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Preface and Acknowledgments
- University of Washington Press
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Preface and Acknowledgments At the invitation of the University of Washington, I delivered the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lecture in April and May 1998. I want to thank Robert Stacey for the invitation, and my host, Naomi Sokoloff, and her colleagues for ten enjoyable and memorable days in Seattle, during which it uncharacteristically never rained. Before going to Seattle, I spent several months researching and writing parts of this book in anticipation of the three public lectures. Several weeks before the scheduled trip, I realized that I did not want to read draft chapters from a book. And so, I made a set of outlines and quotations, as well as hundreds of slides, just for the lectures. I returned to the book from time to time, over the past four years, and completed it thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a triennial leave from Yale University for which I am extremely grateful. I have tried to keep the appearance of this book as accessible to general readers as possible, while not stinting in the notes and bibliography to show scholars the basis for my findings. For this reason, I ask my colleagues in Judaica to overlook the fact that I have avoided using diacritical marks in transliterating Hebrew and related lanxi guages. Except for most proper names, letters alef in the middle of a word and ’ayin, wherever it appears in a word, are represented by an apostrophe (’); heh and het are both h; samekh and sin, as s; tav and tet, by t; zayin and zadeh as z; kaf is k and quf is q, unless it is in an English spelling, such as Kaddish, or in a common spelling of a name, like Rabbi Akiva. Readers who know Hebrew will know the differences; I hope that those who do not will not mind the omission. Hebrew and other foreign words that have become part of English are spelled in their English forms. Thus, a commandment is translated mizvah, but the English term “bar mitzvah” is spelled tz, not z. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) has been my guide, and I have tried to be consistent, but there will be a few exceptions from time to time. Foreign terms are italicized the first time and romanized thereafter. Among other rules that I have tried to follow: words I have added to quotations are in square brackets, but I supply the identification of biblical verses and translations of foreign terms in the text in parentheses . I have retained square brackets or parentheses as they appeared in the original quoted material. All references in the endnotes are found in short form throughout the book, even the first time, but they are all included in the comprehensive Bibliography, which is divided into Primary and Secondary Sources. The few abbreviations to rabbinic texts that I have used also appear there in their proper alphabetical location. For example, B. for Babylonian Talmud is in the Bibliography under Primary Sources, under B. Among those colleagues and friends who have been especially helpful , I want to thank Elisheva Baumgarten, Robert Bonfil, Daniel Boyarin, Shaye J. D. Cohen, Yaakov Deutsch, Steven Fraade, Joseph Gutmann, Samuel Heilman, Elliott Horowitz, Gershon Hundert, Paula Hyman, Moshe Idel, Willis Johnson, David Kogen, David Kraemer , Vivian Mann, Michael Meyer, Carol Matzkin Orsborn, Julie Parker, Joel Rascoff, Benjamin Ravid, David Roskies, Shalom Sabar, Jonathan Sarna, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Menachem Schmelzer, StuPreface and Acknowledgments xii art Schoenfeld, Seth Schwartz, Mel Scult, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner, Don C. Skemer, Sol Steinmetz, Israel Ta-Shema, Roni Weinstein, and Chava Weissler. It is also a pleasure to thank the staff of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, its previous librarians, Dr. Menachem Schmelzer and Dr. Mayer Rabinowitz, and Sharon Liberman Mintz, Rabbi Jerry Schwarzbaum, Naomi Steinberger, and David Wachtel, all of whom make the collection accessible to a visiting scholar. My thanks as well to the helpful staffs of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University. My appreciation to Naomi Pascal, Marilyn Trueblood, and Xavier Callahan of the University of Washington Press, for all of their help and encouragement in seeing this book through to publication. Finally, it is a great joy to dedicate this book to my children and grandchildren: Yuval and Elizabeth Marcus, and grandchildren, Talia Phoebe, Nathaniel Ayal, and Caleb Samuel; Magen Marcus; Sasson and Beverly...