This article engages the transformation of fieldwork as an idea based on specific methodological practices, and the way different conceptions of fieldwork circulated and adapted to the study of the folklore of Jews. Doing fieldwork is not a theory, but as a concept and practice it travels between different disciplinary and ethnographic contexts. This article engages a number of synchronic episodes in which fieldwork was applied to Jewish subjects, tracing the scholarly contexts from which it was borrowed, among them: networks of corresponding authors at the end of nineteenth century in Central Europe; Russian political agendas of “going to the people”; Russian imperial expeditions to Siberia; German diffusionist works in Africa; Boasian anthropology; and studies of Japanese culture from a distance during the Second World War. On the diachronic level, these different crossroads of Jewish folkloristics with other ethnographic initiatives reflect a turbulent history of mobility, displacement, and immigration that underlies Jewish life in the twentieth century. These different adaptations, paths in which fieldwork was translated to the study of Jews, enables an examination of fieldwork as an idea that keeps traveling, or better, in Tim Ingold’s terms, “meshwork”—a texture of interwoven threads.

This entry offers a short overview of women’s letters found in the Cairo Geniza, a collection of medieval manuscripts that provides a rare glimpse into the lives and voices of Jewish women in the medieval Islamic world. Despite the systemic exclusion of women from formal learning and literary production in Jewish culture, the Geniza preserved at least 240 letters of women, primarily written in Judeo-Arabic. These letters, which encompass both family correspondence and formal petitions, shed light on women’s predicament, resources, and actions within a male-dominated society and highlight their active roles in maintaining communication across social and geographic distances. The entry underscores the complexity of authorship, as most letters were likely physically written by male scribes, yet were regarded by women as their own. Women’s letters in the Cairo Geniza are a rich source for gender dynamics, economic realities, and the emotional landscapes of Jewish women in the medieval Islamic world.

This article focuses on a single major affair within modern Jewish history whose antisemitic context is unequivocally recognized by most historical scholarship, namely, the murderous persecution of Soviet Jews during the final years of Joseph Stalin’s rule (1948–53). I argue that alongside events and actions on the part of the regime that appear obviously antisemitic in nature, one can point to a certain distinct trend in Stalin’s “Jewish” policy at the time that the concept “antisemitism” does not help to unravel or understand. Historians were unaware of this trend until the Soviet archives were opened following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I address it here for the first time after perusing relevant archival material that has yet to be assessed by scholarship. After presenting and analyzing this unknown stratum of Stalin’s policy toward Soviet Jewry during the time of the persecutions, I argue that both this element, which is unassociated with the phenomenon of antisemitism, and the familiar murderous components of Stalin’s ostensibly antisemitic policy should from now on be analyzed and interpreted against a phenomenological and theoretical backdrop other than the paradigm of antisemitism.

This article examines the inheritance register of Ezra Bassan, an eighteenth-century Jewish financier (sarraf) in Istanbul, to shed light on Ottoman credit networks, the trade in luxury commodities in the capital, and aspects of Sephardic communal and family life. Upon his death in 1771, Bassan left substantial holdings – including cash, loans, and jewellery, reflecting both his personal fortune and his involvement in Ottoman economic life. Although not among the empire's top financiers, he occupied a crucial middle tier, maintaining cross-communal business ties in his luxury trade – offering a glimpse into broader currents of global gemstone exchange – and in extending credit to military officials, Phanariot grandees, and fellow Jewish merchants. The register also demonstrates once again the Ottoman state's interest in certain private people's estates during that period. The detailed record of burial expenses illuminates upper-class Sephardic death rites. By analyzing Bassan's inheritance register this article underscores the crucial, if often overlooked, role of mid-level Jewish financiers who were involved and perhaps even enabled the operation of essential Jewish institutions. Ultimately, it deepens our understanding of Jewish socio-economic life in the eighteenth-century Ottoman capital and challenges prevailing assumptions about the timing and channels through which global luxury trends reached Istanbul's markets.

By the early twentieth century, biblical criticism had come to dominate the academic study of Scripture in most European universities. Jewish writers and scholars articulated a wide spectrum of responses to this historical-literary approach to the Hebrew Bible, especially in light of what they perceived to be its noxious Protestant presuppositions. In this regard, the establishment of the Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, an early and central part of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, brought the issue to the fore in a particularly vexing manner. While the organizers would not conceive of a Jewish Studies faculty without courses on the Bible, it was far from clear who could, or should, be hired for this field. There was a general sense that the new Institute could not afford to engage a scholar who lacked broad familiarity with the contemporary state of the field, but there was also hesitation—and outright objection in some quarters—to a Jewish scholar who fully embraced the critical approach to the Bible. The archival document published here for the first time addressed this very dilemma. Written by Moshe Zvi Segal, it attempted to protect the notion of unfettered academic freedom while still privileging traditional sensitivities.

