This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.

The description of the wilderness Tabernacle (melekhet ha-mishkan) in Exodus exerted a lasting impact on ancient Jewish culture, evidenced by other texts influenced by its description in Exodus: the description of Solomon's temple (I Kings 6-7), the sanctuary described in the Temple Scroll (cols. 3-13), the Eupolemus fragments, and Josephus. Philo of Alexandria first interprets the Tabernacle account in the Greek tradition of allegory wherein the tabernacle represents an archetype of the universe, that physical entity most approximating the divine abode. Apocalyptic literature frequently presents a celestial sanctuary, but the Temple rather than the Tabernacle is often the paradigm. Origen represents a typical patristic view where the tabernacle description is read completely figuratively. Tannaitic, amoraic, and geonic literature, on the other hand, provides scattered remarks on and explanations of biblical passages but no sustained exegesis of the tabernacle description. Baraita de-Melekhet ha-Mishkan presents the only systematic rabbinic exegesis of the tabernacle account to come from late antiquity or the Middle Ages. In contrast to Philo, the Church fathers, and the aggadic midrashim, this baraita assumes that the tabernacle and its furnishings need explanation as historical objects. The technology of construction, the calculation of measurements, and the delineation of architectural forms concern the framers of this document. Kirschner provides 150 pages of introductory analysis on this document's genre, structure, language, origin, date, and textual criticism before providing a critical edition with apparatus. Following the critical edition can be found Kirschner's English translation, Genizah transcriptions, plates, an appendix of biblical citations within the baraita and one for biblical and postbiblical sources in general, bibliography, and general index.

Emil Schürer's Geschichte des judischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, originally published in German between 1874 and 1909 and in English between 1885 and 1891, is a critical presentation of Jewish history, institutions, and literature from 175 B.C. to A.D. 135. It has rendered invaluable services to scholars for nearly a century. The present work offers a fresh translation and a revision of the entire subject-matter. The bibliographies have been rejuvenated and supplemented; the sources are presented according to the latest scholarly editions; and all the new archaeological, epigraphical, numismatic and literary evidence, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bar Kokhba documents, has been introduced into the survey. Account has also been taken of the progress in historical research, both in the classical and Jewish fields. This work reminds students of the profound debt owed to nineteenth-century learning, setting it within a wider framework of contemporary knowledge, and provides a foundation on which future historians of Judaism in the age of Jesus may build.