Shaye J. D. Cohen

This book explores the period from the 160s to 63 B.C.E., when the Maccabees ruled the Jews, up to the publication of the Mishnah in the second century C.E.

From the Maccabees to the Mishnah

The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic Judaism—all of rabbinic law, from ancient to modern times, is based on the Talmud, and the Talmud, in turn, is based on the Mishnah. But the Mishnah is also an elusive document; its sources and setting are obscure, as are its genre and purpose. In January 2021 the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law of the Harvard Law School co-sponsored a conference devoted to the simple yet complicated question: “What is the Mishnah?” Leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Israel assessed the state of the art in Mishnah studies; and the papers delivered at that conference form the basis of this collection. Learned yet accessible, What Is the Mishnah? gives readers a clear sense of current and future direction of Mishnah studies.

The State of the Question

What Is the Mishnah?

The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic Judaism—rabbinic law is based on the Talmud which, in turn, is based on the Mishnah. Yet its sources, genre, and purpose are obscure. What Is the Mishnah? collects papers by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Israel and gives a clear sense of the direction of Mishnah studies.

His Vita and Development as a Historian

Josephus in Galilee and Rome

Hayim Lapin

Robert Goldenberg

The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic law and, one could say, of rabbinic Judaism itself. It is overwhelmingly technical and focused on matters of practice, custom, and law. The Oxford Annotated Mishnah is the first annotated translation of this work, making the text accessible to all. With explanations of all technical terms and expressions, The Oxford Annotated Mishnah brings together an expert group of translators and annotators to assemble a version of the Mishnah that requires no specialist knowledge.

The Oxford Annotated Mishnah

Joshua J. Schwartz

Louis H. Feldman

This collection of articles honoring eminent classicist and historian Louis H. Feldman brings together a host of prominent scholars from all over the world writing on such fields as biblical interpretation, Judaism and Hellenism, Jews and Gentiles, Josephus, Jewish Literatures of the Second Temple, Mishnah and Talmud periods, History of the Mishnah and Talmud periods, Jerusalem and much more.

Louis H. Feldman Jubilee Volume

Studies in Josephus And the Varieties of Ancient Judaism

In modern times, various Jewish groups have argued whether Jewishness is a function of ethnicity, of nationality, of religion, or of all three. These fundamental conceptions were already in place in antiquity. The peculiar combination of ethnicity, nationality, and religion that would characterize Jewishness through the centuries first took shape in the second century B.C.E. This brilliantly argued, accessible book unravels one of the most complex issues of late antiquity by showing how these elements were understood and applied in the construction of Jewish identity—by Jews, by gentiles, and by the state. Beginning with the intriguing case of Herod the Great's Jewishness, Cohen moves on to discuss what made or did not make Jewish identity during the period, the question of conversion, the prohibition of intermarriage, matrilineal descent, and the place of the convert in the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. His superb study is unique in that it draws on a wide range of sources: Jewish literature written in Greek, classical sources, and rabbinic texts, both ancient and medieval. It also features a detailed discussion of many of the central rabbinic texts dealing with conversion to Judaism.

Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties

The Beginnings of Jewishness

In both Bellum Judaicum and the Vita, an appendix to Antiquitates Judaicae, Josephus deals with his own role in the war. Although both works have apologetic aims, Josephus changes his story from one work to the next. By viewing these two works in the greater context of Josephus's life and not in isolation from each other, Cohen traces Josephus's development as a historian, as an apologist, and as a Jew. --from publisher description

His Vita and Development As a Historian

This is a study of the notion of Jewishness from c. 200 BCE to c. 200 CE. Reasonable and well-informed people disputed whether a given person was Jewish or not; Cohen opens by discussing just such an argument, about Herod the Great.

The Jewish Family in Antiquity

Why aren't Jewish women circumcised? This improbable question, first advanced by anti-Jewish Christian polemicists, is the point of departure for this wide-ranging exploration of gender and Jewishness in Jewish thought. With a lively command of a wide range of Jewish sources—from the Bible and the Talmud to the legal and philosophical writings of the Middle Ages to Enlightenment thinkers and modern scholars—Shaye J. D. Cohen considers the varied responses to this provocative question and in the process provides the fullest cultural history of Jewish circumcision available.

Gender and Covenant in Judaism

Why Aren't Jewish Women Circumcised?

This volume collects thirty essays by Shaye J.D. Cohen. First published between 1980 and 2006, these essays deal with a wide variety of themes and texts: Jewish Hellenism; Josephus; the Synagogue; Conversion to Judaism; Blood and Impurity; the boundary between Judaism and Christianity. What unites them is their philological orientation. Many of these essays are close studies of obscure passages in Jewish and Christian texts. The essays are united too by their common assumption that the ancient world was a single cultural continuum; that ancient Judaism, in all its expressions and varieties, was a Hellenism; and that texts written in Hebrew share a world of discourse with those written in Greek. Many of these essays are well-known and have been much discussed in contemporary scholarship. Among these are: The Significance of Yavneh (the title essay), Patriarchs and Scholarchs, Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus, Epigraphical Rabbis, The Conversion of Antoninus, Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity, and A Brief History of Jewish Circumcision Blood.

Shaye J. D. Cohen

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