Originally published in Ada Rapoport-Albert, ed., Essays in Jewish historiography. History and Theory 27 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 66-77.   From the close of the Babylonian Talmud in the sixth century CE down to the period of the Emancipation (late eighteenth century), the preponderance in Jewish studies was in the halakhah, the legal…...

Originally published in Ada Rapoport-Albert (ed.), Hasidism Reappraised (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1996), 208-13.   From the very beginnings of hasidism enormous claims were made by the hasidim on behalf of the great masters, the zaddikim, who were seen as spiritual supermen endowed with the holy spirit, possessing a degree of sanctity unparalleled in…...

Originally published in Judaism, Summer 1969 The hasidic movement continues to attract attention. The spate of writings on it is unabated. The Kehot Publication Society of New York is currently engaged in publishing an English translation, in separate parts, of the Tanya of R. Schneor Zalman of Liadi, the Alter Rebbe. The best of these…...

Originally published in Sh’ma 13/258 (September 30, 1983), 124-5. Whether the traditional halachah has been a dynamic and developing or static and unchanging system is not a halachic but a historical question, to be investigated by the standard employed in scholarly research. These methods, originating in the 19th century, were not available to the great…...

Reprinted from Judaism, 6, 1 (1957), in Contemporary Jewish Ethics, ed. Menachem Kellner, Sanhedrin Press, 1978.‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ (1) This teaching has long been considered as belonging to the ripest fruits of Christianity. It is believed that in a man’s capacity…...

Originally published in Twentieth Century 174 (Autumn 1965): 1-7.   A famous eighteenth-century rabbi was the author of a slim volume on God which became a classic of Jewish devotional literature running into many editions. One of his colleagues on reading the book remarked: ‘What an achievement to contain such a big God within the…...

Originally published in Nova, 1965.   It might seem intolerably sentimental and priggish, an improper baring of soul, to write in a magazine on ‘What God means to me’. The old prophetic injunction to walk humbly with God refers not so much to modesty or meekness as to a decent reticence which ought to inhibit…...

Originally published in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 291-8. Whether belief in God erupted spontaneously in ancient Israel or whether there can be traced in the biblical record a gradual evolution from polytheism through henotheism to pure monotheism, it is certain that, from…...

Originally published in Journal of Jewish Studies 9, 3-4 (1958), 139-47.   Some years ago I attempted to produce evidence that the Babylonian Talmud is a literary work and that a careful examination and analysis of relevant passages demonstrates that its redactors used such things as literary devices in order to heighten the effect of…...

Originally published in the Jewish Year Book, ed. Stephen W. Massil. London; Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000: [76]-[81]. Like most rabbis serving in this country, I have experienced at first hand in my career what used to be called minhag angliyah, a characteristic English way of approaching things Jewish, subtly different from that of, say,…...

Avigdor ben Hayyim, the fiery opponent of Hasidism, drew up a list of nineteen counts against the, to him, heretical sect for the consideration of the Russian authorities. Avigdor and his supporters believed that if his counts were substantiated they would prove conclusively the subversive nature of the sect as a threat to religion and…...

Originally published in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 233-8. A theological discussion of faith should begin with a brief account of its history in Judaism. When the Bible and rabbinic literature use the word emunah (faith) for man’s relationship to God, it always…...

From We Have Reason To Believe (1957), reproduced by kind permission of Vallentine Mitchell Publishers. (You can visit the Vallentine Mitchell Website where many of Rabbi Jacobs’ books are for sale or go to our Shop section to buy books.) From Chapter 7 A Synthesis of the Traditional and Critical Views THREE distinct attitudes are possible…...

from Beyond Reasonable Doubt: A Sequel to We Have Reason to Believe, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999. Man-made versus divine precepts IT IS IMPORTANT to free the doctrine of Torah min hashamayim [“Torah from Heaven”] from the fetters of mechanistic fundamentalism. If it may be put in this way, it seems far more plausible,…...

Originally published in Journal of Jewish Studies 3: 4 (1952), 157-161.   It is generally assumed by modern writers on the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud [1] that the editors, whoever they may have been, had it as their aim to gather together the vast amount of material which had accumulated during the years of…...

Originally published in Siegfried Stein and Raphael Loewe, eds., Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History (University of Alabama Press, 1979), 157-66. Three differing attitudes have obtained among religious people towards the gratification of the physical appetites where their indulgence involves no breach of the religious law. These may be called the ascetic, the puritanical,…...

Conservative Judaism 34,1 (Sept-Oct. 1980), 4-16. If God knows beforehand how man will conduct himself in the future, how can man be free to choose? This problem has long exercised a powerful fascination over the religious mind. In medieval Jewish thought the problem is known as that of ????? (‘knowledge’ i.e., God’s foreknowledge) and ?????…...

A reprint from Judaism—A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, 6: 3 (Summer 1957), 202-9.   Religious teachers are generally agreed on the significance to religion of disinterestedness. The love of God and obedience to His will, these ought to be the motives for doing good, not the desire for gain. The man who…...

The Society for the Study of Jewish Theology 1. To Further a Philosophy of Traditional Judaism based on sound scholarship In the Jewish religious world today there are two basic attitudes. One is represented by those who believe that Jewish observance depends on a fundamental interpretation of the Bible and the other by those who,…...

In THE FAITH OF OUR FATHERS – THE FATE OF OUR CHILDREN: Proceedings of the European Conference of the Standing Conference of Jews Christians and Muslims in Europe London, 14th February to 17th February 1972 …”The Faith of the Fathers and the Fate of the Children” might suggest that the fathers are the fully converted…...