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.

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.

Every reading community has ways of confronting moments of embarrassment in its reading of scriptures. Scripture may be the holy books of religious communities or the foundational texts of civilizations. Contemporary readers of Aristotle who see his writing as foundational for Western philosophy, for example, must confront his views on slavery. This kind of confrontation, whether with religious, philosophical or canonical books of other kinds, may lead readers to reject scripture's claims-or it may motivate them to re-read or misread scripture so as to eliminate, ameliorate or apologize for the problematic passages. Once this misprision has taken place, the formerly ofending scriptures may be re-embraced. A community may also re-embrace scripture by rejecting traditional readings in favor of more originary readings. By entering into that very tension between what Harry Fox calls embarrassment and embracement, the reader experiences the anxiety of a narrative's power over a community. That anxiety is most palpable in the ideological and theological applications of these foundational works. Applications of scriptures have included the exploitation of natural resources and their preservation; genocide and ethnic cleansing as well as the promotion of human rights; slavery and its abolition; homophobia and the acceptance of sexual variation. The essays in this volume honor Professor Harry Fox (leBeit Yoreh). Written in a variety of disciplines, they rethink canonical texts through Fox's rubric, contributing to our understanding of historical and textual moments of embarrassment and embracement. Contributors include Yaakov Elman, Paul Heger, Tirzah Meacham, Yosef Tubi and the late Chana Safrai as well as many students, colleagues and friends of Professor Fox.

What if the Bible was dominated by strong female voices instead of males? Would we relate to the Bible differently? In this new experiment, I switch the gender of every character in the Biblical text of Genesis and wait for readers' reactions.

Like beautifully layered rock formations lining the walls of a desert canyon, so is the Biblical text. Story is piled upon story until the foundations are invisible. Those foundations tell a different story-one that only a trained geologist can tease from the rock, one that only a Biblical philologist, trained in the dissection of literature, can find in the text. Only by patiently chipping away at the later narrative layers of the book of Genesis do we discover that Abraham may actually have sacrificed Isaac, or that Jacob may have had only seven sons instead of twelve. Without these tools, there would be no way for us to know that the Israelites' sojourn in Egypt lasted only a few generations, not 430 years, and that when they escaped from Egypt, they numbered just 3,000, not 3,000,000. We would not know that according to the original story, the ancient Israelites escaped from Egypt immediately after the plague of darkness, or that only seven commandments were given at Mount Sinai, not ten.

Herein is a modest contribution to the canon of Jewish liturgy. This book is intended for anyone who wishes that there were more prayers, blessings, and poems which reflect contemporary values but still employ the traditional Hebrew cadences. Here you'll find my original poetic compositions in Hebrew, introduced and translated (creatively) into English with notes for people who want to delve more deeply into their meaning. If some of these poems strike a chord, great If none of the poems speaks to you, I still hope and pray that upon reading them you become mobilized to compose prayers that are as meaningful to you as these are to me.

Like beautifully layered rock formations lining the walls of a desert canyon, so is the Biblical text. Story is piled upon story until the foundations are invisible. Those foundations tell a different story-one that only a trained geologist can tease from the rock; one that only a Biblical philologist, trained in the dissection of literature, can find in the text. In this earliest version of the Genesis account that our literary geology will isolate, the world wasn't created in seven days, it was already there. God was not an aloof deity whose mere words could create worlds, but an insecure and entirely immanent being. In this and many other respects, the story of the creation and the flood is very different from what those familiar with the canonical text may recall. In the Beginning traces the development of this uniquely divergent account into the canonical text we have today.