JLA Review Vol.1, No.1                                                      Editor: Miryam Segal 

Reading the Hebrew Bible Through Modern Law:

A Critical Appraisal of Biblical Judgments

Reviewed by: Nitsan Plitman, Harvard Law School

Daphne Barak-Erez’s new book Biblical Judgments: New Legal Readings in the Hebrew Bible (University of Michigan Press, 2024) undertakes an intrepid re-examination of biblical texts through the lens of liberal jurisprudential analysis and contemporary legal theory. The book’s six chapters, devoted to six distinct legal arenas—government, judges, human rights, criminal law, private law, and family law—encompass 127 separate segments, collectively posing and evaluating a spectrum of moral and legal questions within a modern legal frame work.

One illustrative example: Barak-Erez measures the gap between the “law in books” and “law inaction,” as reflected in the leadership aspirations the Hebrew Bible describes. While in principle, a king must be subject to the rule of law (Deuteronomy 17:18), “walk modestly” (Micha 6:8),and be “a slave of the people” (I Kings 12:7), Barak-Erez reminds us that in practice the biblical rulers differed most often in how far they strayed from these prescribed virtues.1 Another moral legal conundrum the book raises is the tension between the commitment to legally binding precedent and the need to rectify past injustices. The book exemplifies this tension by subtly juxtaposing the episode on the daughters of Zelop he had, and the questions it raises about women’s inheritance rights, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as a contemporary instance of overriding established precedent.2 In this sense, the book provides a thought provoking contribution to the growing discourse on law and religion as it not only draws inspiration from biblical narratives but also challenges them, ensuring they undergo rigorous scrutiny— as befits critical legal thinking.

The book’s critical stance invites a further set of pointed reflections: Why this project? Why now? On the one hand, for a renowned scholar of constitutional and administrative law and a sitting Justice on Israel’s Supreme Court at a time when the Court faces fierce criticism and threats to curtail its authority, the turn to the Bible might appear as an act of self-legitimation. In a country that is growing increasingly religious, and amid skepticism about Judaism’s secular-nationalistic characteristics, revisiting the Hebrew Bible could be read as a gesture of affiliation with a shared community devoted to this sacred canon.3 This recalls a recent incident of another (notoriously secular) prominent Supreme Court justice, Aharon Barak, who, under mounting criticism of his liberal-leftist legal legacy, circulated a photograph of himself donning the tefillin as an effort to underscore his enduring Jewish authenticity.4

On the other hand, the book also fits within a longstanding secular tradition, affiliated mainly with secular Zionism, of engaging directly with the Hebrew Bible as a guidebook for formulating neo-biblical political thought and Jewish sovereignty, while deliberately bypassing centuries of traditional rabbinic commentary. From this angle, Biblical Judgments could be viewed as part of an anti-religious movement, challenging traditional interpretations of Scripture. As Barak-Erez repeatedly emphasizes in her introduction, the book does not analyze the Hebrew Bible in any kind of traditional manner.5 Rather, she assures us that “the analysis corresponds directly with the text… [it] continues former readings of the text from a literary and cultural perspective, focusing mainly on the cultural ramifications for the present time.”6 But what do “literary” or “cultural” mean in this context? Has the Bible not always been both a cultural artifact and a literary creation? And what do these terms imply when invoked within a legal framework? In Formation of the Secular, Talal Asad tackles questions of this nature by asking:7

What makes a discourse and an action “religious” or “secular”? A book entitled the Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature, published in England before the Second World War, has a format that does away with the traditional double columns and numbered verses… Is this text essentially “religious” because it deals with the supernatural… Or is it really “literature” because it can be read by the atheist as a human work of art? Or is the text neither in itself, but simply a reading that is either religious or literary – or possibly, as for the modern Christian, both together?... Until someone decides this question authoritatively, there can be no authorized allocation of what belongs to private reason and what to a “political ethic independent of religious belief.”

