Often overlooked as routine or even dismissed as odd customs, ritual in its many guises demands attention as a central strategy for embodying experience. Like other groups, Jews rely on ritual to provide an inventory of social meanings and a context for negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Ritual for Jews has historically carried special meanings for conveying what is Jewish about Jewishness. It is not enough, however, simply to document customs: for a full understanding of ritual and its meaning for participants we need to analyze how ritual expressions, such as liturgies, holidays, life-cycle events - even political rallies - change in response to developments in the wider society, or are adapted to meet new needs. The innovative studies of adapted, invented, and evolving rituals are presented in this volume, including the Tunisian Jewish celebration of Se'udat Yitro, liturgical prayers for Israel Independence Day, shiva observance in an old-age home, transplanted Ethiopian Jewish wedding events, and same-sex marriage rituals. These interpret the Jewish enactment of ritual and uses of tradition in everyday life against the background of modernity and community. It is the complexities of ritual - the dynamics of negotiating the religious and the secular, the traditional and the modern, the social and the political, performance and practice - that form the core of the book. Together, the contributions show ritual action to be key to the maintenance of Jewish identity and to the expression of a distinctive world-view. 'A worthy read for anyone interested in Jewish ritual.' David Tesler, AJL Reviews

Written by Asya Vaisman Schulman and Jordan Brown with Mikhl Yashinsky, In eynem is the first fully-illustrated, multimedia Yiddish textbook that uses the communicative approach to language learning. With this book, students use language as a practical tool for conversing with their classmates about their daily lives and as a vehicle through which they creatively delve into texts for cultural and artistic insights. Fully supports different types of learners (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) and multiple learning environments: in-class learning with a teacher, independent learning, online learning, and community group learning. Incorporates a wide variety of multimedia resources (available through the textbook website), primary source historical documents, and literary texts. Emphasizes all four areas of language learning: speaking, writing, reading, and listening. Includes a cast of recurring characters that represent all the different types of people who speak and study Yiddish today. Includes a teacher guide that provides detailed lesson plans to optimize the use of the book in a classroom setting, as well as functioning as a teacher training tool both for new teachers and as enrichment for experienced teachers.

About 350,000 Jewish children are currently enrolled in Jewish day schools, in every continent other than Antarctica. This is the first book-length consideration of life in such schools and of their relationship both to the Jewish community and to society as a whole. It provides a rich sense of how community is constructed within Jewish schools, and of how they contribute to or complicate the construction of community in the wider society. The volume reframes day-school research in three ways. First, it focuses not just on the learner in the day-school classroom but sees schools as agents of and for the community. Second, it brings a truly international perspective to the study of day schools, viewing them in relation to the socio-cultural contexts from which they emerge and where they have impact. Third, it considers day-school education in relation to insights derived from the study and practice of non-parochial education. This cross-cultural and genuinely comparative approach to the study of Jewish schooling draws on research from the United States, the former Soviet Union, South America, and Europe, making it possible to arrive at important and original insights into parochial Jewish schooling. With contributions from outstanding scholars as well as practitioners of public education and of Jewish parochial schooling, the volume reveals conflicting conceptions of the social functions of schooling and also produces original insights into the capacity of schools to build community. The book is timely in that it studies questions about faith-based schooling and the public good that today are as much questions of public policy as they are of academic inquiry. It will appeal first and foremost to those with a particular interest in Jewish schooling but will also attract the attention of academics and professionals concerned with the place of parochial education in contemporary society. Contributors: Ami Bouganim, Erik H. Cohen, Ira Dashefsky, Howard Deitcher, Jay Dewey, Joshua Elkin, Yoel Finkelman, Zvi Gitelman, Scott J. Goldberg, Ellen B. Goldring, Yossi J. Goldstein, Eli Kohn, Jeffrey S.Kress, Binyamin Krohn, Jon A. Levisohn, Ilana Maryles Sztokman, Deborah Meier, Helena Miller, Christine Muller, Michal Muszkat Barkan, Alex Pomson, Joseph Reimer, Randal Schnoor, Susan L. Shevitz, Asher Shkedi, Claire Smrekar, Uriel Ta'ir, Michael Turetsky, Rahel Wasserfall.

