Rabbinic Perspectives on Loopholes and Legal Integrity
Elana Stein Hain
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 9781512829648
Pub Date: January 2026
Format: Paperback
240 Pages
This book traces rabbinic thought on the phenomenon of legal circumventions—finding licit ways to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. Elana Stein Hain shows how rabbinic literature does not fully reject or accept loopholes, but instead determines their acceptability based on whether their outcomes and processes maintain the integrity of the law.
After Revelation integrates Jewish legal thought in the medieval Islamic world into its larger environment. Traveling from Baghdad to Cairo and bookending with accounts of medieval Jewish luminaries Saadia Gaon and Moses Maimonides, Marc D. Herman underscores that medieval Judaism evolved into the shapes that it did through contact with Islam.
Although the rabbis of the first two centuries CE divided the world into men and women, they recognized that some people are born with characteristics that do not fit these categories. Through an examination of early rabbinic sources, this book explores seven different approaches that the rabbis took toward intersex persons in their legal texts.
Zimzum is the kabbalistic idea that God created the world by limiting his omnipresence. Zimzum originated in the teachings of the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria and here, Christoph Schulte follows its traces across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America over four centuries.
A Life of Psalms in Jewish Late Antiquity clarifies the world of late ancient Judaism through the versatile and powerful lens of the Psalter, recounting the many ways that ancient Jews held physical copies of the Psalms, read from it, interpreted it, used it for liturgy, invoked it as magic, and recited it as an act of piety.
Presenting a cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, Jewish Blues contends that the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves.
Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt
Oded Zinger
Price: $59.95
ISBN: 9781512823790
Pub Date: January 2023
Format: Hardcover
272 Pages
Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000–1250), and considers how ordinary Jews, especially women, experienced communal life under Islam and Jewish law. Oded Zinger concludes that the maintenance of a network of social relations with men protected women at different stages of their lives.
Jonathan V. Dauber examines the strategies of esoteric writing that Kabbalists have used to conceal secrets in their writings, such that casual readers will only understand the surface meaning of their texts while those with greater insight will grasp the internal meaning.
Sephardi Jews and Bible Commentary in the Renaissance
Andrew D. Berns
Price: $65.00
ISBN: 9780812253696
Pub Date: April 2022
Format: Hardcover
224 Pages
Based on the biblical commentaries of rabbis and writers who were exiled from Spain in 1492, The Land Is Mine presents late medieval and early modern Iberian Jewish intellectuals as deeply concerned with questions about human relationships to land.
