Editors' Introduction

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) vii–ix E D I T O R S’ I N T R O D U C T I O N WHEN IN 1889 ISRAEL ABRAHAMS and Claude Montefiore launched the Jewish Quarterly Review as the first English-language journal of Jewish studies, their avowed aim was twofold. ‘‘One prominent portion of our new quarterly,’’ they wrote, ‘‘will be devoted to the past—to the better knowledge of Jewish history, literature, and theology in bygone days.’’ The editors, both Englishmen entering their fifth decade, added, however , that while the past would ‘‘receive its due share of attention, the present, in which we live, and through which the future is determined, must not be neglected.’’ Moreover, they expressed the hope that even the knowledge of the past offered in the pages of their journal would be not only ‘‘attractive and valuable to the pure scholar’’ but also presented ‘‘in such a form as to prove interesting as well as novel to the ‘general reader.’’’ It was their sincere belief that ‘‘these two objects are not by any means necessarily inconsistent.’’ As part of their commitment to the present, Abrahams and Montefiore published during their first year essays by Heinrich Graetz on ‘‘The Significance of Judaism for the Present and Future’’ (the lead article of the inaugural issue) and Israel Zangwill on ‘‘English Judaism.’’ At the same time, they published sober scholarly meditations like S. R. Driver’s article on ‘‘The Origin and Structure of the Book of Judges’’ and David Kaufmann ’s note on ‘‘The Word for Unhappy in Later Hebrew.’’ When, after twenty volumes, the founding editors decided ‘‘with much reluctance’’ to discontinue serial publication of JQR, they expressed greater satisfaction with its contribution to the study of ‘‘Biblical and later Jewish literature and theology’’ than with the degree to which it had served as a ‘‘medium for a living Theology.’’ Consequently, the nonacademic side of the journal was abandoned by the editors of the new series, Solomon Schechter and Cyrus Adler, who assumed responsibility for JQR in 1910 after publication rights were acquired two years earlier by the recently founded Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia (of which Adler was president and Schechter a member of the Board of Governors). ‘‘The fact that the REVIEW has passed from the hands of private individuals into those of a learned institution with a strict academic character,’’ they explained somewhat haughtily, ‘‘makes it incumbent upon the Editors to formulate their policy according to the The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. viii JQR 94:1 (2004) model of academic publications. This will necessitate the exclusion of all matter not falling within the province of Jewish history, literature, philology , and archaeology, though popular articles on these subjects, if they are conceived in a scientific spirit and bear the marks of original research, will be readily admitted.’’ For nearly a century, JQR has followed this charge, serving as a bastion of scholarly excellence—indeed, as a home to work ‘‘conceived in a scientific spirit and bear[ing] the marks of original research.’’ Presided over by a line of distinguished editors extending from Adler and Schechter through Abraham Neuman and Solomon Zeitlin to Leon Nemoy to David Goldenberg, the journal has developed a well-deserved reputation for its meticulous scholarship and textual erudition in a number of important areas of study. Our goal, as JQR’s new editors, is a challenging one: to preserve that attention to textual detail so unmistakably identified with the journal and yet to recapture the original aim of the first editors of reaching a wide and diverse audience. This means expanding the circle of contributors and readers of JQR, appealing to both the ‘‘pure scholar’’ and the ‘‘general reader.’’ With this in mind, we plan to publish innovative work that traverses the many disciplinary and chronological boundaries of Jewish studies. In the new JQR, the ancient will stand alongside the modern, the historical alongside the literary, the textual alongside the contextual...