New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Winter 2024

JQR 114.1 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

JQR debuts a new look! The journal has been redesigned inside and out, reflecting our legacy of producing the best in Jewish studies past and present. 

In a scholarly note, Naphtali Meshel offers a new interpretation of the famous talmudic narrative about teaching the entire Torah “on one foot.”

Ayal Hayut-man explains an approach to classifying halakhic controversy found in fourteenth-century kabbalistic literature, wherein some disagreements must remain unresolved even in the ideal, messianic state of the Torah.

Leore Sachs-Shmueli and Roee Goldschmidt survey a set of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hasidic texts that deal with rationales for the commandments from both kabbalistic and halakhic perspectives.

Avraham (Avi) Siluk reconstructs the twists and turns of the life story of a Jewish convert to Christianity who translated a well-known missionary tract and later penned a masterful sequel turning his reconversion into a tale of redemption.

Rachel Baron-Bloch applies race as an analytic to the work of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) through a case study of its ethnographic expeditions to the Beta Israel in Ethiopia, showing that the AIU’s approach was driven by racial notions, anxieties, and aspirations around whiteness.

Caroline Kahlenberg explores Palestinian Arab knowledge production on Zionism through the life and reception of Ribhi Kamal (1912–79), a Palestinian scholar of Semitic languages who grew up in Jerusalem and became the host of Radio Damascus’s Hebrew-language broadcast after he was exiled by the 1948 war.

*The most recent four years of JQR are distributed online to subscribers exclusively through Project Muse. 

As always, see jqr.pennpress.org to subscribe and get access to all 130 years of JQR content.