Studies of slavery in the Sasanian Empire have focused mainly on the legal status of slaves, based primarily on Middle Persian legal compilations. While these studies have advanced our understanding of Sasanian institutions of slavery, the social history and daily experiences of enslaved individuals remain largely unknown. An overlooked source for reconstructing the social history of enslaved individuals is magical texts and artifacts, in particular the Aramaic incantation bowls. This article therefore focuses on three analyses of the Aramaic bowl texts: occurrences of slaves in lists, magic spells to retrieve runaway slaves, and persistent textual and pictorial connections between slaves and demons. These analyses not only enrich our picture of slavery in the Sasanian Empire but also demonstrate the usefulness of studying magical artifacts for reconstructing the social and cultural history of societies in Late Antiquity.

Mordechai Narkiss (1897–1957), the first and long-serving curator of the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem, was a pioneering scholar in Jewish art history. His significant contributions to the field are epitomized by his insightful critiques, written in Hebrew, of the leading scholars in his era. Narkiss’s rigorous reviews, reinforced by his deep immersion in Jewish tradition and extensive knowledge of the visual arts across various cultures, adeptly identified errors, unfounded assumptions, and methodological shortcomings. He underscored the importance of a solid foundation in both Judaism and art history. This article explores six of Narkiss’s critical reviews of seminal works in the field: Karl Schwarz, Die Juden in der Kunst (1928), Cecil Roth, The Casale Pilgrim (1929), Ernst Cohn-Wiener, Die jüdische Kunst (1929), Rachel Wischnitzer, Symbole und Gestalten der Jüdischen Kunst (1935), Franz Landsberger, Einführung in die Jüdische Kunst (1935), and Jacob Pinkerfeld, Synagogues of Italy (1954). It elucidates the complexities and debates within Jewish art historiography, highlighting Narkiss’s pivotal role in both critiquing and shaping scholarly discourse and emphasizing the ongoing relevance of meticulous research in Jewish art history.

The Crown and the Courts: Separation of Powers in the Early Jewish Legal Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2020) draws on multiple disciplines and aspires to appeal to scholars across several fields, including Jewish thought, rabbinics, and jurisprudence. As such, it is gratifying to have this work be engaged by prominent scholars from these range of fields.

The book is comprised of an introduction, three parts that subdivide into nine chapters, and a conclusion. Part I (chapters 1–4) is dedicated to early postbiblical and Second Temple literature; Part II (chapters 5–7) is dedicated to early rabbinic literature; and Part III (chapters 8–9) offers broader historical and conceptual analyses of these materials. The responses of Warren Zev Harvey and Alon Harel focus on chapter 9, a comparative constitutional excursus juxtaposing rabbinic and modern law, while the response of Haim Shapira addresses chapter 7, concerning the Patriarch and the rabbinic judiciary, but raises methodological issues that are also pertinent to other sections of Part II.

This article examines three halakhic books authored by Rabbi Barukh Assabag in Casablanca during the 1930s and 1940s. Composed in Judeo-Arabic vernacular, these works were intended to cater to the general public whose proficiency in Hebrew was limited. Mindful of the nonobservance of commandments in various sectors of Morocco’s Jewish community, Assabag embarked on this literary endeavor with the aim of rehabilitating religion’s standing. Employing modern methodologies such as the democratization of knowledge, education, and print, Assabag’s innovative approach challenges the oversight of the rabbinic elite in addressing diverse community sectors. I posit that Assabag’s criticism of the rabbinic elite propelled him to propose a novel method for imparting Jewish law to the broader public. Rooted in its language and culture, this approach reflects Assabag’s social and educational consciousness. To achieve this goal, he pioneered a distinctive literary genre in Morocco that domesticated the halakhic text for a wider audience by composing in Judeo-Arabic vernacular, designing a unique structure for his books, and crafting their contents with meticulous care.

In the iconic and widely quoted anecdote from Leah Goldberg’s memoir“Meetingwith a Poet”(1952), Goldberg describes a meeting with Else Lasker-Schüler in aJerusalem Café, the Café Ziechel, which was known for its patrons’belonging to theGerman-Jewish community. The meeting is often read as encapsulating the abyssLasker-Schüler had fallen into in her exile in Jerusalem. Lasker-Schüler, wroteGoldberg, sat in her regular seat,“grey as a bat, small, impoverished, secluded”(43).1Goldberg described herself as swept with guilt, faced with“this terriblepoverty, this insane loneliness of the great poet [...] The wretchedness of her sittinglike that was a symbol of the life of injustice, which we, the others live”(43).

This article discusses aspects of the ways Jews belonged and were seen as belonging in the Middle Ages, alongside the ways they were set aside and portrayed as outsiders in medieval Europe. It details different social, cultural and religious means through which the affinity of Jews to their medieval homes were expressed together with expressions of difference and alienation. The introduction sets the stage for the articles in this volume that explore different facets of this topic.

While the Probus has remained a stepchild in Philonic scholarship, its significance can hardly be overestimated.1 Its particular contribution emerges in view of the fact that it was written in a Roman context and reflects Philo’s intellectual development from Bible exegete in the Jewish community of Alexandria to expositor of Judaism for wider Roman audiences in connection with the Jewish embassy to Gaius Caligula.2 Addressing a neuralgic theme of the first century CE, the Probus affords the opportunity to investigate the presence of Rome in a Jewish-Hellenistic text and to transcend Classicist trends in the study of Hellenistic philosophy. It will be my aim to expose the Roman entanglement of Philo’s thought in the Probus as an example of the strategies of interaction between imperialist forces and an author from a minority group, who may serve as a compass for other authors in similar situations. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the text will enable us to redraw the traditional map of the Roman Empire to challenge its sharp dichotomy between Rome and the provinces and demonstrate the deep involvements of “provincial” elites in Roman discourses. Vice versa, Roman culture and philosophy can only be properly appreciated when the “provincial” is recognized as an integral part.

In the nascent stages of academic scholarship on Haredi (ultraOrthodox) society in Israel, a sense of bewilderment attended the very premise of researching this ostensibly peripheral and inconsequential community. A cursory examination of Israeli print newspapers from the 1940s until the 1970s reveals, at best, a tangential engagement with the Haredi community. This engagement manifested itself primarily in two distinct forms: folkloric accounts chronicling religious customs practiced within Haredi enclaves, particularly in connection with religious holidays (the kapparot rite, sukkah construction, the pre-Passover burning of bread, and Lag Ba-Omer bonfires), and newspaper articles dissecting the internal dynamics and national struggles of Haredi political parties. Only on rare occasions would stories concerning noteworthy religious leaders from the Haredi world also appear on the pages of these publications. The larger Haredi community, as a distinct socio-religious entity with its own norms, practices, and worldview, remained largely unexamined. Even official governmental surveys conspicuously omitted them, as religious affiliation rarely served as a significant statistical metric. According to one urban legend, the prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, acquiesced to the demand for an exemption of yeshiva students from military service due to his conviction that the Haredi community would naturally disappear within a generation or two, leaving behind a few isolated communities, confined to enclaves such as Jerusalem’s Meah She’arim neighborhood.