Cultures in Collision and Conversation: Essays in the Intellectual History of the Jews

The cultural environment : challenge and response -- Identity, ideology and faith : some personal reflections on the social, cultural and spiritual value of the academic study of Judaism -- Judaism and general culture in medieval and early modern times -- How did Nahmanides propose to resolve the Maimonidean Controversy? -- Miracles and the natural order in Nahmanides -- Polemic, exegesis, philosophy, and science : reflections on the tenacity of Ashkenazic modes of thought -- Malbim's secular knowledge and his relationship to the spirit of the Haskalah -- The uses of Maimonides by twentieth-century Jewry -- The Institute for Jewish Studies on its eightieth anniversary -- Interpreting the Bible -- "The wisest of all men" : Solomon's wisdom in medieval Jewish commentaries on the Book of Kings -- On the morality of the patriarchs in Jewish polemic and exegesis -- Yearning for redemption -- Three typological themes in early Jewish Messianism : Messiah son of Joseph, rabbinic calculations, and the figure of Armilus -- Some ironic consequences of Maimonides' rationalist approach to the Messianic age -- Sephardic and Ashkenazic Messianism in the Middle Ages : an examination of the historiographical controversy -- Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus : the impact of Zionism on Joseph Klausner's history of the second temple -- The fragility of religious doctrine : accounting for orthodox acquiescence in the belief in a second coming -- "The countenance of his father" : twenty-fifth years since the passing of Hadoar author Isaiah Berger of blessed memory