For our purposes, Asad’s point highlights the tenuous basis for the common equating of a literary reading of the Bible (the sort Barak-Erez appears to advocate) with secular ideology, and traditional interpretation with “private” or purely religious reason. Indeed, if any essentialism can be ascribed to this discourse, it should be to the innate murkiness of these distinctions. Since there still is no authority convincingly assigning religious biblical reading to the realm of private praxis and a literary reading to public, political and secular praxis, we are both struck and stuck with the realization that religion constantly filters into the public domains of thought and discourse (in both Israel and the United States), just as heretic atheism or heterodoxy pervades ostensibly religious domains. The waters are muddy and no acrobatic attempt to jump over this hurdle by way of “corresponding with the text directly” will suffice.8

This same categorical blurring is very apparent in Barak-Erez’s engagement with modern political theory. The book examines biblical models in Leviticus, Judges, and Kings through the lenses of thinkers like John Rawls, whose concept of the “veil of ignorance” is discussed in the context of King Ahasuerus and Haman’s exchange over the question, “What should be done for the man whom the king desires to honor?”;9 Barak-Erez likewise addresses the challenges of cronyism and power transitions, referring to Thomas Hobbes’s discussion in Leviathan of the people’s request that Samuel appoint a king.10

It is difficult not to classify these references as part of Secular Western tradition. But, as scholars have noted, contrary to the conventional view that sees modern political thought of the 17th century as the moment of separation between religion and politics, the Hebrew Bible actually stood at the center of 17th century discussions of sovereignty and the state. It formed the basis for the debate between monarchists and anti-monarchists, and underpinned discussions of the nature of good governance.11 As historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin put it, “what is defined as secularization inherently contains, ipso facto, the theological sting.”12 We are thus presented with an apparent paradox: the turn from the Bible stands at the foundation of the secularization process, and it is impossible to discuss the process of secularization without engaging with the Bible.13

Of course, this is not to suggest that secularism is merely a “front” or that every biblical reading is fundamentally religious. For instance, the conspicuous absence of “God” as a character in much of Barak-Erez’s book strongly indicates a secular hermeneutic. At the same time, concepts like redemption, vengeance, chosen-ness, and even the notion of true justice, all appear in the book’s analysis and are all deeply theological in nature. The secularizing language—encompassing literary, political, poetic, and legal interpretations of the Bible—remains tethered to theological elements, even while it attempts to purify and differentiate among them.14 As modernists, and certainly as critical legal thinkers, we tend to ascribe to the ‘traditional’ readings the characters of social construction while often perceiving the ‘secular’ readings as the natural, rational, politically realistic ones, when in fact secularism is as much socially constructed (or as natural) as the religious disposition ever was. In other words, reading the Bible “as is” can no longer be perceived as an act of Weberian disenchantment by “implying direct access to reality, a stripping away of myth, magic, and the sacred,” as Asad puts it.15

Taking this into account, Biblical Judgments in fact provokes a kind of disruption—a challenge to the enlightened inclination to isolate the sacred from the secular, both in Bible study and in the law. What emerges is a social experience of fluid hybridity, as another contemporary scholar of secularism observed: “The strength of the post-secular argument lies precisely in the possibility of the simultaneous existence of both options, with mobility within the unclassifiable space between religion and secularism.”16

This “unclassifiable space” becomes clearer when comparing American and Israeli legal systems’ engagement with so-called religious content, two case studies Barak-Erez frequently invokes. As is well known, the U.S. Supreme Court opens its sessions with the proclamation, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court”—a custom (currently) unimaginable in Israel’s legal environment. Nor can the Israeli imagination fathom a daily pledge of allegiance “under God” in public schools, explicit divine appeals in presidential oaths, or the prayer that inaugurates every congressional session in the United States. By contrast, Israel’s national anthem and Declaration of Independence primarily reflect the founders’ deep secular inclinations, with the single ambiguous reference to the “Rock of Israel” in the Declaration hinting that some divine presence might be involved in the project.17 At the same time, it mentions the “eternal Book of Books,” and attributes its authorship to “the Jewish people.” Moreover, Israeli legislation and court rulings are so thoroughly imbued with biblical references, interpretations, and analogies that they would make proponents of a strict view of the American Establishment Clause break out in a cold sweat.