The First World War marked the final chapter in the history of Habsburg Viennese Jewry. In this book, the first study of Viennese Jews in this period, David Rechter explores the community's crises of ideology and identity during the traumatic war years. The book is also a study of modern Jewish politics. Viennese and Austrian Jewish political culture was a unique amalgam, combining the nationalism and radicalism of eastern Europe with the liberalism of the west. During the war, Zionism emerged the victor. The Jewish experience resembled that of other minorities in central and eastern Europe in this period, where ideologies of nationalism and ethnic self-determination became the prevailing norm. Despite this political transformation, Jewish world-views whether liberal, nationalist, or Orthodox survived the war remarkably intact. In analysing how Viennese Jews made the difficult transition from the Habsburg empire to the Austrian Republic, David Rechter offers a case study of Jewish politics and society in the crucible of war and brings to light an unexamined episode of modern Jewish history.

Although the reconciliation of Jewish and Polish memories of the Holocaust is the central issue in contemporary Polish-Jewish relations, this is the first attempt to examine these divisive memories in a comprehensive way. Until 1989, Polish consciousness of the Second World War subsumed the destruction of Polish Jewry within a communist narrative of Polish martyrdom and heroism. Post-war Jewish memory, by contrast, has been concerned mostly with Jewish martyrdom and heroism (and barely acknowledged the plight of Poles under German occupation). Since the 1980s, however, a significant number of Jews and Poles have sought to identify a common ground and have met with partial but increasing success, notwithstanding the new debates that have emerged in recent years concerning Polish behaviour during the Nazi genocide of the Jews that Poles had ignored for half a century. This volume considers these contentious issues from different angles. Among the topics covered are Jewish memorial projects, both in Poland and beyond its borders, the Polish approach to Holocaust memory under communist rule, and post-communist efforts both to retrieve the Jewish dimension to Polish wartime memory and to reckon with the dark side of the Polish national past. An interview with acclaimed author Henryk Grynberg touches on many of these issues from the personal perspective of one who as a child survived the Holocaust hidden in the Polish countryside, as do the three poems by Grynberg reproduced here. The 'New Views' section features innovative research in other areas of Polish-Jewish studies. A special section is devoted to research concerning the New Synagogue in Poznan, built in 1907, which is still standing only because the Nazis turned it into a swimming-pool. CONTRIBUTORS: Natalia Aleksiun, Assistant Professor in Eastern European Jewish History, Touo College, New York; Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, Head, Section for Holocaust Studies, Centre for European Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow; curator, International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust, Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum; Boaz Cohen, teacher in Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Shaanan and Western Galilee Colleges, northern Israel; Judith R. Cohen, Director of the Photographic Reference Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Gabriel N. Finder, Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia; Rebecca Golbert, researcher; Regina Grol, Professor of Comparative Literature, Empire State College, State University of New York; Jonathan Huener, Associate Professor of History, University of Vermont; Carol Herselle Krinsky, Professor of Fine Arts, New York University; Marta Kurkowska, Lecturer, Institute of History, Jagiellonian, University, Krakow; Joanna B. Michlic, Assistant Professor, Holocaust and Genocide Program, Richard Stockton College, Pomona, New Jersey; Eva Plach, Assistant Professor of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada; Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Alexander V. Prusin, Associate Professor of History, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro; Jan Schwarz, Senior Lecturer, Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago; Maxim D. Shrayer, Professor of Russian and English, Chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages, Co-Director, Jewish Studies Program, Boston College; Michael C. Steinlauf, Professor of Jewish History and Culture, Gratz College, Pennsylvania; Robert Szuchta, History teacher, Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz High School, Warsaw; Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Lecturer in Cultural Anthroplogy, Warsaw University; Chair, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Collegium Civitas, Poland; Scott Ury, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University; Bret Werb, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC; Seth L. Wolitz, Gale Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Texas at Austin.

Today many Germans remain nostalgic about "classic" film comedies created during the 1930s, viewing them as a part of the Nazi era that was not tainted with antisemitism. In Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, Valerie Weinstein scrutinizes these comic productions and demonstrates that film comedy, despite its innocent appearance, was a critical component in the effort to separate "Jews" from "Germans" physically, economically, and artistically. Weinstein highlights how the German propaganda ministry used directives, pre- and post-production censorship, financial incentives, and influence over film critics and their judgments to replace Jewish "wit" with a slower, simpler, and more direct German "humor" that affirmed values that the Nazis associated with the Aryan race. Through contextualized analyses of historical documents and individual films, Weinstein reveals how humor, coded hints and traces, absences, and substitutes in Third Reich film comedy helped spectators imagine an abstract "Jewishness" and a "German" identity and community free from the former. As resurgent populist nationalism and overt racism continue to grow around the world today, Weinstein's study helps us rethink racism and prejudice in popular culture and reconceptualize the relationships between film humor, national identity, and race.

