Hebrew studies 

About: Hebrew studies is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Hebrew & Linguistics. It has an ISSN identifier of 0146-4094. Over the lifetime, 18 publications have been published.

Dealing with a Literary Estate: Methodological Issues Encountered in Organizing Josef Mundi's Estate as a Case Study

Abstract: Abstract:In the humanities literature concerning research questions, little attention is paid to methodological issues. This paper seeks to help fill that gap by presenting a case study: the problems that arose when working on the estate of Josef Mundi, which we received in 2016. We had to make numerous decisions regarding, among other things, chronological, chronotropic, textual, and biographical issues. The plays had to be dated and arranged in chronological order, the parent text among the various versions of the same play had to be determined, and Mundi's artistic development in terms of movements, genres, and themes had to be traced.Some of the problems we encountered, and the solutions we found, are illustrated here by three plays from different periods: "The Razor" from 1977, "The Messiah: The Rise and Fall of Shabbetai Zvi" (1982), and "Peep Show," which was never published or staged.

Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship: Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel

Abstract: Challenging Stereotypes of Scholarship:Intention in the Talmud Between America and Israel Sara Ronis A review of: Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed by Shana Strauch Schick. Pp. xii 178+. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Hardback: $135.00 In 2018, I participated in a roundtable at the Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies titled "Different Approaches to Rabbinics Research: Between America and Israel." The participants were junior and senior scholars in academic positions in the United States and Israel, all reflecting on the complicated relationships between scholarship in these two regions. My own presentation was meant to represent the perspective of American early-career scholars. Being early career myself at the time and recognizing that people without tenure have distinct risks in offering critiques, I surveyed a number of junior scholars and shared their aggregated views without attaching names to the quotes. In talking to my peers, two important themes that came up were the perception that there is a shared academic interest in "law" – both actual laws and the concept of law more generally – across the community of scholars in North America and Israel, and a sense that rabbinists in Israel and America are engaged in fundamentally different kinds of work. The general picture that emerged was one in which Israeli scholars have better skills of textual criticism, manuscript traditions, and better knowledge of some of the Hebrew reference works, and as one colleague put it, American scholars are asking about what texts mean more expansively, "in conversation with wider theoretical trends and interdisciplinary approaches in the academy more broadly."1 This distinction points to a pervasive stereotype which contributes to how different communities of scholars see each other and engage with each other's works. But it is also clearly too broad; it does a disservice to the textual skills of rabbinists [End Page 275] trained in America, and to Israeli scholars' ability to engage with broader questions and conversations in the academy. Shana Strauch Schick's 2021 book Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed both affirms this shared interest in the law and convincingly challenges a reductive binary between scholars in these two regional centers. Strauch Schick earned a PhD from Yeshiva University, and teaches in both the United States and Israel. Where many scholars who have been trained in the United States read the Talmud with an eye toward discourse and rhetorical analyses, and identity-construction, Strauch Schick demonstrates profound expertise in textual criticism and manuscript traditions, and using these skills, offers a positivist reconstruction of the development of rabbinic concepts of intention. Strauch Schick's work is characterized by her extremely careful readings of complicated legal texts. It is worth repeating this last point – these rabbinic texts are complicated; understanding them requires profound experience with rabbinic thinking as well as deep familiarity with modern legal categories. In this short but dense book, Strauch Schick expertly analyzes these rabbinic texts and brings legal theory to bear in understanding what the rabbis are doing. Using source critical methodologies together with an eye toward the rabbis' cultural contexts, she Constructs a legal-intellectual history that highlights the distinct positions of the Amoraim expressed in their statements and rulings (identifying each according to generation, cultural environment, and school of thought) as well as the approaches favored by the redactors. This careful process of reconstruction reveals a decided shift in rabbinic thinking that ramifies across many aspects of Talmudic law" (p. 2). She offers this detailed reconstruction over the course of an introduction and five subsequent chapters. In her introduction, Strauch Schick situates her work within three scholarly contexts: the field of Jewish thought on rabbinic intention (including works by Shaul Kalcheim, David Brodsky, Yaacov Habba, Irwin Haut, Jacob Bazak, Avraham Goldenberg, Shalom Albeck, Ephraim Urbach, and Leib Moscovitz), scholarship applying source critical methodologies to the Talmud (the approach pioneered by David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman, and nuanced by Robert Brody), and scholarship on the historical context of the Bavli (with an extensive list of relevant scholars, from Alexander Kohut and Jacob Levy in the nineteenth century to the more recent work of her dissertation advisor Yaakov Elman, [End Page 276] Isaiah Gafni, Shaul Shaked...

Gender Performance and the Queen of Sheba

Abstract: Abstract:This article examines narratives about the Queen of Sheba found in Kings, Chronicles, the Targum Sheni to Esther, and the Alphabet of Ben Sira. The gender, performance, and power of the Queen of Sheba are explored through attention to descriptions (or lack thereof) of her body. Notably, Kings and Chronicles offer no description of the Queen of Sheba, which stands in contrast to the playful interest in her body hair found in the Targum Sheni to Esther and the Alphabet of Ben Sira. Special attention is paid to the economic valences of the Queen of Sheba's visit to Solomon's court, which have received less attention in scholarship than the significance of her gender. An intersectional analysis reveals that the literary effects of the gender of the Queen of Sheba is subtle in biblical texts; gender is a site of potential which gets explored more fully only in later periods.

