Judaic Studies

"Although Fourth Ezra and Second Baruch roughly date to the same era (late 1st to mid-2nd century) and respond to the same catastrophe (destruction of the Second Temple), use the same narrative device of pseudepigraphy and narrative foil (destruction of the First Temple), it has been noted that their theologies and theodicies are markedly different. In addition, the narrative point of view also differs, informed as it is by the chosen narrator personae. Baruch is actually located in Jerusalem and near the Temple Mount in the wake of its destruction, whereas Ezra – by his own account – is removed in time (30 years after the destruction) and space (located in Babylonia). He is thus looking back and looking in.

This paper asks to what degree these different perspectives influence their portrayal of the city of Jerusalem."

World Jewry today is concentrated in the US and Israel, and while distinctive Judaic approaches and practices have evolved in each society, parallels also exist. This volume offers studies of substantive and creative aspects of Jewish belonging. While research in Israel on Judaism has stressed orthodox or “extreme” versions of religiosity, linked to institutional life and politics, moderate and less systematized expressions of Jewish belonging are overlooked. This volume explores the fluid and dynamic nature of identity building among Jews and the many issues that cut across different Jewish groupings. An important contribution to scholarship on contemporary Jewry, it reveals the often unrecognized dynamism in new forms of Jewish identification and affiliation in Israel and in the Diaspora.

"This volume publishes for the first time an untitled anti-Hasidic manuscript, which the editors have called Reshit Hokhmah (The Origin/Beginning of Wisdom), from the Joseph Perl Archive in Tarnopol. The manuscript was copied in 1819, the year that Perl’s Megale Temirin was published. It is housed today in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. The identity of the author is unknown, but he probably came from Galicia and was associated with Mitnagdim and Maskilim. The book expresses harsh and detailed criticism of the hagiographic work, Shivhei ha-Besht (In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, Kapost 1815), which is the first extensive engagement with this book. Moreover, the work is erudite and anticipates the views of Isaac Baer Levinson in his work Te‘udah be-Yisrael (A Warning to Israel, Vilna and Grodno 1828). The manuscript was read by many Maskilim in Galicia and it seems to have influenced both Joseph Perl and Isaac Baer Levinson. This work is therefore of great importance as an example of anti-Hasidic literature, which influenced nineteenth-century Haskalah literature. A transcription of the manuscript is presented in this volume, accompanied by explanatory notes, references to literature that influenced the author, references to anti-Hasidic literature, and an introduction that describes the character of the work and its reception.

Table of Contents

Early Manuscripts in Joseph Perl Archive / Jonatan Meir
Introduction / Shmuel Werses

Reshit Hokhmah (1819): Critical Edition
Introduction • The History of Heresy • In Praise of Wisdom and The Sages • On the Ways of the Fools • Hasidic Tales and their Secrets • On the Besht’s Path • The Besht’s Family • The Secret of Healing a Barren Woman • A Hasidic Sermon on Wine and Sons • Another Question and a Sermon on the Secrets • A Question and Sermon on Hasidic Tales • A Story about the Wonders of the great Tzaddik • On the Besht and a Priest who had an Accidental Emission • Another Story on the Besht and a Priest • The Besht and Wine • The Besht and Adultery • The Besht and the Messiah • Exaggerated Praise Concerning the Besht and the Origins of Praise • An Elegy on the Heretics, the Besht, and the Hasidim • A Reproach against the Besht’s Sayings Concerning the Messiah • Stories of False Tzaddikim • Two Types of Hasidic Rabbis • On the Tzaddikim and the Damage They Cause • Praising Wisdom and Work

Bibliography
Indexes


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"A lo largo de su historia el Imperio romano tuvo que hacer frente a numerosas revueltas, debido al enorme territorio que controlaba. De entre los pueblos que las protagonizaron, los hebreos se contaban entre los que con mayor insistencia lucharon por recuperar su independencia. En cuanto a los diversos conflictos que enfrentaron a judíos y romanos, la que, a la postre, seria recordada como la Primera Guerra Judeo-romana (66-73 d.C.) pasó a la historia como el más importante de todos. Ello se debe tanto a que requirió de la participación de dos futuros emperadores al mando de las tropas romanas que debían restablecer la paz en la provincia de Judea, Vespasiano y su hijo Tito, como al hecho de que la ciudad de Jerusalén y el Gran Templo que albergaba acabaron completamente destruidos.