Which of these legal-biblical convergences is religious and which is secular? Is the daily pledge of allegiance to God Almighty, as one U.S. Judge put it, “[a] fundamentally patriotic exercise, not a religious one”?18 Or consider the following passage, by Justice Barak-Erez herself, from a recent 2024 Israeli case regarding women’s appointment as “Rabbis” to the statutory committee responsible for electing State Rabbis:19

There are three Mitzvot that are time bound [‘she-ha-zeman gerama’] and that women are obligated to follow. The explanation given for this is that “They too were in the same miracle” [i.e., that they too participated in the divine revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai]. We can therefore also say in the case before us: the women who wish to participate in religious services and study Torah are part of the miracle of the renewal of the people of Israel in their land. It is fitting that this also be expressed in the elections committee for State Rabbis.

Significantly, this passage comes as the culmination of Barak-Erez’s decision, following a lengthy overview of various female historical figures from biblical to modern times, worthy of the title “Jewish sages.” This overview is followed by what one might call a novel halakhic analysis of the public role of a rabbi, referring to established halakhic concepts such as “whom the people accepted upon them” or “public consent” and applying them to contemporary Israeli society through combined legal-halakhic tools.20 It is hard to imagine a U.S. Supreme Court ruling crafted in a similar manner. But in Israel, such an encounter is almost trivial and is commonly taken as characteristic of the state’s so-called secular nature.

However, this understanding is changing. The unmediated “return to the Bible”, a motif that once served largely secular-national purposes, is evolving into a predominantly religious practice, especially in military and land-ownership contexts.21 Ironically, while posters proclaiming “an eye for an eye” now appear more frequently in religious neighborhoods, banners highlighting rabbinic teachings such as “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow” are more commonly found in secular areas. The “empty Sabbath feast” installation, still on display in Tel Aviv, is meant to represent the predominantly non-religious, strictly secular population of those abducted to Gaza. One result of this national-to-religious shift is a popular tendency to label acts of aggression or injustice as fundamentally religious, casting Judaism as the root of Israel’s prejudice.22 This view not only overlooks the secular roots of many systemic injustices, it denies the hybridity at Israel’s core, that “unclassifiable space” between religion and secularism.23 Consequently, a contrived hierarchy emerges: as long as the Bible is used for cultural, literary, or secular-national purposes, it is deemed “kosher.” Once employed for religious, halakhic, or utopian objectives, it becomes “dangerous.”

The Bible in itself, of course, is neither dangerous nor kosher. It is a rich repository of various expressions, any of which may be harnessed to varying ends. The biblical text – like all texts – inevitably reflects the interpretive choices of its readers. To be sure, certain “biblio-legal” applications can be detrimental to those whom the ancient norms disfavored. Applying the Hebrew Bible to contemporary political contexts can also undermine modern institutions widely regarded as crucial (such as constitutional human rights or substantive democracy). This danger is magnified by the vast chronological gulf the modern legal thinker is asked to traverse, effectively leaping over three millennia of evolving human thought.

One strategy for handling this problem is to expel the Bible entirely from legal, public discourse, in the manner of French laïcité. Another approach simply dismisses the gap, condemning any selective use of sacred texts as sacrilegious.24 A third path, at once more difficult and more imaginative, is precisely that which Barak-Erez attempts to tread in Biblical Judgments, and this is why her work navigates that unclassifiable space so well. Reading Biblical Judgments uncovers, broadly, two models of justice in the Hebrew Bible. The first condemns racial discrimination (“He married a Cushite woman”), government corruption (“Your rulers are rogues and cronies of thieves”), and ritualistic hypocrisy (“Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood”).27 The second type commands the erasure of Amalek (“blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven”),28 or mandates the destruction of entire populations (“Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them”).29

Barak-Erez’s approach does not deny, obscure or overlook this duality. Rather, in each case, she makes an informed conscionable choice. The real issue thus becomes not whether her perspective emerges directly from the pure biblical text or through a set of either modern or traditional filters, but rather how one deals with the residue of violence that lingers wherever any type of ‘justice’ is applied, biblical or otherwise.

