The concept of 'Ruakh Ra'ah' (Evil Spirit), is extremely rare in the Tanach, but is found much more frequently in post-Biblical rabbinic literature and even more in publications by rabbis of the last two centuries. This study focuses on the quite neglected period of responsa literature after the Second World War until the present. This literature consist fo answers given to questions about religious rules. The notion of the 'evil spirit' is strongly connected to the ritual of washing hands in the morning, but also before a meal, in connection with sexual relations and with visiting a graveyard. The washing of hands is supposed to be necessary to ward off bad influences. This ritual can be understood in between mysticism, gender studies, magic and embodied religion. This book analyses the meaning and role of the 'Ruakh Ra'ah' in a corpus of almost 200 rabbinic orthodox response from 1945-2000. What happens to the term Ruakh Ra'ah in these modern responsa? Does the ritual persist without being associated with the Ruakh Ra'ah, or does the term continue to be linked to the ritual, but reinterpreted in cause of the possible tension between the traditional rabbinic paradigm and the modern scientific knowledge paradigm. The connection between this ritual and the stratification of the (ultra) orthodox society and cosmological representations offers a clue to the rationale of this practice. Questions of identity, gender and community boundaries that divide insiders from outsiders (Jewish and non-Jewish) seem to be related to the discourse in the corpus on this ritual. As the Ruakh Ra'ah stands at the intersection between magical perceptions, religion (ritual), and premodern science (medicine) it is suitable as a possible test case for the way in which modern rabbinic responsa deal with other archaic terms and concepts that are related or comparable to the Ruakh Raah. This book is relevant to the debate on the relation of religion to the modern world as it provides insights into the ways contemporary believers deal with the modern world, and the various mechanisms to deal with potential discrepancies.

The textual history of the Books of Kings forms one of the most complex and debated issues in the modern text-historical scholarship. This book examines and reconstructs the textual history of 2 Kings 17 in light of the preserved textual evidence. The analysis of textual differences between the LXX, the Old Latin, and the MT allows the reconstruction of the oldest text attainable. The Old Latin version appears to have in many cases best preserved the Old Greek edition of the chapter, now lost in the Greek witnesses due to Hebraizing revisions. The Old Greek version of 2 Kings 17 evidences a Hebrew Vorlage often radically differing from the MT. In most cases the MT exhibits signs of later editing. The LXX can thus help the scholars reconstruct multiple text-historical layers previously out of our reach, as well as shed new light on certain historiographical details recounted in 2 Kings 17. As supposed by the literary critics for well over a century, the textual data shows beyond doubt that there happened vast editing and rewriting of the Books of Kings even at very late date. Text-critical considerations are therefore not only useful, but invaluable to all scholarly work on 2 Kings 17, and the Books of Kings as a whole.

This volume approaches the topic of mobility in Southeast Europe by offering the first detailed historical study of the land route connecting Istanbul with Belgrade. After this route that diagonally crosses Southeast Europe had been established in Roman times, it was as important for the Byzantines as the Ottomans to rule their Balkan territories. In the nineteenth century, the road was upgraded to a railroad and, most recently, to a motorway. The contributions in this volume focus on the period from the Middle Ages to the present day. They explore the various transformations of the route as well as its transformative role for the cities and regions along its course. This not only concerns the political function of the route to project the power of the successive empires. Also the historical actors such as merchants, travelling diplomats, Turkish guest workers or Middle Eastern refugees together with the various social, economic and cultural effects of their mobility are in the focus of attention. The overall aim is to gain a deeper understanding of Southeast Europe by foregrounding historical continuities and disruptions from a long-term perspective and by bringing into dialogue different national and regional approaches.

The Anatomy of the Book of Esther is the first commentary on the Biblical book that includes, not only classic scriptural and midrashic commentary, but also historical comments that are based on Persian, Greek, archaeological and other historical sources. The book includes the complete Hebrew text and English translation, its unique commentary, and both preliminary blessings and post reading blessings and hymns. An introduction that places this more than two millenia-old book historically makes this edition fascinating reading, an indispensible educational tool and a necessary text for synagogue observance.