This is a monograph about the medieval Jewish community of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. Through deep analyses of contemporary historical sources, mostly documents from the Cairo Geniza, life stories, conducts and practices of private people are revealed. When put together these private biographies convey a social portrait of an elite group which ruled over the local community, but was part of a supra communal network.

The author discusses how religious groups, especially Jews, Mormons and Jesuits, were labeled as foreign and constructed as political, moral and national threats in Scandinavia in different periods between c. 1790 and 1960. Key questions are who articulated such opinions, how was the threat depicted, and to what extent did it influence state policies towards these groups. A special focus is given to Norway, because the Constitution of 1814 included a ban against Jews (repelled in 1851) and Jesuits (repelled in 1956), and because Mormons were denied the status of a legal religion until freedom of religion was codified in the Constitution in 1964. The author emphasizes how the construction of religious minorities as perils of society influenced the definition of national identities in all Scandinavia, from the late 18th Century until well after WWII. The argument is that Jews, Mormons and Jesuits all were constructed as "anti-citizens", as opposites of what it meant to be "good" citizens of the nation. The discourse that framed the need for national protection against foreign religious groups was transboundary. Consequently, transnational stereotypes contributed significantly in defining national identities.

A major new history of the century-long debate over what a Jewish state should be Many Zionists who advocated for the creation of a Jewish state envisioned a nation like any other. Yet for Israel's founders, the nation that emerged against all odds in 1948 was anything but ordinary. Born from the ashes of genocide and a long history of suffering, Israel was conceived to be unique, a model society and the heart of a prosperous new Middle East. It is this paradox, says historian Michael Brenner-the Jewish people's wish for a homeland both normal and exceptional-that shapes Israel's ongoing struggle to define itself and secure a place among nations. In Search of Israel is a major new history of this struggle from the late nineteenth century to our time.

How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews' experience in the decades before World War II - during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture - led them later to bolster the myth of Italy's wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy's Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.

Following decades of silence about the involvement of doctors, medical researchers and other health professionals in the Holocaust and other National Socialist (Nazi) crimes, scholars in recent years have produced a growing body of research that reveals the pervasive extent of that complicity. This interdisciplinary collection of studies presents documentation of the critical role medicine played in realizing the policies of Hitler's regime. It traces the history of Nazi medicine from its roots in the racial theories of the 1920s, through its manifestations during the Nazi period, on to legacies and continuities from the postwar years to the present.

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas's wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas's deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas's draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and Francois-David Sebbah, among others.

The book about the Westerweel Group tells the fascinating story about the cooperation of some ten non-conformist Dutch socialists and a group of Palestine Pioneers who mostly had arrived in the Netherlands from Germany and Austria the late thirties. With the help of Joop Westerweel, the headmaster of a Rotterdam Montessori School, they found hiding places in the Netherlands. Later on, an escape route to France via Belgium was worked out. Posing as Atlantic Wall workers, the pioneers found their way to the south of France. With the help of the Armee Juive, a French Jewish resistance organization, some 70 pioneers reached Spain at the beginning of 1944. From here they went to Palestine. Finding and maintaining the escape route cost the members of the Westerweel Group dear. With some exceptions, all members of the group were arrested by the Germans. Joop Westerweel was executed in August 1944. Other members, both in the Netherlands and France, were send to German concentration camps, where some perished.

This volume explores the ways in which Jerusalem is represented in Psalms - from its position in the context of liturgical and pilgrim songs to its role as metaphor. Jerusalem in the Book of Psalms is the site of scenes of redemption, joy, and celebration of the proximity to God and the house of the Lord. But it is also the quintessential locus of loss, marked by cries over the devastating destruction of the Temple. These two antithetical poles of Jerusalem are expressed in both personal terms as well as within a collective framework. The bulk of the articles are devoted to questions of reception, to the ways in which the geographies of the Book of Psalms have travelled across their native bounds and entered other historical settings, acquiring new forms and meanings.

This volume addresses the complex topic of the preeminent status of the divine feminine power, to be referred also as Female, within the theosophical structures of many important Kabbalists, Sabbatean believers, and Hasidic masters. This privileged status is part of a much broader vision of the Female as stemming from a very high root within the divine world, then She was emanated and constitutes the tenth, lower divine power, and even in this lower state She is sometime conceived of governing this world and as equal to the divine Male. Finally, She is conceived of as returning to Her original place in special moments, the days of Sabbath, the Jewish Holidays or in the eschatological era. Her special dignity is sometime related to Her being the telos of creation, and as the first entity that emerged in the divine thought, which has been later on generated. In some cases, an uroboric theosophy links the Female Malkhut, directly to the first divine power, Keter. The author points to the possible impact of some of the Kabbalistic discussions on conceptualizations of the feminine in the Renaissance period.