'Religion in the Roman Empire' (RRE) aims to advance and document new and integrative perspectives on religion in the ancient world, combining multidisciplinary methodologies. Committed to interdisciplinarity and new approaches to the study of religion, it offers a space to take up recent, but still incipient, research to modify and cross the disciplinary boundaries of the History of Religion, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classics, Ancient History, Jewish History, Rabbinics, New Testament, Early Christianity, Patristics, Coptic Studies, Gnostic and Manichean Studies, Late Antiquity and Oriental Languages. We hope to stimulate the development of new approaches that can encompass the local and global trajectories of the multi-dimensional pluralistic religions of antiquity.

Christian baptismal rites evolved from Jewish purification practices. At the same time, during the following centuries the rabbis appropriated major features of Christian baptism, thereby reshaping Jewish conversion. Rabbinic sources testify to the growing role of immersion in water in the conversion procedure. Through the comparison of the two detailed versions of the rabbinic protocol of conversion, dated to the fourth and fifth centuries and incorporated in the Babylonian Talmud and in tractate Gerim, this paper reconstructs the history of this rabbinised rite. It is argued that the earlier version is to be understood as a ritual response to current forms of Christian baptism, which include two unique elements: a baptiser and a declaration over the water. Against the background of Christian invocation of the credo over the water, the presumably bizarre listing of commandments while still in the water is a rabbinic attempt to encapsulate the essence of the Jewish alternative.

How do we come to terms with crises? What stories do we tell ourselves to integrate difficult current events into our worlds and help ourselves come to terms with the new challenges we face? Jews retell the stories of past crises and victories year in, year out. For example: the story of slavery, exodus, and redemption on Passover; the story of the sacrifice of Isaac on Rosh Hashanah. Yet, we do more than retell these stories. Each generation adds new emphases, adjusting the tales they tell to the concerns and dilemmas with which they are occupied at a given moment. As a historian, I seek to understand the interplay between the constancy and the variation, which can reveal a complexity of both past and present life. Nothing is ever completely novel nor is it ever an exact repetition of the past.

The present collection of articles revisits the question of Philo's contexts in the wake of Maren Niehoff's Philo of Alexandria. An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, 2018/translation Tübingen 2019), which argues for the first time that Philo's diplomatic activities in 38 CE had a significant impact on his career and transformed him from a Bible exegete addressing Alexandrian audiences to a Roman philosopher. In the articles gathered here, the contributors further discuss these insights and adopt new hermeneutic frameworks to contextualize Philo's writings. In the first and largest section of the collection, Philo's participation in Roman discourses, including his engagement with ideas advocated by Cicero, Valerius Maximus, and Musonius, as well as his hitherto-overlooked Cynic tendencies, are studied. One essay furthermore treats Philo as an exponent of Alexandrian Platonism in Roman circles and another as a diplomat with close ties to the imperial administration who may have noticed the emergence of Christ-believers in the Jewish community of Rome. In the second section of this collection, the contributors focus on Philo in relation to the New Testament. Two of the contributions apply a triangular perspective, taking Philo as a benchmark for Romanization, which illuminates texts such as Acts and the Letter to the Hebrews. Two others respectively investigate Philo's hagiographical style of biography in view of the Gospel of Luke and his Platonically inspired Logos theory in view of the Gospel of John. The third section places Philo in the context of Greek literature and philosophy, one essay introducing ecocriticism in relation to Roman politics and the other drawing attention to Philo as a unique witness to inner Platonic debates which fully emerge in the second century CE.

A long tradition of comparative scholarship has succeeded to establish the impact of Roman legal environment on rabbinic law making during the first two centuries CE, particularly in the field of family and status. Yet, the specific channels for acquiring this knowledge have hitherto remained a matter of conjecture. This paper argues that the rabbis were exposed to the contents of the current legal handbooks. Tractate Qiddushin (on betrothal) of the Mishnah includes two peculiar units: the first (1.1–5) regarding forms of acquisition and the second (3.12) on the status of newborns. Both units appear in key points in the tractate and exhibit striking structural and conceptual similarities to extended portions of the Roman school tradition regarding the laws of status, as handed down in Gaius’ Institutes and Pseudo-Ulpian's liber singularis regularum. It is therefore suggested that these units provide the earliest literary attestation already around the turn of the third century CE for the dissemination of Roman legal education among non-Roman provincials in the East, who sought to adjust their local practices into Roman-like legal structures.