In this book, master Talmudist and scholar of the Greco-Roman world, the late Professor Saul Lieberman, elucidates words, texts, customs, and practices in either rabbinic or classical literature, often by reference to passages in the other. In “Greek in Jewish Palestine”, he demonstrates that “almost every foreign word and phrase have their raison d'etre in rabbinic literature” and that “all Greek phrases in rabbinic literature are quotations.” “Hellenism in Greek Palestine” is “an inquiry into the spirit of many rabbinic observations and investigations of the facts, incidents, opinions, notions and beliefs to which the Rabbis allude in their statements.”

"Each summer, tens of thousands of American Jews attend residential camps, where they may see Hebrew signs, sing and dance to Hebrew songs, and hear a camp-specific hybrid language register called Camp Hebraized English, as in: "Let's hear some ruach (spirit) in this chadar ochel (dining hall)!" Using historical and sociolinguistic methods, this book explains how camp directors and staff came to infuse Hebrew in creative ways and how their rationales and practices have evolved from the early 20th century to today. Some Jewish leaders worry that Camp Hebraized English impedes Hebrew acquisition, while others recognize its power to strengthen campers' bonds with Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish people. Hebrew Infusion explores these conflicting ideologies, showing how hybrid language can serve a formative role in fostering religious, diasporic communities. The insightful analysis and engaging descriptions of camp life will appeal to anyone interested in language, education, or American Jewish culture"--Provided by publisher.

Abraham Abulafia, the founder of the ecstatic Kabbalah, exposed a mysticism that includes a deep interest in language as a universe in itself, to be studied as the philosophers study nature, in order to attain higher knowledge than natural science and speculative philosophy. The status of Hebrew as the natural, intellectual, and primordial language is discussed against the background of the medieval speculations regarding this topic.Abulafia proposed an elaborate hermeneutical system, unique in the whole Kabbalistic literature, for both its systematic exposition and the eccentric exegetical devices it describes. Various versions of this sevenfold system occur in several manuscripts that are collected and analyzed here in detail for the first time.Torah was regarded by Abulafia as the most important text, reflecting the constitution of the intellectual world and being identical with the Active intellect and even to God Himself. On the other hand, Torah was interpreted in Abulafia’s Kabbalah as an allegory to the psychological processes of the mystic, an approach different from the regular Kabbalistic interpretation of this text as a symbolic corpus reflecting the divine intrasefirotic life.

Hebrew manuscripts are our most important source of knowledge about Jewish intellectual, religious and everyday life in the Middle Ages, and anyone wishing to engage with medieval Jewish history needs to know about the manuscripts themselves, how to study them, and the literary genres to which they belong. Colette Sirat offers a comprehensive overview of these subjects in this illustrated introduction to Hebrew manuscript culture. This 2002 work is a considerably re-structured, extended and updated version of an earlier presentation in French. It now encompasses all aspects of Hebrew manuscripts - textual, codicological and palaeographical - combining different disciplines to give an all-embracing view of the subject. The volume has been translated from the author's revision of her earlier French book, and edited for an English readership, by leading Hebrew scholar Nicholas de Lange, who worked closely with Professor Sirat in the preparation of the new book.

While the rabbinic literature is often seen as a collection of miscellaneous responses to questions arising from study of the Hebrew Bible and its application to contemporary life, Neusner sees a system behind and embodied in the various writings. He discusses the ways in which the divine thought, and the human thinking that sought faithfully to interpret it, actually came to expression and treats what he calls the grammar of the divine self-expression in order to help us see the theological structure that it implies. Then he shows how this implicit system is expressed in the rules for the life of the people that God has chosen as his own. --from publisher description.