The encounter between synagogue and state in Israel’s military context raises a variety of complex questions that defy conventional paradigms. While religious liberty continues to occupy a special place in most liberal democratic thought, the legal and philosophical literature pondering its various dimensions has largely lost analytic sight of the fascinating intersection of military and religion. This article embarks on analyzing the appropriate integration between loyalty to God and to country, and between religious male and secular female soldiers. Evaluating (...) examples of synagogue-state tensions and accommodationist policies, this article explores the manner and extent to which the Israeli military (IDF) responds to the observant soldier’s multiple identities as a religious minority member and a faithful citizen of the larger secular polity. Against this backdrop, the article analyzes the vexed challenges posed to multicultural theory by the equivocal status of the Orthodox community as a numerical minority but “power majority” within the military, and by the IDF’s unique exercise of multiculturalist protection, termed herein “external restrictions,” imposed on majority group members. It concludes that the ongoing “religionization” of the IDF through the 2002 “Appropriate Integration” regulation has served as a powerful counterforce to gender equality, fostering a growing practice of female exclusion through which women are disenfranchised from core, non-negotiable protections of citizenship. The article identifies as the prime casualty of this aggressive multicultural accommodation not only secular women’s hard-won equality of opportunity, but also the very rights and status of minority women within their own religious community. (shrink)

Même si son déroulement historique exact demeure une énigme, l’exclusion des communautés johanniques de la synagogue a été un accélérateur décisif dans la construction de leur identité croyante. Ce processus peut être décrit d’un double point de vue. Premièrement, il s’effectue à travers une transformation du rapport à la tradition juive. Si l’autorité de la Bible hébraïque n’est pas mise en question, en revanche, les marqueurs identitaires du judaïsme synagogal (le Temple, les prescriptions de pureté rituelle, l’observance du sabbat, (...) la circoncision) sont l’objet d’une profonde réinterprétation, voire d’une abrogation. Deuxièmement, cette redéfinition du rapport à la tradition vétérotestamentaire-juive s’accompagne de l’apparition de nouveaux marqueurs identitaires que sont, par exemple, le baptême et l’eucharistie. À quoi il faut ajouter la naissance d’une école théologique et d’un corpus d’écrits ayant rang d’Écriture, d’une nouvelle définition de l’apostolat, de la création de nouvelles formes d’organisation ecclésiales. (shrink)

In this article, I consider a set of contextual questions related to the social and economic influences on the construction and use of Capernaum’s great limestone synagogue, and ask what these influences might tell us about Jewish–Christian relations in this village during the fifth and sixth centuries CE. After a survey of current scholarship, I address issues of method and engage in the interpretation of the relevant primary sources, some of which have only very recently been discov­ered, while others (...) have been overlooked in discussion of the question, or are deserving of reinterpret­ation. Building upon previous proposals, and in places revising them, I argue that we should see a dynamic interplay at work between local and non-local sources of funding for the synagogue and an intensely interactive and relational setting for the town’s Jews and Christians. (shrink)

This article explores the place and religious activities of medieval Jewish women in northern France and especially in Germany during the High Middle Ages. The centrality of the synagogue in Jewish life in medieval Ashkenazi communities invites a reassessment of the role of women in the synagogue and of their ritual participation more generally. The article is based on four exemplary case studies, the first of which relates to Dolce, the famous wife of the German rabbi R. Eleazar (...) b. Judah. The article then addresses the question of women’s presence in the synagogue when menstruating and during the circumcision ceremony, and ends with a look at changing attitudes toward women benefactors. Based on an analysis of liturgical, archaeological, halakhic and poetic sources, this article demonstrates the extent to which women were active and present in Ashkenazi synagogues and provides an explanation of their gradual segregation and marginalization starting in the thirteenth century. (shrink)

The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. By Marina Rustow. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 597, illus. $45, £35.

This article consists of three sections: the first sketches the development of calculating the timing of the New Moon from biblical times onward with special emphasis on the Byzantine/Romaniote communities; the second contains the critical edition of the announcement of the New Moon from four late medieval manuscripts, where the Judaeo-Greek text complements the Aramaic version of this announcement that was recited in Romaniote synagogues; and the third presents a philological commentary on the Judaeo-Greek version/versions of this announcement. Its main (...) goal is to place the language of the announcement, that is unique for its use of the vernacular, in the context of Byzantine vernacular literature, which has primarily been preserved in poetry. While substantial differences exist between the two versions identified by the authors, the Aramaic and the Greek texts both strive to create the impression of great antiquity through the use of images associated with the Temple and by linguistic means. Dating these texts earlier than the eighth century is unlikely, though, and the Greek text does not permit a terminus ante quem. Considering its thematic content and the use of archaic language(s) as constituens textus, which can run counter to a certain modernization, we may understand this decision as symbolic act by the Romaniotes to push their claim of diaspora ancestry reaching back to Late Antiquity or possibly the Second Temple Period. Another significant strand that can be discerned in the Greek version is the strong Byzantine background being evoked for its intended audience. Through their deliberate effort to archaise their origins, the Romaniote Jews, like their Christian neighbors, display Ancient Greek as a symbol of their identity. (shrink)

The story of the lectionary runs from the pre-Christian synagogue to the new Roman Catholic Ordo and its variants in American Protestantism. Across the centuries those who fashioned lectionaries were seeking to provide inclusive, appropriate, and crucial sequences of readings from Scripture which opened its richness to the congregation.

This chapter examines how Jewish opera singers in late eighteenth-century Britain became focal points for complex negotiations of ethnic identity, cultural belonging, and musical expression. At a time when opera’s associations with foreignness and bodily experience intersected with Britain’s self-definition as a commercial, tolerant nation, Jewish performers occupied a uniquely ambiguous position. The analysis centers primarily on Michael Leoni, the era’s most prominent falsettist, whose career trajectory from synagogue cantor to star of Sheridan’s anti-Jewish opera The Duenna (1775) embodied (...) the contradictions of British attitudes toward Jews. Tracing the various stages of his career, this chapter argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience’s psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. The ambivalence triggered by Leoni’s performances and his volatile reception would define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of his protégé, John Braham, Britain’s leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. These tensions would manifest most clearly when these Jews performed in Handel’s oratorios, the very sacred—and Christian—musical canon of the British nation. Ultimately, the ambivalence toward these performers mirrored and amplified the broader ambivalence toward the project of English-language opera and its singers. (shrink)

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. Spinoza's family lived on the edge of Vlooienburgh. The house in which Bento was born and raised, a handsome merchant's residence on the north quay of the Houtgracht, close to the old Amsterdam synagogue, was pulled down in the nineteenth century. On 27 July 1656, just a few months after Spinoza's spectacular legal escape from the family business, he was ritually expelled from the Amsterdam Jewish community, with a formal ban pronounced in (...) the synagogue of the Talmud Tora congregation. Travelers who came to Rijnsburg in September 1661 also mention him as a local celebrity. Spinoza rented a room in a cottage that had been built between 1656 and 1660 by his landlord, the surgeon Herman Homan. One of the most puzzling events in Spinoza's life is a visit he made to the occupied town of Utrecht in July–August 1673. (shrink)