Proceedings of the Rabbinical Assembly 81. (S.l.: The Assembly, 1982), pp. 56-63. Rabbi Spectre, our Chairman, has told you that a book of mine is about to appear on ‘teiku’, the unsolved problem in talmudic literature. This is a suitable introduction to the topic we are to discuss this morning. If I may digress, just…...

Entry by Rabbi Louis Jacobs in the Blackwell Companion to Jewish Culture: from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Blackwell Publishing: 1990), 241-2. Repr. in EMJC, vol. 1, 280-1. [Bibliography updated.] Frankel, Zecharias (1801-1875) Rabbi, historian of the Talmudic period and theologian. Born in Prague, Frankel studied Talmud under Rabbi Bezalel Ronsberg and philosophy, natural…...

Originally published in Survey of Jewish Affairs, ed. William Frankel (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1988), 221-234. The term ‘fundamentalism’, much bandied about during the past decade, has its origin in the United States at the beginning of this century, when a group of Protestant Christians formed an alliance to oppose…...

Originally published in the Masorti Journal (1993) The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 7:11; Sanhedrin 67a) states “The sorcerer (hamekhasef)-one who performs an act is culpable but not one who deceives the eyes (oches haenayim) literally “one who takes hold of the eyes”). Rabbi Akiba says in the name of Rabbi Joshua: “If two men gathered cucumbers “by…...

Originally published in Manna 1977. [The following is a text, prepared by the editor and corrected by the author, of a recent talk in Cambridge.] I want to discuss how far it is legitimate to engage in what is called reductionism as far as Judaism is concerned. ‘By reductionism I mean the interpretation of Judaism…...

Originally published in Jewish Law Annual, 6 (1987), 94-108.   Jacob b. Asher (d. 1340), compiler of the Tur, prefaces the section of this code which deals with jurisprudence, ‘Hoshen Mishpat’, with a statement on the importance of justice for the social order and the nature of the authority vested in the judges. As a…...

Originally published in Abraham Ezra Millgram, ed., Great Jewish Ideas (B’nei B’rith, Washington, 1964), 81-93. The key terms in Jewish life – Torah and mitzvah – are inextricably linked. In English translations of the Bible, Torah is rendered as Law. The idea of a God-given law was foremost in the minds of Jews when they…...

Originally published in Polin 11 (1998): 25-30. References in literature to the use of tobacco by hasidic Jews are numerous [1]. Although there is little direct evidence to indicate how widespread it was, the references suggest it was fairly extensive. Let us examine some of these. In his autobiography Solomon Maimon (d. 1800) describes a…...

Originally published as ‘Current Theological Literature: time and eternity’, in Judaism (Fall 1969), 458-63. There are two views in Medieval Jewish thought on the relationship between time and eternity. The philosophers tend to distinguish between God’s time and the succession of years, days, hours and minutes that we call time, while the kabbalists tend to…...

Originally published in Judaism 34.1 (Winter 1985), 55-59. From the historical evidence marshalled by Professor Cohen it would appear that the change from the patrilineal to the matrilineal principle for the offspring of mixed unions of Jew and gentile took place in the early Tannaitic period. The central problem is why the change was introduced…...

Originally published in Judaism, Summer 1967   Although the writers of responsa are primarily halakhic authorities, with their chief interest the practical application of Jewish law, it is not altogether unusual to find them discussing questions of belief. Among the best-known theological responsa of the eighteenth century, for example, are R. Ezekiel Landau’s anti-hasidic polemics,…...