Binah: Studies in Jewish History, Thought, and Culture. Volume Three: Jewish Intellectual History in the Middle Ages (review)

Book Reviews 157 contemporaryJewish identity in which many Jewish men already identify Judaism with women. Such provocative questions are characteristic of this groundbreaking book which so convincingly demonstrates that knowledge of the roles that gender differences have played inJewish assimilation in the past is essential to any understanding of the continuing saga ofJewish self-definition in the contemporary world. Judith R. Baskin State University of New York at Albany Hinah: Studies in Jewish History, Thought, and Culture. Volume Three: Jewish Intellectual History in the Middle Ages, edited byJoseph Dan. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994. 200 pp. When I first entered graduate school in Jewish studies, one of my undergraduate professors, a historian ofmedieval science, gave me a word ofadvice. "Never publish in Hebrew," he said. "No one knows Hebrew." Of course, nearly aU scholars ofJewish studies know Hebrew, to say nothing ofthe Israelis. But our students in the U.S., with rare exceptions, do not. To them, Hebrew is an unintelligible language in an indecipherable sCript. On this account, we must thankJoseph Dan and his collaborators for their volumes of Binab, in which they have presented English translations of important scholarly articles in Jewish studies which were originally published in Hebrew. The present volume ofBinab is the third such volume of translations to appear. The first two volumes ofBinab each ranged widely over Jewish history from ancient Israel to the present day. Volume one focused, not too closely, on Jewish politicS, political thought, and historical thought. The second volume focused, also very loosely, on kabbalah and Jewish thought. The present volume focuses more narrowly on medieval Jewish intellectual history. The following articles are in this volume: - Robert Bonfil, "Cultural and Religious Traditions in Ninth-Century French Jewry" - Joseph Dan, "Kabbalistic and Gnostic Dualism" - Jose Maria Millas VaUicrosa, "The Beginnings of Science among the Jews of Spain" - Warren Zev Harvey, "Political Philosophy and Halakhah in Maimonides" 158 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 - Sara Heller Wilensky, "The 'First Created Being' in Early Kabbalah: Philosophical and Isma'ilian Sources" . - Israel Yuval, "A German-Jewish Autobiography of the Fourteenth Century" - Yitzhak Baer, "Rashi and the World Around Him" - Gerald Blidstein, "Menahem Meiri's Attitude to Gentiles-Apologetics or Worldview?" - YoramJacobson, "The Image ofGod as the Source ofMan's Evil, according to the Maharal of Prague" - Mordechai Pachter, "Kabbalistic Ethical Literature in Sixteenth Century Safed" - Jacob Elbaum, "The Influence of Spanish-Jewish Culture on the Jews of Ashkenaz and Poland in the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Centuries . " In his introduction, Joseph Dan writes that the intended audience of the volume is "the undergraduate student in a university, who is taking a general 'Introduction to Judaism' course or studying a more specialized area of Jewish civilization." However, in spite of the best efforts of the translators and editors, the articles in this volume, it seems to me, are still too specialized and require too much knowledge in advance to be very helpful for beginning students. However, they may be appropriate for Dan's second group, that is, for students in an advanced undergraduate (or graduate) course on medieval Judaism. The quality of the translations varies. Most ofthem are excellent; a few are wooden and filled with unidiomatic jargon. All of the translations (which, as the editors note, are actually heavily edited adaptations of the original articles) have one great virtue, important to undergraduates-they are short, between ten and fifteen pages each, plus footnotes. The impulse to assign students to read recent scholarly articles implies a desire to teach scholarly method. The factual material itselfcan generally be taught more effectively in other ways. This being so, one might suggest that a problem-eentered collection with groups of articles discussing the same or related questions would have been more useful. Perhaps future volumes of Binah might take this approach. Still, the present, more wide-ranging collection presents the reader with many examples of rigorous argument and creative historical interpretation : Baer's article, for example, is a model of reading medieval exegetical texts within a hist~rical context. Bonfil recovers a picture ofJewish culture in France in the Dark Ages through a careful reading of a single non-Jewish source. Millis Vallicrosa combines several scattered pieces of...