Jewish Love Magic: From Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages' is the first monograph dedicated to the supernatural methods employed by Jews in order to generate love, grace or hate. Examining hundreds of manuscripts, often unpublished, Ortal-Paz Saar skillfully illuminates a major …
Rustow changes our understanding of the origins and nature of heresy itself. In this book she draws on the Cairo Geniza to show that despite the often fierce arguments between the Jewish groups, they depend on each other for political and financial support and cooperate in both …
Judaism is often described as a religion that tolerates, even celebrates arguments with God. Unlike Christianity and Islam, it is said, Judaism endorses a tradition of protest as first expressed in the biblical stories of Abraham, Job, and Jeremiah. In Pious Irreverence, Dov Wei…
"How have Jews understood the foundational stories of the Torah? What can this record of commentary teach us about the Bible, our past, and our own times? Master teacher Shai Cherry explores these questions by systematically examining the biblical commentary of some of the great…
Every commentator, from the classical rabbi to the modern-day scholar, has brought his or her own worldview, with all of its assumptions, to bear on the reading of holy text. This relationship between the text itself and the reader's interpretation is the subject of Torah Throug…
This book challenges the dominant perception that medieval Ashkenazic rabbinic scholarship was lacking in intellectualism or broad scholarly interests. While cultural interaction between Jews and Christians in western Europe was less than that of Sephardic Jews, this study shows…
"Introduction Rabbi Solomon Yitzhaqi (1040-1105), known as Rashi, is perhaps the most influential Jewish Bible interpreter of all time. A native of Troyes in the French county of Champagne, Rashi traveled in his youth to study for a decade in the Rhineland talmudic academies (ye…