The poet Manfred Winkler is hardly known as a plastic artist. This essay is a descriptive meditation on the unique style of his statuettes, said to embody a tension between distinct sculpture and raw matter. Influenced by Central European Modernism, especially Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit , Winkler maintains a unique style that bridges tradition and modernity. Unlike the Israeli “Bezaleli” school, Winkler remains loyal to the committed expressiveness of artists like Käthe Kollwitz. The essay explores Winkler’s plastic style, termed “shy monumentality,” as a blend of Central European Modernism’s humility and his poetic naiveté. This naiveté, informed by Schiller’s conception of the term, gives his sculptures an ambiguous complexity, which is the focus of this essay.

This paper develops a formal methodology for capturing and representing the semantics of causal expressions in natural languages. Focusing on two causative constructions—covert causatives (change-of-state verbs) and overt causatives (the verb cause)—it provides a proof of concept for analyzing the distinguished meanings of different causative constructions. We adopt the formal framework of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analyze causality and integrate it into model-theoretic semantics for interpreting causal statements. In our approach, the selection of a cause within a particular construction depends on its inclusion in a sufficient set of conditions that bring about the effect, as well as on specific properties of the cause itself. To formalize this process, we introduce the concept of causative-construction selection (CC-selection), which captures how speakers select a causative construction that aligns with the relational structure between states of affairs. For each relevant condition within the sufficient set, CC-selection determines whether it can be encoded as the cause in a statement articulated through a specific causative construction, thereby describing a particular state of affairs. We argue that CC-selection plays a central role in shaping the meaning of causal statements. By leveraging the SEM framework, CC-selection effects can be formally explained through contrasts within the structure of a model. For instance, notions of sufficiency and necessity, which play a crucial role in these selections, are rigorously defined within SEM, allowing for a precise account of CC-selection effects. This paper further illustrates how CC-selection accounts for contrastive inference patterns across constructions. By focusing on the two causative constructions central to our discussion, it resolves longstanding puzzles associated with change-of-state (CoS) verbs. The proposed framework establishes a foundation for the systematic study of causal language, bridging semantics and philosophy while providing tools to investigate the interplay between causative constructions and their associated causal meanings.

This special issue of Jewish History explores Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) through the lens of time and space. External forces—modernization, colonialism, nationalism, and migration—reshaped temporal and spatial categories, profoundly affecting communal, religious, and social structures. The articles highlight the agency of the Jews operating within these constraints: Jews negotiated with external pressures; and frequently shaping new frameworks of time and space by drawing on, adapting, or critically reworking traditional patterns. From their often-marginalized positions, community members developed strategies in private and hidden spaces—both physical and textual—that fostered continuity and provided avenues for critique of colonial and national authority. In the wake of displacement, whether in countries of origin or in diaspora, Jews constructed mental maps and developed usable narratives to forge a sense of place and identity. These were not merely physical geographies but imagined spaces, shaped by selective memory and imbued with renewed meaning. Together, the articles contribute to a deeper understanding of time and space in Jewish history, particularly in MENA contexts. They present these categories not as static coordinates, but as active, fluid dimensions—central to the formation of identities, memories, worldviews, and strategies for both individual and collective survival.

In a pioneering monograph-length study of the theological journey of Moses ben Shemtov de León of Guadalajara—self-proclaimed "Light of the West" and presumed writer of the Zohar, the kabbalah's crowning literary achievement—Avishai Bar-Asher and Jeremy Phillip Brown reach bold new conclusions about the kabbalah's prominence in medieval Castile. Through rigorous examinations of fragmentary texts inaccessible to scholars previously, the authors unearth critical insights about de León, specifically his regimens of pious living, discourse on gender, understanding of the Hebrew language, and signature thirteen-fold speculation. Bar-Asher and Brown correlate the large body of de León's Hebrew writings with the canonical Zohar, charting the parallel paths of their growth. They also reveal, with unprecedented clarity, the reciprocally interreferential character of the twin corpora at the heart of Castilian kabbalah.

Witness testimony in a judicial setting is commonly viewed as a form of evidence—a means to inform a judicial body of relevant facts in a given case. In this perspective, witnesses are merely instrumental to the process of adjudication. While this viewpoint provides a useful account of how we think of witness testimony in courts today, it is illsuited to the way witnesses and their role were perceived in the ancient world. Drawing on a cross-cultural analysis of ancient and late antique texts, the article recovers a different perception of the role of witnesses that once prevailed in the societies that gave rise to Western civilization. According to this alternate view, witnesses were not seen as passive providers of information but rather as active agents with the power to adjudicate—a role that we would now associate with judges. The article offers a new conceptualization of this historical transformation, outlining two paradigms that can help us critically examine the implied assumptions about the role of witnesses in adjudication: “the instrumental paradigm,” which is dominant in contemporary thought, and “the authoritative paradigm,” emerging from ancient texts, wherein witnesses held a far more authoritative role than the contemporary understanding suggest. The study argues that the instrumental paradigm reflects a radical transformation in the meanings of testimony and witness as legal concepts—a shift that marks an unexamined revolution in the history of legal thought.

The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice comprise a liturgical composition, as indicated explicitly in each song’s superscription which specifies its designated time and cultic context.1 One must assume, therefore, that the full significance of the Songs was not comprehended merely by reading it as a literary text; rather, it was experienced through ritual performance (Lieber 2004; Newsom 2012; Falk 2015). The surviving manuscripts may be likened to a musical score, which is not quite the same thing as actual music; a score is an abstraction—a simplified, notational representation of music—that can be rendered into a lived experience only by way of performative realisation, which inevitably entails interpretation.

Academic interest in Ottoman food consumption and cuisine advanced impressively in the last two decades, both in correlation with the general trend of cultural studies and material culture; and with Turkey’s growing interest and attraction with its Ottoman imperial past.1 Yet, very little has been done in regard to the culinary culture of Sephardi- Ottoman Jews besides the work of Karen Gerşon Şarhon, who mostly deals with the later phase – late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.2 This article presents two Jewish expense accounts, which are practically shopping lists, the only ones found to date from the Ottoman realms. This is part of a larger project, and it demonstrates the importance of Hebrew manuscripts as a source for original data, in this case for food culture and food consumption among Ottoman Jews.

Illuminating the contemporary revival of the Jewish marriage contract, Ketubah Renaissance relays the storied history of this beloved document (known in Hebrew as a ketubah) through the present day and showcases sixty of the most innovative and beautiful ketubot of the last half century. Originally created 2,500 years ago as a unilateral marriage contract stating what a groom would provide for his bride, the ketubah evolved from the tenth century onward into a richly decorated expression of love and commitment. Starting in the late 1960s a modern sensibility took root. Influenced by Jewish life and North American society at large, hundreds of artists and calligraphers began to imprint their unique aesthetic onto each ketubah design—a movement Judaica scholar Shalom Sabar calls “a veritable renaissance of the illuminated ketubbah”—while also updating the original Aramaic text to express contemporary values. Couples and families with upcoming weddings as well as officiating clergy, educators, aficionados of Jewish culture, scholars, and others will discover the evolving history of the ketubah in all its facets: its artforms, texts, scripts, iconography, production processes, and technological innovations. A curated, chronological ketubah gallery brings readers up close to sixty influential ketubot and the artists who created them—a colorful cornucopia of breakthroughs that epitomize the ketubah renaissance.

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.