Elijah Levita: a Jewish Hebraist

Elijah Levita’s (c. 1469–1558) study of Hebrew was part of the longtime Jewish occupation with the language of Scripture. Yet much of Levita’s scholarship was at odds with prior Jewish approaches to Biblical language and the transmission of the Biblical text. In his many works, Levita provides a critical account of the development of Hebrew, Aramaic, and the masoretic scribal traditions. This article examines the relationship between Levita’s critical approach to the Bible and the Christian context within which he worked. With the rise of Christian Hebraism, an increasingly sophisticated and sustained discourse on Hebrew developed outside of Jewish circles. This created an alternative setting within which Levita could produce scholarship that challenged prior Jewish notions of language and the Bible. The viability of Levita’s scholarship was no longer contingent on Jewish reception alone, allowing him to express critical ideas without fear of internal censure and without assuming the hermeneutical posture typical of pre-modern Jewish scholarly expression. This article has benefited from conversations with advisors at Columbia University and with colleagues at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. In particular, I would like to thank Wim Smit (z”l) and Jennifer Greenfield for shaping my studies of early-modern European intellectual life and my colleague Naomi Seidman for helping me to better tell the story. Thanks to Kenneth Stow, Arthur Lesley, and unnamed third and fourth readers of this essay for their helpful suggestions.     

“God Loves an Infant’s Praise”: Cultural Borrowing and Cultural Resistance in Two Nineteenth-Century American Jewish Sunday-School Texts

Two mid-nineteenth-century American Jewish Sunday-school textbooks—Mrs. Eliezer [Rachel Peixotto] Pyke’s Scriptural Questions for the Use of Sunday Schools for the Instruction of Israelites (1843) and Simha C. Peixotto’s Elementary Introduction to the Scriptures for the Use of Hebrew Children (1840)—shed important light on the relationship between Jews and the dominant Christian (largely Protestant) culture that surrounded them. A comparison of these books with the Protestant Sunday-school texts upon which they drew serves as a revealing case study of cultural borrowing and cultural resistance between minority and majority faiths.     

Paying for medical care: a Jewish view

According to Jewish law, there is a clear obligation to try to heal, and this duty devolves upon both the physician and the society. Jewish sources make it clear that health care is not only an individual and familial responsibility, but also a communal one. This social aspect of health care manifests itself in Jewish law in two ways: first, no community is complete until it has the personnel (and, one assumes, the facilities) to provide health care; second, the community must pay for the health care of those who cannot afford it as part of its provision for the poor. The community, in turn, must use its resources wisely, which is the moral basis within the Jewish tradition for some system of managed care. The community must balance its commitment to provide health care with the provision of other services.     

Health Care Behaviours and Beliefs in Hasidic Jewish Populations: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Cultural issues impact on health care, including individuals’ health care behaviours and beliefs. Hasidic Jews, with their strict religious observance, emphasis on kabbalah, cultural insularity and spiritual leader, their Rebbe, comprise a distinct cultural group. The reviewed studies reveal that Hasidic Jews may seek spiritual healing and incorporate religion in their explanatory models of illness; illness attracts stigma; psychiatric patients’ symptomatology may have religious content; social and cultural factors may challenge health care delivery. The extant research has implications for clinical practice. However, many studies exhibited methodological shortcomings with authors providing incomplete analyses of the extent to which findings are authentically Hasidic. High-quality research is required to better inform the provision of culturally competent care to Hasidic patients.     

Approaches to Jewish Studies: Teaching a Methods Class

Abstract. Like religious studies, Jewish studies is an academic exploration of literature, ritual, history, philosophy, and experience across disciplinary boundaries. As with all area studies, Jewish studies balances itself – often precariously – as a bridge across that range of methodological options. The breadth of theories employed by each has complicated the teaching of an upper level seminar in Jewish studies. Conceived as a cross between a parade of scholars course and a senior capstone experience, the class employed the broad thematic principle of “identity.” In doing so, it exposed the biases of the students, the subject, and the instructor. (The appendix – abbreviated syllabus mentioned in this essay can be found on the Wabash Center Web site < http://www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/journal/hochman.html >.)     

The modern country house as a Jewish form: a proposition

ABSTRACT

Although the vast majority of modern country houses built or refurbished in the long nineteenth century were owned by non-Jews, Jews owned some of the most magnificent. Thus, these dwellings pose the same question that historians have raised about other aspects of diasporic Jewish practices: Was there anything particularly “Jewish,” about country houses owned by Jews? In this essay I propose a hypothesis – that Jewish country houses were the ideal-type of the modern country house. On the one hand, super-elite Jews took their capital, both cultural and real, their family networks, and their long experience interpreting and navigating the often-hostile worlds in which they found themselves and created country houses that were the model of the genre. On the other hand, I argue that Judaism itself mattered as much as the social and economic positioning of Jews produced by discrimination. Uniquely Jewish conceptualizations, and practices, of home, of time, and of space rendered Jews particularly comfortable with the complex interweaving of public and private intrinsic to the country house.     

Smoking: A Jewish view

The issue of smoking and Jewish law is explored. After the dangers from smoking are cited, various precedents in Jewish law are presented as the basis for confronting the matter of smoking. Arguments are suggested for strictly prohibiting smoking. The matter of the effects of smoking on the non-smoker is the subject of much research, and the dangers posed to the innocent bystanders are an added dimension pointing to the hazards of smoking and therefore indicating that it should be prohibited.Rabbi Dr. Reuven P. Bulka is editor of theJournal of Psychology and Judaism, published by Human Sciences Press for the Center for the Study of Psychology and Judaism in Ottawa, Canada.     

Soviet Jewish Refugee Women:

In the following article, you will meet some typical Soviet Jewish refugee women. Three came to America more than a decade ago, the others within the last eighteen months. Although they are from different regions and diverse backgrounds, their stories bear a common thread of the effects of living under totalitarian rule. They suffered anti-Semitism on the streets and sexual harassment in the work place. Yet even wife battering, overcrowded living conditions, and daily governmental repression would not induce any of them to seek professional help. Stress and trauma were never mentioned outside of the family.     

Abortion: A Jewish view

A practicing physician reviews the contribution of Jewish ethics, as it relates to the structure of Jewish law, to the issue of abortion. The topics approached include the status of the fetus, the relationship of fetus to mother, abortion and murder, therapeutic abortion, and the rights of the mother. The discussion describes rabbinic answers to abortion requests and is followed by a summary of the Jewish attitudes toward termination of fetal life. An appendix is provided, dealing with central aspects of Jewish ethics, the structure of Jewish law, their relationship, and a note on abortion legislation in Israel.     

Family therapy and ultra-orthodox Jewish families: a structural approach

Most ultra-orthodox Jewish families live in tightly knit communities in which there is religious and cultural congruence between the structure of their communal organizations, their families, and the way individual members construe their world. Without excluding other family therapy models, this paper points to striking links between strictly orthodox Judaism and aspects of structural family therapy which suggest the latter may be particularly applicable to members of this ethnic minority. Therapeutic issues are illustrated with examples.