Driving the post-secular point home, the potential for violence in evoking a text such as the Bible—particularly in the legal context—cannot be defined simply as either ‘religious’ or ‘secular.’ A liberal-secular interpretation offers no guarantee against violence, nor can a secular doing away with the Bible ensure it.30 Conversely, “love thy neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and “you shall not allow a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18) are both religious mandates. In other words, biblical cherry-picking is a practice employed by all sides and across ideological spectrums. Barak-Erez’s work joins in the cherry-picking in a very deliberate way. Perhaps the main recurring theme to which the book returns again and again is the prophetic critique of government. In that tradition, a moral conscience—even under threat of personal risk and at moments of despair and isolation—calls power to account. Consequently, contrary to the book’s self-depiction, Biblical Judgments goes beyond merely a contemplative work, “an invitation to think about legal questions in a way that allows the biblical text to shed light on modern law and vice versa”.31 It functions as an ethical guide, compelling us—indeed—to arrive at the better biblical judgment.

1 Biblical Judgments, 18-20. All translations from Hebrew sources are my own, NP.
2 Biblical Judgments, 113-114; see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2002).
3 Projections of Israel Population until 2065 (Press Release No. 141/2017), Israel Central Bureau of Statistics(2017); Marc Tracy, Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish? NYT (Jan. 14, 2024)https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/us/israel-jewish-america-diasporism.html
4 See Chana Spiegel (Tunik), “Healing the Charedi Inferiority Complex,” Tzarich Iyun: Charedi Thought and Ideas (Feb., 2023) https://iyun.org.il/en/sedersheni/healing-the-charedi-inferiority-complex/.
5 “This book aspires to go back to the [biblical] text…in contrast to what has been the traditional focus of Jewish law”; “[T]he analysis corresponds directly with the text, usually without referring to its traditional interpretations or earlier readings”; “I focus on the legal and jurisprudential aspects of the narratives… which are not at the center of their traditional readings.” (Biblical Judgments, 2-5).
6 Id, 3.
7 Talal Asad, Formations of The Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2003), 8-9.
8 Supra, note 5.
9 Biblical Judgments, 24-25.
10 Id, 50, especially note 161.
11 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Mishna Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture (Van Leer Institute Press, 2022) (Hebrew), 64: “It seems undeniable that political philosophy, as shaped in the 17th century, is theological in nature, with Scripture at its core;” see also Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Harvard University Press, 2010); Adrien Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
12 Raz-Krakotzkin, supra. This “sting” being, unequivocally, Christian.
13 Id.
14 Compare John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Blackwell, 1990)
15 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 13.
16 Yehuda Shenhav, “Invitation to A Post-Secular Outline for the Study of Israeli Society,” Secularism and Secularity: Interdisciplinary Studies (Y. Fisher ed., 2015) 139, 154 (Hebrew).
17 Yoram Shachar, “The Early Draft of the Declaration of Independence,” 26(2) Iyunei Mishpat (2002), 523(Hebrew).
18 Doe v. Acton-Boxborough Regional School District, 468 Mass. 64 - Mass: Supreme Judicial Court 2014.
19 HJC 7583/22 The Ruth and Emanuel Rakman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University v. The Chief Rabbis of Israel (January 2024).
20 “In a deeper sense, this reflects the Jewish-law tradition of appointing a rabbi ‘whom the people accepted upon them’ [she-kiblu ha-kahal ‘aleihem, quoting Shulkhan ‘Aruch, Yoreh De‘ah, Hilkhot Melamdim, 245, 22]… it was not for nothing that Rabbi Dichovski referred to “public consent” [haskamat ha-tsibur] and suggested that rabbis be elected by two forums… Gdoley Torah… and public figures.”
21 For a similar process in the context of the prohibition on pig consumption see Daphne Barak-Erez, Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion and Culture in Israel (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). See also Anita Shapira, “The Bible and Israeli Identity,” 28(1) AJS Review (2004), 11; Ruth Calderon, “A Biblical Israeli or a Talmudic Israeli,” From the Margins to the Fore? Religious Zionism and Israeli Society (Yair Sheleg ed., 2019), 495 (Hebrew). There are lower rates of Bible study in secular schools. See Yairah Amit, Rise and Fall of the Bible’s Empire in Israeli Education: the 2003 Syllabus: Retrospect and Prospect (Israel: Reaches, 2010) (Hebrew).
22 This is a common refrain within Israeli society. Progressive (mainly American) Judaism tends to “blame” Jewish nationalism, not religion, for the troubles of racism and Jewish supremacy.
23 See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Religion and Nationalism in the Jewish and Zionist Context,” When Politics Are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Nadim N. Rouhana et al. eds., 2021), 33.
24 “Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it” (Deut. 4:2); “Do not turn aside from what they tell you, to the right or to the left” (Deut. 17:11).
27 Numbers 12:1 (addressed in Biblical Judgments, 135-7); Isaiah 1:23 (Biblical Judgments 32-4, 256-7); Isaiah 1: 15, respectively
28 Deuteronomy 25:17-19.
29 Deuteronomy 25:17-19; 20:16, respectively. As a general concept, this is addressed in Biblical Judgments in various places, see mainly 79-82, 96-97.
30 Asad, Formation of the Secular,20, on the violence of the secular state: “A secular state does not provide guarantees for tolerance; it operates different structures of aspirations and fears. Law and justice never aim to eliminate violence, as their purpose is to regulate it.”
31 Biblical Judgments, 3.

Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate by Yosie Levine

Reviewed by: Emmanuel Bloch, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

Among modern Ashkenazi rabbis, few shine as brightly as Ḥakham Tsevi Ashkenazi (1658-1718).* Active during a pivotal period in European history, he left a profound mark on the Jewish life of his time. He participated in the debates of his era, and his communal decisions and halakhic responsa played a crucial role in shaping Jewish responses to the new challenges of the times, contributing in a broad sense to the emergence of Jewish modernity in Ashkenazi lands.

Ḥakham Tsevi was widely recognized during his lifetime as a leading figure, and his legacy continues to shape Jewish life to this day. Yet, until recently, a comprehensive intellectual biography that fully encompassed the breadth of his contributions—especially in his principal domain of Jewish law (halakhah)—had been sorely lacking. This lacuna has now been admirably filled by Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine, whose scholarly study, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate (Liverpool University Press, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2024), stands as an essential contribution to the fields of Jewish law and rabbinic history.

Levine's remarkable ability to reconstruct the historical dynamics of Ḥakham Tsevi’s Amsterdam community and the interpersonal conflicts he examines with a temporal distance of three centuries is deeply impressive. At the same time, this reviewer must confess a degree of ambivalence about the work’s framing. Precisely because of the author’s evident talent, I was left yearning for an academic framework free of the constraints of disciplinary paradigms that fail to accommodate the unique character and methodologies of halakhah. These two observations, the first pertaining to the work itself and the second to the broader disciplinary lens, frame the two sections of analysis below.

The book contains seven chapters, each examining a different aspect of Ḥakham Tsevi’s life and work. Following a biographical chapter outlining the main events of Ḥakham Tsevi’s life, Chapter Two shifts focus to the expansive epistolary network that crystallized Ḥakham Tsevi’s role as a prominent halakhic authority. The development of improved communication infrastructures throughout Europe, but particularly evident in port cities, enabled a remarkable intensification of exchanges between halakhic inquirers and respondents.

