Into the New Century

As we noted in the introduction to the last issue, Cyrus Adler and Solomon Schechter imagined themselves in 1910 at the dawn of a new age, one in which America "is fast becoming the center of Jewry, and in all likelihood will become also the center of Jewish learning in the English world." As guardians of that precious moment, the first two editors of JQR in America held out a special mission for academic research:

It would be anomalous if, in the face of the great present growth, the past with its glory and its sacrifices, its ideals and its achievements, its lessons and its inspirations, were not offered the opportunity of that articulate utterance which can be given to it only through the mouth of science and scholarship.

A hundred years later, the field of Jewish studies has expanded to every major university and many small colleges in North America. Dozens of new Ph.D.s are granted in the field each year. Thousands of students are taught. And scores of journals in various subareas are published. Alone among those organs, the Jewish Quarterly Review has lasted a century, altering its external form and shuffling disciplinary emphases at various junctures. But its commitment to the core values of Adler and Schechter remains unchanged.

In the first instance, the journal still deems it essential to give voice to "that articulate utterance" of the past, even if we no longer believe that "the mouth of science and scholarship" is the sole form of expression. The pages of JQR have been graced by probing studies in the major areas of the field as understood and emphasized by Adler and Schechter in the early American years of JQR: history, philology, and literature, the latter of which usually meant focus on the canonical texts of Judaism from antiquity though the Middle Ages.

In the current issue we feature work by younger scholars, who both perpetuate these long-standing JQR interests and yet represent the future of their respective fields. We are devoted to the encouragement and cultivation of these scholars and others of their generation. From the perspective of the historian, Hannah Meyer presents an inquiry into the curious phenomenon of Christian excommunication of Jews in thirteenth-century England. We honor—and update—the journal's long-standing emphasis on rabbinics in Azzan Yadin's analysis of the reception and exegesis of rabbinic texts as history in general, and Rabbi Akiva's biography in particular. The final article represents JQR's expanded interest in modern literary studies in the form of Natasha Wheatley's psychoanalytically inflected study of the representation of women in Amos Oz's fiction.

To our mind, this trio of superb articles is a necessary but not sufficient tribute to the legacy of JQR. To honor that legacy more fully, we have asked a quartet of eminent Jewish studies scholars—Galit Hasan-Rokem, Daniel Schwartz, David Ruderman, and Moshe Idel—to dig back into the past of the journal and cast a new set of eyes on key motifs, personalities, or articles that appeared in our pages. The result is a fascinating series of glosses that reveals both the richness of the historical JQR and the fecundity of current scholarship, which is both keenly attentive to the past and fiercely independent of it. Managing this balance between the stern principles and commitments of the past and the opportunities of the present and future, the antique and the modern, the antiquarian and the innovative, remains the animating task of the Jewish Quarterly Review in its current form. We conclude this fourth of our centennial issues with the hope of continuing to draw inspiration from that tension as JQR commences its second century in America.

The Editors

May 2010