Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica was a unique thinker in the history of Hasidism with a highly personal vision of Judaism. His teachings, partially derived from the Przysucha-Kotsk school, adopted the concept of absolute divine providence as a cornerstone.

A collection of seven groundbreaking essays on Rabbinic midrash and related texts by a new generation of erudite scholars combining the themes of the 2004 and 2005 SBL midrash sessions: "Jewish and Christian Hermeneutics" and "Midrash and Cultural Studies," this book is a must have for clergy, students, scholars, and laypersons interested in deepening their understanding of Rabbinic and Patristic biblical interpretation.

The third issue of Proceedings of the Midrash session at the SBL Annual meeting published in this series. This volume contains papers on religion in midrash (2006) and modes of biblical interpretation in rabbinic, Syriac and Islamic traditions (2007).

Through literary, historical, archaeological, and engendered readings, this collection of essays presents a multidisciplinary analysis of rabbinic texts. Such a conversation between diverse scholars illuminates the hermeneutical issues generated by the contemporary study of the Talmud and Midrash.

The Rabbis' King-Parables: Midrash From the Third-Century Roman Empire examines the ancient Rabbis at work using parables about kings; parables that reflect the Rabbis' ideas about the role of the ruler in society, and the relationship of humanity to God. It considers the parables as resistance literature in light of the work of theorists of dominated groups. It is the first systematic attempt to read the parables as sources for Roman history in over 100 years.

Judaic reasoning is discussed from the standpoint of modern logic. Andrew Schumann defines Judaic logic, traces Aristotelian influence on developing Jewish studies in Judaic reasoning, and shows the non-Aristotelian core of fundamentals of Judaic logic. Further, Schumann proposes some modern approaches to understanding and formalizing Judaic reasoning, including Judaic semantics and (non-Aristotelian) syllogistics.

The Sasanian Empire was home to many religious communities. It was also a place of meeting and transformation. The studies in this volume encompass a diverse array of topics concerning these religious communities inhabiting the Sasanian Empire. Some include the Roman East in their deliberations. Most, however, deal with the interaction of one or other religious community based in the Sasanian Empire with the dominant religion of the empire, Zoroastrianism.

Was there an active Jewish-Christian polemic in fourth-century Persia? Aphrahat's Demonstrations, a fourth-century adversus Judaeos text, clearly indicates that fourth-century Persian Christians were interested in the debate. Is there evidence of this polemic in the rabbinic literature? Despite the lack of a comparable Jewish or rabbinic adversus Christianos literature, there is evidence, both from Aphrahat and the Rabbis that this polemic was not one sided.

This book is the first attempt to apply formal pragmatics to Judaic studies as a discipline under the auspices of cultural studies, reconstructing the pragmatic approach in Judaism and defining some of the pragmatic limits assumed in the Torah. It is a continuation of previous work considering Judaic reasoning from the standpoint of analytic philosophy and logic. The present volume aims to explicate the Judaic pragmatic point of view with an emphasis on logic, political studies, ethics, and speech act theory.

This is the fifth issue of Proceedings of the Midrash Section at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature published in this series, and contains six papers on Jewish and Black biblical hermeneutics with regard to Rabbinic Midrash.