This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Boehme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

Continuing his contribution to medieval Jewish intellectual history, Haym Soloveitchik focuses here on the radical pietist movement of Hasidei Ashkenaz and its main literary work, Sefer Hasidim, and on the writings and personality of the Provencal commentator Ravad of Posquieres. In both areas Soloveitchik challenges mainstream views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. Some of the essays are revised and updated versions of work previously published and some are entirely new, but in all of them Soloveitchik challenges reigning views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. The section on Sefer Hasidim brings together over half a century of Soloveitchik's writings on German Pietism, many of which originally appeared in obscure publications, and adds two new essays. The first of these is a methodological study of how to read this challenging work and an exposition of what constitutes a valid historical inference, while the second reviews the validity of the sociological and anthropological inferences presented in contemporary historiography. In discussing Ravad's oeuvre, Soloveitchik questions the widespread notion that Ravad's chief accomplishment was his commentary on Maimonides' Mishneh torah; his Talmud commentary, he claims, was of far greater importance and was his true masterpiece. He also adds a new study that focuses on the acrimony between Ravad, as the low-born genius of Posquieres, and R. Zerahyah ha-Levi of Lunel, who belonged to the Jewish aristocracy of Languedoc, and considers the implications of that relationship.

The focus is on how the Jews were affected by Polish independence in 1918. Other topics covered include Jan Blonski's article 'The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto'; Polish historiography on the privileges granted to the Jews; the decline of the kahal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the social perception of Jews in the eighteenth century; representations of Jews in nineteenth-century literature; nineteenth-century synagogues; the Jewish Polish-language press in the interwar period; and antisemitic slogans in Endecja political campaigns. CONTRIBUTOR: Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Research Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford. Eugene C. Black, Ottilie Springer Professor of History, Brandeis University. Andrzej Bryk, Lecturer, Institute for Constitutional History, Jagiellonian. University, Krakow. Jan Blonski, Professor of the History of Polish Literature, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Sh. Cygielman, Senior History in Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-heva. David Engel, Tel Aviv University. Mieczyslaw Inglot, Professor of Polish Literature, University of Wroclaw. Paul Latawski, Assistant Professor of International Relations, New England College, Arundel. Eli Lederhendler, Lecturer in Jewish History, Tel Aviv University. George J. Lerski, Emeritus Professor of Modern European History, University of Chicago. Jozef Lewandowski, Professor of History, Uppsala University. Maria and Kazimierz Pietchotka, architects and architectural historians. Edward Rogerson. Szymon Rudnicki, Docent and Deputy Director, Historical Institute, University of Warsaw. Michael G. Steinlauf, Brandeis University. Daniel Stone, Professor of History, University of Winnipeg. Bernadeta Tendyra, London School of Economics. Anna Zuk, Lecturer, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Marie Curie-Sklodkowska University, Lublin.

Published in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, this volume has a special section with memoirs and other material dealing with aspects of Jewish life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Topics covered in other articles include the autobiographies of Salomon Maimon and Jakob Fromer, entitled 'From the Ghetto to Modern Culture'; Jan Czynski and the question of equal rights for all religious faiths; education of Jewish women in the nineteenth century; ritual slaughter as a political issue; and the Jewish press in Krakow in the inter-war years. Contributors: Zygmunt Bauman, Czeslaw Brzoza, Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, Anna Clarke, Adam Galkowski, Jan Marek Gronski, Dora Katzenelson, Mark W. Kiel, Ariel Joseph Kochavi, Jerzy Lewinski, Zenon Nowak, Laura Quercioli, Richie Robertson, Marek Rudnicki, Szymon Rudnicki, Shaul Stampfer, Aharon Weiss, Tomasz Wisniewski, Josef Wrobel, Aleksander Zyga

Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism have long been studied separately. Yet, scholars are becoming ever more aware of the need to merge them into a single field of Jewish Studies. This volume opens new perspectives and bridges traditional gaps. The authors are not simply contributing to their respective fields of Sephardic or Ashkenazic Studies. Rather, they all include both Sephardic and Ashkenazic perspectives as they reflect on different aspects of encounters and reconsider traditional narratives. Subjects range from medieval and early modern Sephardic and Ashkenazic constructions of identities, influences, and entanglements in the fields of religious art, halakhah, kabbalah, messianism, and charity to modern Ashkenazic Sephardism and Sephardic admiration for Ashkenazic culture. For reasons of coherency, the contributions all focus on European contexts between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

