Any discussion of communal government in medieval Ashkenaz must take into account both the theoretical positions offered by rabbinic authorities and the actual practices of the communities. As is well-known, R. Jacob b. ...

The Samaritan community mostly had to fight to survive. Relations with the Jewish community were tense -- Until everything changed in the 19th century.

Biblical scholars have long claimed that the Israelites "could not conceive of a disembodied nefesh [soul]." In this book, Richard C. Steiner rejects that claim based on a broad spectrum of textual, linguistic, archaeological, ...

In summary, then, -ו is sometimes meaningful and sometimes meaningless. All of the meaningful instances can be viewed as having one and the same meaning, whether it be the full four-line truth table of the logical ...

A comparison of the first century Theodotus inscription from Jerusalem with the third century building at Dura Europos demonstrates the emergence of the synagogue as a dominant institution of Jewish life. The first, which ...

This article relates the transmission history of a single Samaritan text and its fascinating trajectory from a Samaritan legend into early modern rabbinic tradition, and on to nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish ...

"Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often ...

The three major figures of German Pietism (Hasidut Ashkenaz), R. Samuel he-Hasid, his son R. Judah he-Hasid (d. 1217), and R. Judah's student R. Eleazar of Worms (d. ca. 1230), were all descended from the Qalonymides, ...