Like many of his contemporaries, Ḥakham Tsevi actively engaged in this newly expanded epistolary halakhic discourse. Levine examines four responsa that illustrate the mechanisms through which legal queries were submitted and rulings issued. These case studies reveal a significant disjunction between the adjudication of halakhic questions and the practical implementation of their resolutions. Rather than delivering conclusive judgments, the legal decisor had to navigate a highly fraught terrain. Local contexts to evolve into intricate and prolonged disputes.

Chapter Three contrasts Ḥakham Tsevi’s positive attitude toward the study of the Mishnah with his critical stance on the widespread engagement with Kabbalah. Concerned about Sabbatean misuse of esoteric traditions, he insisted on restricting Kabbalah to an initiated elite. For those drawn to mysticism, he advocated a foundation in the normative, exoteric teachings of rabbinic Judaism: the Mishnah. Chapter Four examines the contested nature of rabbinic authority in the early eighteenth century, focusing on the challenges Ḥakham Tsevi faced: lingering Sabbateanism, religious laxity, assertive lay leaders, and influential non-elite rabbis. As Levine notes, his responses varied—ranging from active confrontation to strategic retreat—depending on the specific context and the challenge.

In Chapter Five, Levine investigates the social, cultural and religious divides between Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities in eighteenth-century port cities, where they often lived in close proximity, while each remained fiercely committed to preserving its distinct traditions. Unlike many of his peers, Ḥakham Tsevi sought to bridge these divides—questioning certain Ashkenazi practices and adopting elements of the Sephardic tradition. Despite his own identity, Ḥakham Tsevi exhibited a critical stance toward established Ashkenazi customs, embracing a more integrative and eclectic approach to religious identity. Chapter Six turns to a local controversy that rapidly escalated into a broader regional crisis. In 1713, Ḥakham Tsevi joined Rabbi Moses Hagiz in confronting Neḥemiah Ḥayon, a prominent Sabbatean newly arrived in Amsterdam. Until then, Sabbateans had largely benefited from rabbinic silence. The Ḥayon affair marked a turning point, prompting Sabbateans to retreat from public expression and giving rabbis a model for opposing heresy. It also ultimately led to Ḥakham Tsevi’s departure from Amsterdam, and had enduring consequences for Sabbateans and their opponents, as well as for those who previously suspended between tacit disapproval and quiet endorsement.

In the concluding chapter, Levine explores the enduring intellectual legacy of Ḥakham Tsevi and the diverse ways moderns have reinterpreted his halakhic writings. In recent decades, scholars discussing the sanctity of life conceived outside traditional means have invoked his responsum on the golem, an artificially created humanoid; his ruling on pilgrims has become central to debates on maintaining Diasporan customs in the Land of Israel; his analysis of a chicken without a heart is important to current debates on brain death and organ donation. Three centuries after his death, Ḥakham Tsevi’s jurisprudence continues to shape the way observant Jews engage with pressing ethical and legal questions.

I would like to suggest that the academic study of Jewish law is plagued by certain historiographical and scholarly challenges. In my view, these challenges resonate with core concerns articulated by feminist and postcolonial critiques of knowledge production and historical methodology. In what follows, I briefly outline the main contours of these critiques and demonstrate how their underlying dynamics surface at various points in Levine’s work.

Joan Kelly, a prominent American historian of the Italian Renaissance, famously contended that questions of gender and interpretation of gendered texts fundamentally disrupt conventional historical periodization, which is typically grounded in male-centered experiences. Kelly questioned the assumption that major historical transformations—the Renaissance or the advent of modernity—benefited or even included women as they did men. Her critique is foundational to feminist historiography, advancing the argument that women's history cannot merely be integrated into existing narratives, but demands a reexamination of the very frameworks through which history is conceptualized. From Kelly’s perspective, when one centers women's experiences, traditional temporal divisions—such as those between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modernity—lose coherence as markers of historical progress.1Echoing similar concerns, postcolonial scholars have critically examined historiographical terms for privileging Eurocentric developments and marginalizing alternative historical trajectories and periodization. For example, Kathleen Davis has demonstrated that the concept of the "Middle Ages" functions not merely as a temporal label but as a political tool rooted in Eurocentric narratives of progress.2