'Carefully and lovingly edited . . . The scholarship is impeccable, and the contributors all serious scholars.' S. Gittleman, Choice 'One the book's best attributes is the ability of its contributors to place their subjects within larger European contexts . . . the calibre of the contributions is high, demonstrating the degree to which Yiddish theatre is attracting the attention of serious scholars . . . the book] succeeds not only in its goal of presenting some of the most important new scholarship on Yiddish theatre, but more importantly in helping to bring the study of this integral component of Jewish culture into wider academic circles and into a more complex scholarly discourse.' Jeffrey Veidlinger, Shofar 'A landmark in the field of Yiddish cultural history . . . a thought-provoking book, which will hopefully inspire new collective volumes and monographs.' Gennady Estraikh, East European Jewish Affairs 'A stimulating and encouraging book that I am happy to recommend to the specialist and the curious reader alike.' Yana Meerzon, Modern Language Review This book considers Yiddish theatre from a number of aspects: its historical development, its popular and critical reception, and the practice and consequences of state censorship. Its coverage ranges from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century and extends to locations as diverse as Cracow, London, Moscow, New York, St Petersburg, Vienna, and Warsaw. Yiddish Theatre not only presents a wide-ranging study of the field but also helps illustrate the significance of Yiddish theatre as a vital form of expression in the Jewish world: it has not only provided entertainment for audiences on six continents, but has also highlighted the social, political, religious, and economic concerns that Jews considered of vital interest. Yiddish Theatre is a valuable resource for scholars, university students, and general readers interested both in Yiddish theatre specifically and related fields such as Jewish literature and culture, east European history and culture, and European and American theatre. The book contains an extensive bibliography of sources relating to all aspects of Yiddish theatre. Contributors: Ahuva Belkin, Joel Berkowitz, Paola Bertolone, Miroslawa M. Bulat, Brigitte Dalinger, Barbara Henry, John Klier, David Mazower, Leonard Prager, Nahma Sandrow, Nina Warnke, Seth L. Wolitz

In the period between the two world wars, Poland's Jewish community was second only in size to that of the United States, and was the laboratory in which the ideological orientations which dominated the Jewish world - Zionism, Bundism, Neo-Orthodoxy, Assimilation - were tested. There has been much disagreement as to the character and strength of anitsemitism in Poland at that time, and the extent to which the experience of the Jews aided the Nazis in carrying out their genocidal plans. This latest volume of Polin includes contributions from Poland, western Europe, Israel, and North America, which together provide a clearer understanding of the issues which have in the past proved so divisive. It also includes a number of personal testimonies from people who experienced the interwar period at first hand. The result is a book that will be essential reading for all those interested in modern Jewish history and in the problems of ethnic minorities in post-Versailles Europe.

Written at different times and for different audiences - some for scholars of rabbinic literature, some for laymen or for scholars not necessarily Jewish - the essays gathered together in this volume nevertheless have an inner coherence. They reflect the author's lifetime interest in the history of halakhah - not as intellectual history per se, but rather a concern to identify measurable deflection in the unfolding of halakhic ideas that could point to an undetected force at work. What was it that stimulated change, and why? What happened when strong forces impinged upon halakhic observance, and both the scholarly elite and the community as a whole had to grapple with upholding observance while adapting to a new set of circumstances? Haym Soloveitchik's elegant presentation shows skilfully that the line between adaptation and deviance is a fine one, and that where a society draws that line is revelatory of both its values and its self-perception. Many of the articles presented here are well known in the field but have been updated for this publication (the major essay on pawnbroking has been expanded to half again its original size); some have been previously published only in Hebrew, and two are completely new. An Introduction highlights the key themes of the collection and explains the underlying methodology. Having these essays in a single volume will enable scholars and students to consult all the material on each theme together, while also tracing the development of ideas. The opening section of the volume is a brief description and characterization of the dramatis personae who figure in all these essays: Rashi and the Tosafists. It covers the halakhic commentaries and their authors; the creativity of Ashkenaz; and the halakhic isolation of the Ashkenazic community. The second section focuses on usury and money-lending, including the practice of pawn-broking, while the third section deals with the ban on Gentile wine and how that connected to the development of money-lending. The final section presents general conclusions in the form of four studies of the communal self-image of Ashkenaz and its attitude to deviation and change.