Rabban Gamaliel’s slave Tevi is pretty famous in rabbinic literature, not least because we know his name at all. While most of the characters peripheral to the rabbis remain only loosely sketched—Anyone know the name of Rav Sheshet’s wife? The oldest child of Shimon bar Yohai?—Tevi, by contrast, emerges in full resolution from the classical rabbinic sources.

JQR 113.4 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue:

Last week saw the final meeting of a yearlong program that brought fellows together with rabbis from across the United States, to extend the reach of Jewish studies scholarship and use it to think about issues facing the American Jewish communities today. This was the sixth year of the program, called LEAP, which the Katz Center has offered through a partnership with Clal, engaging a new cohort of rabbis and scholars annually, with this year taking place remotely for the first time.

Building on Bernard Jackson’s influential application of semiotics to the field of biblical law, Daniel Reifman’s essay “Semiotics and the Nature of Rabbinic Legal Discourse” (JQR 110.1) offers a foray into a semiotic approach to the study of rabbinic law, exploring the potential of this approach for legal theory more broadly. He takes as his case casuistic rabbinic law and the very concrete terms and exemplars it addresses.