Over half of all American Jewish children are being raised by intermarried parents. This demographic group will have a tremendous impact on American Judaism as it is lived and practiced in the coming decades. To date, however, in both academic studies about Judaism and in the popular imagination, such children and their parents remain marginal. Jennifer A. Thompson takes a different approach. In Jewish on Their Own Terms , she tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Thompson notes that in the dominant Jewish cultural narrative, intermarriage symbolizes individualism and assimilation. Talking about intermarriage allows American Jews to discuss their anxieties about remaining distinctively Jewish despite their success in assimilating into American culture. In contrast, Thompson uses ethnography to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality. She explains how American and traditional Jewish gender roles converge to put non-Jewish women in charge of raising Jewish children. Interfaith couples are like other Americans in often harboring contradictory notions of individual autonomy, universal religious truths, and obligations to family and history. Focusing on the lived experiences of these families, Jewish on Their Own Terms provides a complex and insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing.

In May 1941, Gertrude van Tijn arrived in Lisbon on a mission of mercy from German occupied Amsterdam. She came with Nazi approval to the capital of neutral Portugal to negotiate the departure from Hitler's Europe of thousands of German and Dutch Jews. Was this middle aged Jewish woman, burdened with such a terrible responsibility, merely a pawn of the Nazis, or was her journey a genuine opportunity to save large numbers of Jews from the gas chambers? In such impossible circumstances, what is just action, and what is complicity?

A moving account of courage and of all-too-human failings in the face of extraordinary moral challenges, Th"e Ambiguity of Virtue "tells the story of Van Tijn's work on behalf of her fellow Jews as the avenues that might save them were closed off. Between 1933 and 1940 Van Tijn helped organize Jewish emigration from Germany. After the Germans occupied Holland, she worked for the Nazi appointed Jewish Council in Amsterdam and enabled many Jews to escape. Some later called her a heroine for the choices she made; others denounced her as a collaborator.

Bernard Wasserstein's haunting narrative draws readers into the twilight world of wartime Europe, to expose the wrenching dilemmas that confronted Jews under Nazi occupation. Gertrude van Tijn's experience raises crucial questions about German policy toward the Jews, about the role of the Jewish Council, and about Dutch, American, and British responses to the persecution and mass murder of Jews on an unimaginable scale."

With exacting scholarship and fecund analysis, Manuel Oliveira probes through the lens of Martin Buber (1878-1965) the theological and political ambiguities of Israel's divine election. These ambiguities became especially pronounced with the emergence of Zionism. Wary, indeed, alarmed by the tendency of some of his fellow Zionists to conflate divine chosenness with nationalism, Buber sought to secure the theological significance of election by both steering Zionism from hypertrophic nationalism and by a sustained program to revalorize what he called alternately "Hebrew Humanism." As Oliveira demonstrates, Buber viewed the idea of election teleologically, espousing a universal mission of Israel, which effectively calls upon Zionism to align its political and cultural project to universal objectives. Thus, in addressing a Zionist congress, he rhetorically asked, "What then is this spirit of Israel of which you are speaking? It is the spirit of fulfillment. Fulfillment of what? Fulfillment of the simple truth that man has been created for a purpose (...) Our purpose is the upbuilding of peace (...) And that is its spirit, the spirit of Israel (...) the people of Israel was charged to lead the way to righteousness and justice."