The academic study of Jewish legal texts, in my view, offers comparable challenges. Historical analyses tend to overlook the religious tradition and the logic of its internal development. And the problems are not limited to historiography. As some scholars have already noted, the field remains fragmented across disciplinary boundaries—history, philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, etc.—none of which aligns, either methodologically or conceptually, with the internal logic and discursive structures of halakhic reasoning.3

In a slightly different, related context, Shai Lavi has incisively articulated the complexities and tensions inherent in imposing a conceptual framework onto an object of study that is, in whole or in part, foreign to it.4

In matters of theory and methods, [this approach] subordinates legal scholarship to other disciplines like economics, political science, history, sociology, statistics, and literature. These disciplines provide the methods of analysis and the theory, while law becomes merely the subject of investigation. Law, to use a morbid metaphor, is akin to a patient who has donated her body to science. Doctors from different disciplines assemble around the bed and hover over her body to study it using the most advanced tools at their disposal. The corpse is still warm, but experimentation has already begun. What would law, if it were unexpectedly to awake, say back to the scientists surrounding it?

Nuance is important here, and these critical observations should not be overstated. Undoubtedly, the use of tools drawn from the humanities has, over the past few decades, facilitated a remarkable flourishing of academically rigorous scholarship about halakhah unprecedented in scope and depth. Still, the incorporation of Jewish law into interpretive paradigms shaped in external, often secular or non-Jewish, intellectual traditions has entailed certain costs—costs that have not always been explicitly acknowledged or fully understood.

Let us now return to Yosie Levine’s remarkable book, which clearly adopted a historiographical framework to study a prominent halakhist. This orientation is signaled from the outset, with a title that situates the work squarely within a historical paradigm. This historiographical approach is reinforced throughout—from the acknowledgments crediting historians, to the method that explains its subject’s halakhic positions in light of broad sociohistorical dynamics, to the book’s concluding reflections, which briefly trace Ḥakham Tsevi’s influence on subsequent developments in halakhic discourse. However, categories such as "early modernity" are culturally and historically contingent constructs. They are shaped by referring to specific events, social transformations, and conceptual frameworks whose relevance to rabbinic literature is frequently peripheral or tangential and, in some cases, altogether inapplicable. In fact, in traditional discourse, a figure such as Ḥakham Tsevi is not identified as an “early modern rabbi,” but rather as an aḥaron (a late as opposed to an early authority, or rishon).5

This kind of disciplinary reappropriation—from halakhic reasoning to historical analysis—functions a bit like a Procrustean bed. Some features of the object of study risk being overemphasized well beyond their analytical value, such as when Levine attempts to reconstruct the sociocultural context of one of Ḥakham Tsevi’s decisions, although that context is of limited relevance.6Other aspects can fall entirely by the wayside. This is particularly evident in the treatment of the jurisprudential dimensions of the decisor’s or posek’s interpretive and legal creativity. Consider, for instance, the question of the legal status of custom (minhag), a fundamentally jurisprudential issue of considerable importance for a posek of Ḥakham Tsevi’s stature, yet one whose relevance to broader historical developments is not immediately apparent. To his credit, Levine demonstrates an awareness of this methodological risk and addresses this topic in a few densely informative pages.7Yet the treatment feels somewhat tangential to the main thrust of the book. The entire question of Ḥakham Tsevi’s legal sources and hermeneutical approach (including his incorporation of aggadic material and biblical verses into halakhic argumentation8) would have benefited from a more sustained and systematically integrated discussion. Other pertinent topics are simply omitted, presumably because they do not align with the disciplinary lens adopted in the book. One example is the changing nature of rabbinic authority. Scholars have argued that it underwent a significant shift from a predominantly institutional model to one grounded increasingly in personal charisma, piety, and erudition, an evolution shaped in part by technological and ideological developments.9 An exploration in the fourth chapter of how Ḥakham Tsevi fits into this broader transformation would have offered valuable insight.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate that my critique is not primarily directed at the contributions of certain academic disciplines to the study of halakhah, but rather at our uncritical acceptance of the distortions and omissions they inevitably produce. Are alternative approaches conceivable?

