The Claude Montefiore Lecture delivered by Rabbi Louis Jacobs, Jewish Liberal Synagogue, London, 1962 Republ. in L. Jacobs. Rabbinic thought in the Talmud (London; Portland, OR: Vallentine, Mitchell, 2005), 127-142. The subject of my address is “Montefiore and Loewe on the Rabbis”. I am referring of course to the book known as A Rabbinic Anthology,…...

Address given at the TENTH CONFERENCE of ANGLO-JEWISH PREACHERS, Golders Green, May 1953 Originally published in Addresses Given at the tenth conference of Anglo-Jewish preachers, [London]: Standing Committee, [1953?], 52-62. Some years ago the German-Jewish scholar. Rabbi Judah Bergmann, wrote an interesting article in which he advanced the thesis that the spirit of Judaism expresses…...

Entry “Judaism” in the Dictionary of Medical Ethics, ed. A.S. Duncan et al. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977), 191-192. In spite of the Biblical reproach of King Asa who ‘sought not to the Lord, but to physicians’ (II Chronicles 16:12) and notwithstanding that the second century teacher Rabbi Judah declared that ‘the best of…...

Originally published in Jewish Quarterly, 35, 4 (133) (Spring 1989), 48-9. [Extract from autobiography Helping with Inquiries.]   It used to be said that anyone who has studied in a yeshiva may go to heaven but he will never be able to really enjoy this world. In that sense the Rosh’s approach (at Manchester Yeshiva)…...

Transcript of lecture given at the Open University Arts Faculty II Level Course AD208/13 Recording Date: Monday, 24 January 1977 Title: THE JEWISH QUEST Tape Number: BLN04/950H060 Speaker: Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs Duration: 19 minutes approx. Producer: Helen Rapp RABBI LOUIS JACOBS:  The book of Exodus (chapter 15, verse 2) states that when the Children…...

Originally published in Intercommunion and church membership, ed. John Kent & Robert Murray (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Denville, NJ: Dimension Books, 1973), 141-153. My knowledge of Christianity is admittedly scanty but it seems to me that the main difference in the concept of membership between Christianity and Judaism lies in the nature of the…...

Originally published in Man, myth & magic: an illustrated encyclopedia of the supernatural (London: Purnell, 1970-1), Pt. 55: 1529-38.   The progenitor of all subsequent monotheistic religions, Judaism is based on the belief that there is only one God. Unlike other faiths, Judaism is centred not on a prophet or saviour but on the idea…...

Bick, Etta (ed.), Judaic Sources of Human Rights: edited proceedings of an IDI colloquium held in Jerusalem in November 1987. Israel Diaspora Insttute Report, 1. Ramat Aviv: Israel-Diaspora Institute, 1989. I must confess at the outset that I had hoped that we would discuss the broader topic of whether there is room within the halakhic framework…...

Entry in The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol. 3, ed. Erwin Fahlbusch et al. (Cambridge: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 49-55.   The thinking of the biblical authors and the Talmudic rabbis has rightly been described as organic, that is, responsive to the concrete situations of human life in all its variety. In the Bible, for instance,…...

This is the digest of a lecture and discussion held on 16 May 1981 at the Study Circle on World Jewry. Under the auspices of the President of Israel edited by Moshe Davis Shazar Library, Institute of Contemporary Jewry The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Background paper number 3 prepared for THE PRESIDENT OF ISRAEL’S SIXTH…...

Originally published as Preface of Byron L. Sherwin, Jewish Ethics for the Twenty-First Century: Living in the Image of God (Syracuse University Press, 2000). In a talmudic legend King Manasseh accuses the prophet Isaiah of contradicting the words of Moses: ‘Your teacher Moses said: “For men shall not see me and live” (Exod. 55: 20)…...

in Ancient cosmologies. Ed. Carmen Blacker & Michael Loewe. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975: 66-86. Lecturer in Talmud, Leo Baeck College, London A study of the Jewish sources demonstrates that the Jews did not develop in any period of their history a special cosmology of their own. They adopted or accepted the cosmologies of…...

Originally published in Tel Aviv Review 2 (Fall 1989/Winter 1990): 372-83.   Introduction An interesting development in modern talmudic scholarship is the detection of literary structures in the Babylonian Talmud, compiled at the end of the fifth century. The major part of the Talmud is halakhic (legal exposition) but a considerable portion is aggadic (legends,…...

Originally published in Aspects of Liberal Judaism: Essays in Honour of John D. Rayner, eds. David J. Goldberg & Edward Kessler (London; Portland, 2004), 36-48. For all the discussions, ancient and modern, on Jewish ethics1 the fact remains that there is no equivalent term for ethics in the classical Jewish sources of the Bible and…...

Originally published in Problems in Contemporary Jewish Theology, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok (Edwin Mellen Press 1991), pp. 3-20. To attempt, as this article does, a presentation of the current state of the art in Jewish theology, presupposes that there is a specific discipline so designated from the study of Jewish history; Jewish philosophy; Jewish literature; the…...

Originally published in Journal of Jewish Studies 28, 1 (Spring 1977), 46-59. Students of the Babylonian Talmud are aware that many of the statements attributed in that work to various teachers are not necessarily authentic. This paper is not, however, concerned with the question of reliability of the transmission but with the phenomenon that some…...

Originally published in Cambridge opinion 39: On the Jews, ed. Malcolm Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge Opinion, 1965), 4-8. Prominent among eighteenth-century revivalist movements in Europe, Hasidism reveals all the tensions, particularly strong in any modern interpretation of an ancestral faith like Judaism, between authority and freedom. Thanks to the labours of Professor G. Scholem, Martin Buber…...

Originally published in Conservative Judaism 37,3 (1984), 4-16. Every religion has its holy places; monotheistic faiths are no exception. The concept of a holy place does, however, present difficulties peculiar to monotheism. When earth is seen as inhabited by a multiplicity of gods, it seems natural to assume that each of these has his own…...

Originally published in SIDIC (Service International de Documentation Judeo-Chretienne), 30: 7 (1997), Engl. edn. 18-21. What is Holiness? Because holiness (kedushah) by any definition points to an intangible world, to the spiritual, it is an elusive concept. Most of us have some idea of what is meant by saying that something is sacred or holy…...