One of the most astounding aftershocks of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the massive immigration of Russian Jews to Israel. Today, Russian speakers constitute one-sixth of Israel's total population. No other country in the world has absorbed such a prodigious number of immigrants in such a short period. The implications of this phenomenon are immense both locally (given the geopolitical situation in the Middle East) and globally (as multicultural and multiethnic states become the rule rather than the exception). For a growing number of immigrants worldwide, the experience of living across different cultures, speaking different languages, and accommodating different--and often incompatible--identities is a daily reality. This reality is a challenge to the scholar striving to understand the origin and nature of cultural identity. Languages can be learned, economic constraints overcome, social mores assimilated. But identity persists through generations, setting immigrants and their children apart from their adoptive country. The story of the former Russians in Israel is an illuminating example of this global trend. The Russian Jews who came to Israel were initially welcomed as prodigal sons coming home. Their connection to their "historical motherland" was seemingly cemented not only by their Jewish ethnicity, but also by a potent Russian influence upon Zionism. The first Zionist settlers in Palestine were mostly from Russia and Poland, and Russian literature, music, and sensibility had had a profound effect upon the emerging Hebrew culture. Thus, it seemed that while facing the usual economic challenges of immigrations, the "Russians," as they came to be known, would have littleproblem acclimatizing in Israel. The reality has been quite different, marked by mutual incomprehension and cultural mistranslation. While achieving a prominent place in Israeli economy, the Russians in Israel have faced discrimination and stereotyping. And their own response to Israeli culture and society has largely been one of rejection and disdain. If Israel has failed to integrate the newcomers, the newcomers have shown little interest in being integrated. Thus, the story of the post-Soviet Jews in Israel illustrates a general phenomenon of cultural divergence, in which history carves different identities out of common stock. Besides marking a turning point in the development of Israel, it belongs to the larger picture of the contemporary world, profoundly marked by the collapse of the catastrophic utopias of Nazism and Communism. And yet this story has not adequately been dealt with by the academy. There have been relatively few studies of the Russian immigration to Israel and none that situates the phenomenon in a cultural, rather than purely sociological, context. Elana Gomel's book, The Pilgrim Soul: Being Russian in Israel, is an original and exciting investigation of the Russian community in Israel. It analyzes the narratives through which Russian Jewry defines itself and connects them to the legacy of Soviet history. It engages with such key elements of the Russian-Israeli identity as the aversion from organized religion, the challenge of bilingualism, the cult of romantic passion, and even the singular fondness for science fiction. It provides factual information on the social, economic, and political situation of the Russians in Israel but relates the data to an overallinterpretation of the community's cultural history. At the same time, the book goes beyond the specificity of its subject by focusing on the theoretical issues of identity formation, historical trauma, and utopian disillusionment. The Pilgrim Soul is an important book for all collections in cultural studies, ethnic and immigrant studies, Israeli studies, and Soviet studies. It will appeal to a variety of readers interested in the issues of immigration, multiculturalism, and identity formation.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, several thousand impoverished young Jewish women from Eastern Europe were forced into prostitution in the frontier colonies of Latin America, South Africa, India, and parts of the United States by the Zwi Migdal, a notorious criminal gang of Jewish mobsters.

Isabel Vincent, acclaimed author of "Hitler's Silent Partners," tells the remarkable true story of three such women--Sophia Chamys, Rachel Liberman, and Rebecca Freedman--who, like so many others, were desperate to escape a hopeless future in Europe's teeming urban ghettos and rural shtetls. "Bodies and Souls" is a shocking and spellbinding account of a monumental betrayal that brings to light a dark and shameful hitherto untold chapter in Jewish history--brilliantly chronicling the heartbreaking plight of women rejected by a society that deemed them impure and detailing their extraordinary struggles to live with dignity in a community of their own creation.

The term "wailing culture" includes an array of women's behavioUrs and beliefs following the death of a member of their ethnic group and is typical of Jewish life in Yemeni culture. Central to the practise is wailing itself - a special artistic genre that combines speech with sobbing into moving lyrical poetry that explores the meaning of death and loss. In Aesthetics of Sorrow: The Wailing Culture of Yemenite Jewish Women, Tova Gamliel decodes the cultural and psychological meanings of this practise in an ethnography based on her anthropological research among Yemenite Jewish communities in Israel in 2001-2003. Based on participant-observervation in homes of the bereaved and on twenty-four in-depth interviews with wailing women and men, Gamliel illuminates wailing culture level by level: by the circles in which the activity takes place; the special areas of endeavor that belong to women; and the broad social, historical and religious context that surrounds these inner circles. She discusses the main themes that define the wailing culture (including the historical origins of women's wailing generally and of Yemenite Jewish wailing in particular), the traits of wailing as an artistic genre and the wailer as a symbolic type. She also explores the role of wailing in death rituals, as a therapeutic expertise endowed with unique affective mechanisms, as an erotic performance, as a livelihood and as an indicator of the Jewish exile. In the end, she considers wailing at the intersection of tradition and modernity and examines the study of wailing as a genuine methodological challenge. Gamliel brings a sensitive eye to the vanishing practise of wailing, which has been largely unexamined by scholars and may be unfamiliar to many outside of the Middle East. Her interdisciplinary perspective and her focus on a uniquely female immigrant cultural practise will make this study fascinating reading for scholars of anthropology, gender, folklore, psychology, performance, philosophy and sociology.

Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis examines the centrality of "birth" in Jewish literature, gender theory, and psychoanalysis, thus challenging the centrality of death in Western culture and existential philosophy. In this groundbreaking study, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel discuss similarities between Biblical, Midrashic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic perceptions of birth, as well as its place in contemporary cultural and psychoanalytic discourse. In addition, this study shows how birth functions as a vital metaphor that has been foundational to art, philosophy, religion, and literature. Medieval Kabbalistic literature compared human birth to divine emanation, and presented human sexuality and procreation as a reflection of the sefirotic structure of the Godhead - an attempt, Kaniel claims, to marginalize the fear of death by linking the humane and divine acts of birth. This book sheds new light on the image of God as the "Great Mother" and the crucial role of the Shekhinah as a cosmic womb. Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis won the Gorgias Prize and garnered significant appreciation from psychoanalytic therapists in clinical practice dealing with birth trauma, postpartum depression, and in early infancy distress.

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.

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.

In The Feminine Mystique, Jewish-raised Betty Friedan struck out against a postwar American culture that pressured women to play the role of subservient housewives. However, Friedan never acknowledged that many American women refused to retreat from public life during these years. Now, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? examines how Jewish women sought opportunities and created images that defied the stereotypes and prescriptive ideology of the "feminine mystique." As workers with or without pay, social justice activists, community builders, entertainers, and businesswomen, most Jewish women championed responsibilities outside their homes. Jewishness played a role in shaping their choices, shattering Friedan's assumptions about how middle-class women lived in the postwar years. Focusing on ordinary Jewish women as well as prominent figures such as Judy Holliday, Jennie Grossinger, and Herman Wouk's fictional Marjorie Morningstar, leading scholars from a variety of disciplines explore here the wide canvas upon which American Jewish women made their mark after the Second World War.

This book focuses on Abraham Abulafia's esoteric thought in relation to Maimonides, Maimonideans, and Islamic thought in the line of Leo Strauss' theory of the history of philosophy. A survey of Abulafia's sources leads into an analysis of the esoteric meaning on the famous parable of the three rings, considering also the possible connection between this parable, which Abdulafia inserted into a book dedicated to his student, the 13th century rabbi Nathan the wise, and the Lessing's Play "Nathan the Wise." The book also examines Abulafia's universalistic understanding of the nature of the Bible, the Hebrew language, and the people of Israel (or the Sinaic revelation). The universal aspects of Abulafia's thought have been put in relief against the more widespread Kabbalistic views which are predominantly particularistic. A number of texts have also been identified here for the first time as authored by Abulafia.

A rich, sweeping memoir by David G. Roskies, Yiddishlands proceeds from the premise that Yiddish culture is spread out among many different people and geographic areas and transmitted through story, song, study, and the family. Roskies leads readers through Yiddishlands old and new by revisiting his personal and professional experiences and retelling his remarkable family saga in a series of lively, irreverent, and interwoven stories. Beginning with a flashback to his grandmother's storybook wedding in 1878, Yiddishlands brings to life the major debates, struggles, and triumphs of the modern Yiddish experience, and provides readers with memorable portraits of its great writers, cultural leaders, and educators. Roskies's story centers around Vilna, Lithuania, where his mother, Masha, was born in 1906 and where her mother, Fradl Matz, ran the legendary Matz Press, a publishing house that distributed prayer books, Bibles, and popular Yiddish literature. After falling in love with Vilna's cabaret culture, an older man, and finally a fellow student with elbow patches on his jacket, Masha and her young family are forced to flee Europe for Montreal, via Lisbon and New York. It is in Montreal that Roskies, Masha's youngest child, comes of age, entranced by the larger-than-life stories of his mother and the writers, artists, and performers of her social circle. Roskies recalls his own intellectual odyssey as a Yiddish scholar; his life in the original Havurah religious commune in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the 1970s; his struggle with the notion of aliyah while studying in Israel; his visit to Russia at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement; and his confrontation with his parents' memories in a bittersweet pilgrimage to Poland. Along the way, readers of Yiddishlands meet such prominent figures as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Melekh Ravitch, Itsik Manger, Avrom Sutzkever, Esther Markish, and Rachel Korn. With Yiddishlands, readers take a whirlwind tour of modern Yiddish culture, from its cabarets and literary salons to its fierce ideological rivalries and colorful personalities. Roskies's memoir will be essential reading for students of the recent Jewish past and of the living Yiddish present.