'Your Hair is the Hair of Men': Gender Discord and Depilatories in the Reception History of the Queen of Sheba

Abstract: Abstract:Out of the crucible of Jewish and Islamic imaginative retellings of the encounter between the Queen of Sheba and Solomon in 1 Kgs 10:1-13 emerged an etiological myth which describes the invention of depilatory creams. Drawing on contemporaneous written sources concerning the body's production of hair, its grooming and depilatory practices, I argue that body and facial hair removal was a gendered norm for women. However, Queens and royal women could use their hair to perform a counter-cultural female masculinity. The decision to remove the Queen of Sheba's body hair in later versions of the story aligns the Queen of Sheba with a gender paradigm which was more comfortable for its medieval interpreters. Through the introduction of a sexual element to the encounter and the subsequent association with cosmetics, later retellings simplify the earlier, complex portrayal of the Queen of Sheba as Solomon's royal equal, and instead reduce her to merely a Strange Woman.

A Return to Biblical Poetry Through a Reexamination of the Mashal

Abstract: A Return to Biblical Poetry Through a Reexamination of the Mashal Kevin Chau A review of: Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on Its Own Terms. The Ancient Word by Jacqueline Vayntrub. Pp. viii + 260. London: Routledge, 2018. $160.00 (hardcover), $48.95 (paperback). Jacqueline Vayntrub begins her monograph discussing some fundamental questions to biblical poetry and orality to challenge the status quo. She identifies the "Great Divide" (in which the literary texts that were originally oral, poetic, and emotional are seen to have evolved into textualized, prosaic, and logical) as critical for understanding theories for the evolution of poetry and orality. She notes the nebulous character of what most biblical scholars conceptualize as a text's "oral character" – an earlier stage, before textualization. She points specifically to the hazy nature of the conclusions for these diachronic endeavors, which often have nothing or little to show in terms of evidence. These uncertainties prompt Vayntrub to pose a tantalizing question: What if we were to abandon this diachronic treasure-hunting and considered instead how the text presents its own orality, specifically how the text represents its poetic speech? Her discussion at large for poetry and orality focuses upon the mashal form (conventionally taken as "proverb," but not by Vayntrub) and how the oral elements of a mashal are represented textually. In chapter one ("From Proverbs and Poetry to Prose," pp. 19–35), Vayntrub provides background for the impetus of her monograph. She questions the notion of biblical poetry by noting how the designation of "biblical poetry" is not a term native to the Hebrew Bible. In fact, there is no equivalent term in Hebrew for "poetry." Instead, the bible presents what is commonly perceived as poetry as shir ("song"), mashal, qinah ("lament"), etc. Vayntrub therefore proposes that to truly understand poetry, one must consider how poetry presents itself: how the poetry was presented as voiced (to whom, by whom, where, when, how, etc.). This chapter also explores how biblical scholarship throughout the ages and presently has struggled to overcome the "Great Divide." By comparing and contrasting studies on poetry by rabbinic and early modern [End Page 245] Christian thinkers, Vayntrub demonstrates how two different approaches arrive at similar conclusions. For the rabbis, because Solomon began his literary career composing poetry in Proverbs and Song but matured into the logical prose of Ecclesiastes, his personal development was taken as an exemplar for literary evolution. Similarly, early modernists held the common belief that language and literature develop from the oral to the written, simple to complex, poetry to prose, emotional to logical, figurative to literal, and so on. As a result, the mashal takes center-stage in studying biblical literature's development: the mashal was originally conceived of as a form of oral, short, witty snippet of poetry that explained life. Yet, a key question emerged concerning how the crude language of poetry could serve as a vehicle for divine wisdom. Vico explained this apparent vulgarity of the mashal away: though the vehicle may be poor, he argued, the message is sublime. Vayntrub concludes that these early modernists assumed their views in order to justify their own contemporary modes for scholarship, i.e., intellectual prose. For modern biblical scholarship, she exposes how this troubling thinking assuming the Great Divide still occurs in various forms.1 She contends that scholarship through the ages has unnecessarily taken reductionistic views on poetry, especially its development. As a result, Vayntrub proposes stepping back from these positions and returning to the text to gain a better understanding of what exactly poetry – and specifically the mashal – is, by analyzing the representation of its orality. Chapter 2 ("The Idea of Mashal," pp. 36–69) surveys how scholars from different ages have focused on the mashal as bearing the essence of poetry and/or as a precursor to fully formed poetry. Reviewing scholarship from Medieval Jewish Spain, Romanticism, and Structuralism, Vayntrub concludes how in each age scholars (mis)identified the mashal through their era's dominant view of poetry. For Medieval Jewish scholars, the mashal was integral to poetry's essence because of its figurative nature, which allows for effective teaching and for it to be a "building block" for more complex poetry...