One possibility consists in a fundamental shift in perspective on the academic study of Jewish law. While a comprehensive exploration exceeds the scope of this essay, I will briefly sketch two core features that, in my view, are essential to such a reorientation. First, future research should adopt a bottom-up approach. It should move away from the prevailing top-down methodology in favor of one that positions halakhah as the central object of inquiry. In other words, instead of viewing Jewish law as a passive foundation upon which external theoretical frameworks are superimposed, this perspective would treat halakhah as the generative starting point from which analytical categories and interpretive frameworks are derived.

Second, this alternative approach (requiring methodological tools tailored to the specific questions posed, and that those questions remain responsive to the phenomenon under investigation) must by its very nature be multidisciplinary. Thus, it would draw selectively on explanatory paradigms from various disciplines, depending on the nature of the questions asked, the sources under consideration, and the expertise brought to bear.

This is an important discussion. Jewish law has historically served as a central framework for the religious, moral, and practical expression of Jewish identity. As a system of norms governing Jewish life, it often reflected the core values and perceptions of the Jewish people. A central guiding force through which Jews engaged with the world, halakhah dictated what was permissible and prohibited, shaped the Jews’ relationships with others, and defined their worldview. It provided a pragmatic, present-oriented framework, limiting utopian aspirations and focusing on improving life in the here and now. Halakhah, in other words, is sui generis. It deserves to be studied on its own terms.

In the meantime, Yosie Levine's work represents an admirable contribution that will undoubtedly draw readers back time and again, providing new perspectives on the life and scholarship of Ḥakham Tsevi—a rabbi from the early modern era, certainly; yet foremost, a distinguished posek whose rulings continue to influence Jewish thought and practice today.

* The author gratefully acknowledges Beth A. Berkowitz and Miryam Segal for their valuable feedback andinsightful edits on earlier drafts of this review.
1 Joan B. Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984):19-50.
2 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
3 For a good summary, see Avi Sagi, “Reflections on the Challenges Confronting the Philosophy of Halakha,” in *The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy*, vol. 2 (2012), pp. 499–518.
4 Shai Lavi, “Turning the Tables on Law and: A Jurisprudential Inquiry into Contemporary Legal Theory,” *Cornell Law Review*, vol. 96 (2011), pp. 811–812. Note that Lavi’s analysis does not pertain to halakhah but to the scholarly movement in contemporary legal studies commonly referred to as the “Law and…” approach.
5 Scholars may quibble over what exactly distinguishes the period of the rishonim (early authorities) from that of the aḥaronim (later authorities), but all approaches converge to emphasize the centrality of the publication of the Shulḥan Arukh by Rabbi Yosef Karo (1563), accompanied by the glosses of Rabbi Moshe Isserles, and their rapid acceptance in almost all Jewish communities of the time. This development represents a turning point internal to the rabbinic tradition itself. It is worth noting that the term aḥaron is neither defined in the book’s glossary (p. 211) nor explicitly employed by Levine in the main body of the text, as far as I can tell.
6 Levine, Ḥakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, p. 193.
7 Levine, Ḥakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, p. 131-137
8 See for instance Levine, Ḥakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, p. 189-190
9 Shaul Stampfer, “Tsmihata shel Tofa‘at ha-Gedolim,” in Benjamin Brown and Nissim Leon (eds.), *ha-Gedolim – Ishim she‘Itsvu et Pnei ha-Yahadut ha-Haredit be-Yisrael* (Jerusalem: Van Leer / Magnes, 2017), pp. 11–20.

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