En el año 66 d.C. numerosos factores se unieron al odio que sectores radicales hebreos sentían hacia sus conquistadores romanos, provocando la caída del procurador de Judea, Gesio Floro, y la derrota del Legado de Siria, Cestio Galo, en Beth Horón, quien acudió con sus tropas a pacificar la región sin conseguirlo. El movimiento fue cobrando fuerza tras estos éxitos, y Jerusalén se convirtió en el epicentro del independentismo judío. Roma no podía permanecer pasiva ante estos acontecimientos y Nerón envió allí a Vespasiano, un general experimentado, para acabar de una vez por todas con el problema. La resistencia implacable que demostraron los rebeldes y los problemas políticos que, durante ese tiempo, se produjeron en Roma, provocaron que la conquista final quedara en manos de su capaz hijo Tito quien, a la postre, consiguió conquistar Jerusalén y acabar con la revuelta. El gran triunfo que se celebró en Roma para conmemorar la victoria era lo que la nueva dinastía Flavia necesitaba para afianzar su poder. Sin embargo, la campaña no finalizó hasta el año 73 d.C., tras la toma de la fortaleza de Masada, donde los últimos insurrectos prefirieron suicidarse antes de ser derrotados. El enfrentamiento se saldaría con una enorme pérdida de vidas, tanto entre los soldados romanos como entre los insurrectos judíos y la población civil. Gracias a la obra de Flavio Josefo, podemos reconstruir lo sucedido para poder así conocer con detalle uno de los grandes episodios de la Historia Antigua."

