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Apart from Hebrew liturgical poetry, our knowledge of nonreligious Jewish literature (belles lettres) from before the time of Saʿadya Gaon (882–942) is very sparse. The oldest known pieces are four-line strophes with the simple rhyme scheme aaaa/ bbbb, such as the “strophes ( ḥaruzot) of the masoretic grammar” included in the masoretic literature of the eighth and ninth centuries, or the anti-traditional Polemics of Ḥīwī al-Balkhī (Ḥayawihi of Balkh, Afghanistan) from the mid-ninth century. Ḥīwī’s strophes questioned the holiness of the Bible and the claim…

The focus here is on preaching in Britain and the United States by representatives of the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements (though not by the Ultra-Orthodox, whose Yiddish and—in Israel—Hebrew preaching is a very different tradition). 1 Limits of space in comparison to the breadth of the topic make it is unrealistic to attempt to survey all of Jewish preaching in the modern period. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, there is such a…

For any number of reasons, the Judaism of Flavius Josephus has not been a subject of burning inquiry these past two thousand years. He began his literary career saddled with the reputation of a heinous traitor to the Judean people; his works were first preserved by those who had destroyed the Second Temple and then by Christian leaders such as Eusebius, who were in the process of building a state that would limit Jewish civil rights. None of these early users of Josephus had any motive to reckon seriously with his perspectives on Judaism. Nor, by and large, have his more recent users. Cr…