Medieval Jewish Legends on the Decline of the Babylonian Centre and the Primacy of Other Geographical Centres

This chapter recounts how the Babylonian centre of Jewish study gradually went into decline and Jewish centres in Christian Europe grew stronger in France, Germany, Spain, and Provence during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It demonstrates the ways Jews sought reasons to extol the virtues of their own locale, which was customary in contemporaneous Christian societies. It also describes the various centres in Christian Europe that sought to establish a connection to the charismatic Charlemagne, cities, and countries in the Islamic world, which produced literatures praising their region. The chapter describes the eleventh-century legends and folk tales that extol the virtues of different Jewish centres in Europe set against the backdrop of the decline of the Babylonian centre following the death of R. Hai Gaon. It examines the rivalry between Spain and Ashkenaz as each centre strived to outdo the other.

Radical Jewish Study of the Masoretic Text during the Enlightenment Period: Joshua Heschel Schorr, Abraham Krochmal, and Elimelech Bezredḳi

During the Enlightenment period, Jewish scholars began addressing the issue of textual criticism. Few of these took a radical approach to this question, the most prominent being Joshua Heschel Schorr, Abraham Krochmal, and Elimelech Bezredḳi, whose writings are replete with thousands of textual emendations. This article seeks to examine this fascinating but neglected chapter in the history of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. It discusses the work of these three scholars, analysing their outlook, principles, and methodology and adducing cultural, intellectual, and personality factors as contributing to their special status as a group within a broader phenomenon.

“And God Remembered:” Barrenness and Hope in Genesis

For a book of beginnings,[1] Genesis is ironically replete with beginnings that almost were not. Indeed, the motif of the barren woman, the woman unable to produce a new beginning in the form of a child, is so common it becomes almost redundant in the narrative. What is most characteristic of God in Genesis—to be a fertile source of life[2]—is painfully denied the matriarchs. This pain is heightened by the steadily increasing tension in the text regarding the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Abraham. God’s promise to Abraham that he will be “a great nation”[3] with many descendants requires Abraham to have offspring in order for it to be fulfilled, yet nature repeatedly opposes the fulfillment of the promise. Through the repeated motif of the barrenness of the matriarchs, the reader is inducted into the struggle of the primary characters to have faith in a God “whose promise tarries too long.”[4] This paper examines the motif of barrenness in Genesis in order to argue that the barrenness of the matriarchs functions literarily as a “type-scene” that is meant to signify a complex series of messages in a few simple plot details. The motif also functions theologically. Through negative contrast, the barren wombs recall the goodness of creation as well as God’s nature as the fertile giver of life. Furthermore, the repetition of the motif in Genesis, far from indicating a lack of creativity on the part of the redactors, instead serves to inculcate through repetition an expectation in the reader that God will do what God always does in this situation—namely, bring life from death. The motif’s power is in its predictability. In this way, the motif of barrenness in Genesis is a tutor in the school of hope. [1] Jon D. Levenson. “Genesis: Introduction,” Jewish Study Bible, 8. [2] As Phyllis Trible notes in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), “making is a familiar activity for God,” 90. [3] Genesis 12:2, Jewish Study Bible, 30. [4] Victor Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapter 1-17 (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1990), 151.