"The State of Israel was consolidated in the early twentieth century as the homeland of the Jewish people. While nominally secular, it also acknowledged in law and practice the complex , possibly inextricable relationship between ethnic, religious and national or genealogical forms of imagining what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. In one celebrated Supreme Court case, it was made clear that a "Jew," for purposes of immigration, could not include someone who clearly identified in a religious sense with Christianity. Yet the demography of Israel has been changing through mass immigration (especially from the USSR and Ethiopia) as well as strong foreign missionary efforts. In the Ethiopian case, tens of thousands of individuals immigrated over the last two decades who were considered by the state to be descendants of converts to Orthodox (or Protestant) Christianity: their case was normalized, from the state's point of view, by encouraging them to undergo a state-sponsored "return to Judaism" program that brought ethnic and religious grounds of identification back into synch. Yet this has remained contested and conflictual at both the policy level and the level of everyday, vernacular experience of Ethiopians. Moreover, a smaller but even more challenging group of Ethiopians, from the state's point of view, have begun, with other Jewish Israelis, to embrace various forms of Messianic Judaism and charismatic Christianity in Israel--making a frontal collision with the state's basic imaginary almost inevitable. My paper, grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among both groups of Ethiopian-Israelis,  begins to pry apart the  tortured relationship between Christianity and Jewishness in the Ethiopian case: its corollaries in everyday religion, distinctive practices of aversion or mimesis, and its explosive political implications for Israeli self-understanding.
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""So often, when scholars compare the depiction of Adam’s transgression and its consequences as seen in 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, they use the oft-quoted line from 2 Baruch, “Adam is therefore not the cause, save only of his own soul, but each of us has been the Adam of his own soul” (2 Bar 54:19), as a prooftext that Adam’s sin, while transformative, was not as integral to the author of 2 Baruch’s thinking as to the author of 4 Ezra, who instead can claim things via Ezra like, “O Adam, what have you done?  For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants” (4 Ez 7:118).
But, when we look further into the situation, we come across all of these references in 4 Ezra to the foreordained ages and the precreation of all of the eschatological materials.  In so many places, the author of 4 Ezra states unequivocally that these things—the age of the mortal world, the number of souls, the judgment, the world to come—all of them were planned or created prior to the creation of the mortal universe.  With this being the case, Adam’s sin could not have resulted in such a profound transformation of an original divine plan.  This is in contrast to 2 Baruch, where we read that only after Adam’s sin was the number of souls—and therefore the age of this mortal world—set.  For the author of 2 Baruch, Adam’s transgression led to nothing less than a fundamental paradigm shift in the universe, while in 4 Ezra, Adam becomes simply the first to fall victim to God’s original, intentional plan.
But then we come to 4 Ezra 7:10-14, which, on the surface, seems to suggest that God originally created this world for Israel and the righteous, but when Adam sinned, God suddenly changed his mind and instead made this world difficult and a new world as the destination for the righteous.  Yet, this concept so clearly clashes with the strong, repeated emphasis elsewhere in the text of an original, purposeful two-world dichotomy where the mortal world is a testing ground to determine who is worthy to enter the true inheritance, the immortal world to come.
A close reading of the passage under question, however, reveals a level of ambiguity in the Latin and Syriac that allows for a different reading, one which coincides with the author’s assertions throughout the rest of his treatise.  We see this ambiguity in three crucial points.  In my paper I argue, first, that when Uriel states in 7:11, “I made the world for their sake,” he is not referring to the mortal world, as in commonly assumed, but the immortal world to come.  Only if the world to come was the original inheritance of the righteous can we make sense of Uriel’s two examples immediately preceding this passage.
Next, I argue that the Latin phrase “iudicatum est quod factum est” in 7:11 does not mean “what had been made was judged” as if referring to the entire cosmos for all time, as most take it.  By looking at the phrase quod factum est elsewhere in 4 Ezra and its use outside the text, it is fairly clear that the phrase is translating a Greek “τὸ γεγονός” or equivalents, and refers not to a product or creature, not to something made, but to an event, something that has occurred: “What has happened/was done was judged,” referring to Adam’s actual transgression.
Finally, I argue that the Syriac “ܘܡܛܠ ܗܢܐ” which begins 7:12, “b/c of this,” need not refer to Adam’s transgression, but instead likely refers to the very fact that the world to come was the original destination for the righteous.  This is Uriel’s primary point in this passage and the very thing which Ezra is confused about.  Because the city is the heir’s true inheritance, the heir must pass through the dangerous, narrow path in order to reach it.  Likewise, because the world to come is Israel’s true inheritance, Israel must pass through the dangerous, narrow mortal world in order to reach it.
The reading I give of 4 Ezra 7:10-14 is grammatically and syntactically as acceptable as the traditional interpretation of the passage, but it has the advantage of both making sense of Uriel’s argument at this point in the text, and coinciding with the strong emphasis on an original two-world scheme espoused throughout the rest of the document, a scheme, which, not incidentally, is fully integrated into the author’s concept of the evil heart. 
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"The following syllabus was used for an advanced course on Gender and Body in Jewish Literature, taught jointly with my spouse. We wanted to combine our interests in Jewish literature throughout the ages, as well as to question the definition of “Jewish texts.” For that purpose, we included Second Temple Jewish authors whose work was not canonized as part of the Jewish tradition, such as the writings of Philo, or the apocryphal Book of Judith. The most notable example in this context is probably the inclusion of selections from the epistles of Paul of Tarsus. Despite the inclusion of his epistles in the New Testament, he remains a Jew who lived before the destruction of the Second Temple. Similarly, our study of Jewish mysticism was not confined to the semi-canonized texts of the Zohar and related literature, but also the more esoteric Shiur Komah, part of the Hekhalot literature. Secular modern Hebrew literature and literature written by or dealing with Jews have long been recognized as Jewish literature, broadening the definition from the religious tradition to the ethnic group. In relation to that we also chose to include the film A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers and a song by Paul Simon, to further broaden the definition of “text.”
The course was intentionally designed to avoid a chronological order or any bias of “canonic” vs. “non-canonic” or “religious” vs. “ethnic” definitions of Judaism. A chronological order might have given the wrong impression of an essentialized development, as well as become a repetition of the Introduction to Judaism course, designed by an historical paradigm. Instead, we organized the course according to three themes:  Body, Gender, and Sexuality. While these topics overlapped throughout the entirety of the course, there is an appropriate sense of progression. We began with the ungendered body, dealing more abstractly with the tension between matter and spirit, then proceeded to various aspects of gender constructions, Jewish patriarchy, misogyny, and the thwarted masculinity of the Jewish body. We concluded with several issues pertaining to sex, some of which mirrored topics from the earlier selections, as in the issue of the relationship between sex and worship that evoked once more questions raised in the second class on God’s body.
In addition to the syllabus, I attach here the timeline and three bibliographies we gave to the students. The timeline is intended to provide the historical framework that the course’s plan refuses to follow. The List of Sources for the syllabus provides full details of all materials used, for those who wish to seek them. Finally, the two bibliographies on the topic, provide further reading, as well as remind us all that the course barely scratched the surface of this fascinating issue."