Can emotions be historicized? Are they universal and biologically determined or socially determined, culturally dependent and varying through history? What is the role of emotions and their changing character in the course of history? Is there a history of emotions just as there is a history of ideas, of manners, of political institutions or social movements? More specifically, to what extent can love, fear or hate be historicized? Do they change through history, and if so, in what senses? Is it in the objects they relate to? (Fear of what? Hate – towards whom?) In the means and legitimacy of expressing them? In the ways they are institutionalized (families, churches, political parties)? Can emotions themselves be separated from these social and cultural means of expressing and legitimizing them?

Though some historians have posed these questions earlier, it is only recently, in the 1970s and especially since the early 1980s, that historians have begun to address these questions directly. Interestingly enough, the early 1980s were also the time when psychologists, especially social psychologists, became increasingly aware not only of the issues of affects and emotions in general, but of their historical dimension, namely their possibly changing nature, as well.

Our group will try to deal with some of these questions, focusing mostly on the late medieval and early modern period, both in Christian Europe and in Jewish communities in Europe at that time. The comparison between Jewish and Christian societies will add an important dimension to the research.

 

Semantics, the study of semantic competence, is that part of linguistic theory that deals with the interpretation of natural language expressions. Semantics is a theory of the faculty of native speakers to interpret their language.

Semantic competence is a highly structured system, and research in semantics over the last twenty years has made progress in trying to uncover this structure and its general principles. The foundational principles of semantic theory, first formulated a century ago by the German mathematician and philosopher of language Frege, are aboutness and compositionality. Aboutness means that semantics studies the relations between linguistics expressions and the world as structured by our cognitive system, and, as part of this, the context of use for each expression. Compositionality means that the semantic interpretation of a complex expression – for example, a sentence – is determined by interpretation of its parts and by the operations that put those parts together. While semantics is popularly thought of as the study of the meanings of words, in fact semantic theory mostly focuses on the semantic operations that combine words into sentences and sentences into discourse.

In the last fifteen years, five areas of research have been exceptionally prominent. First, with the advent of the theory of discourse representation (initiated by Hans Kamp and Irene Heim), much work has been done on quantificational and anaphoric phenomena beyond the sentence level. Simultaneously, Mats Rooth initiated the systematic study of the semantic effects of the discourse notion of focus, and Martin Stokhof and Jeroen Groenendijk developed the study of the semantics of questions. Second, the theory of generalized quantifiers (initiated by Jon Barwise, Robin Cooper and Edward Keenan) has uncovered a wealth of systematic constraints in the determiner system of natural language. Third, the theory of singular and plural individuals (initiated by Godehard Link) has considerably deepened our understanding of the semantics of plurality, in particular with respect to distributive, collective and cumulative interpretations of noun phrases. The theory of kinds developed by Gregory Carlson has contributed to the understanding of the semantics of mass terms and other kind-denoting expressions. Fourth, the theory of events (originating in the work of Donald Davidson in the sixties) has simulated research on a variety of topics, in particular in the study of aspect, such as the semantics of the progressive and perfective. Fifth, theory of Logical Form, initiated by the work of Noam Chomsky, has contributed to research on the syntax-semantics interface.

Most importantly, these areas do not develop in isolation from each other: cross-fertilization between them has been, and continues to be highly successful and promising. Our group will concentrate precisely on the areas of cross-fertilization.

 

During the nineteenth century, Ashkenazi Jewish society in Europe underwent a radical transformation. Until this point, the Jews had constituted a religious-national minority, divided into local communities with more or less homogenous social and religious institutions. Now, large sectors of the Jewish public reorganized themselves into new social frameworks and divided into religious streams. The beginnings of this process can be seen already in the second half of the eighteenth century with the rise of Hasidism, but it was only during the next hundred years that the trend became more institutionalized and variegated. The main currents that crystallized included Reform, Orthodox and Conservative Judaism. Each current encompassed sub-groups which resulted from the various social and historical contexts in which these streams developed. The process included internal splits and competition as well as independent developments within each movement. Beginning in Germany at the start of the nineteenth century, the phenomenon spread to Bohemia, Hungary, England and the United States, reaching Eastern Europe toward the end of the century.

Whereas the Reform and Conservative movements have basked in the historiographical limelight for decades, Orthodoxy has received serious attention as a subject worthy of historical research only during the last twenty years. The late Prof. Jacob Katz defined the phenomenon and encouraged his students to investigate it. In his opinion, Jewish Orthodoxy emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a response to the challenges of modernity in general, and to the other Jewish religious currents in particular. The strengthening of Orthodoxy in recent years has stimulated research into its historical roots.

Over the years, Orthodoxy itself evolved and became more diversified in its responses to the challenges presented by other Jewish religious trends (Reform and Positive-Historical Judaism in Germany, Neologism in Hungary) and Jewish social movements, especially in Eastern Europe (Zionism and Jewish Socialism). Zionism added a new aspect to the problem of modernity: the question of how to relate to Zionist activity in the Land of Israel and specifically whether to cooperate with “errant” Jews in this regard. In addition, Zionism invested messianic aspirations with new meaning. At the same time, Orthodoxy was essentially a reaction to the secularization of Jewish society, a subject which has not yet been sufficiently analysed and evaluated in historical research.

 

The encounter between "barbarian" conquerors with sedentary peoples possessing sophisticated cultural and political traditions is one of profound historical importance. The interaction has resulted in great cultural, religious, political, linguistic and demographic changes, in which inter alia whole previously distinct groups can disappear, not so much through physical destruction, but rather through assimilation and absorption. One such meeting of enormous dimensions was that of the Roman world with the various Germanic invaders. Another would be that of the Byzantine and Persian territories overrun by the Arab Muslim armies of the 7th century. While there is still much debate among historians about the exact nature of these encounters, there is no doubt that the resulting influence was not in one direction, but both sides were greatly affected by this experience. It is also clear that these meetings left an indelible impact on the further development of these two regions.

A different set of encounters is that of the nomadic peoples of the Eurasian steppe with their sedentary neighbours in the later Middle Ages, i.e. the Turkish and Mongol invasions of the Middle East in the 11th-14th centuries and the Khitan, Jurchen and Mongol invasions of China in the late 10th to mid-14th centuries. In the aftermath of all these instances, nomadic elites established long-term control over large swathes of the territory of sedentary society. Our research group seeks to examine the effects of this encounter in a comparative way, diachronically in the same territory and synchronically between the Islamic Middle East and China.

 

This research group will explore the following topics:

Infinite groups:
- Branch groups and automata groups, their subgroups, representations, presentations, and subgroup growth
- Zeta functions of nilpotent groups
- Rigid groups
- Redidual properties of the modular group

Finite groups:
- Asymptotic aspects of finite simple groups, and probabilistic aspects in particular
- Generation, and random generation, of finite simple groups
- Algorithms for matrix groups

 

Our group will examine the mechanisms by which cultural and religious canons were formed, functioned and went through radical transformations in various societies of the ancient world. We hope that a better understanding of these processes, arising from such juxtaposing of diverse cultural models of canonization, has shed a new light upon the fundamental structures of religious and cultural canons adopted in different civilizations.

Odd as it may appear, there seems to have been no single comparative study of canons. This was not what could be expected at the dawn of the historical scholarship two hundred years ago. When Friedrich August Wolf, with his Prolegomena ad Homerum, opened the era of Homeric scholarship in 1795, he used a model which was being developed at the time for the study of the Old Testament. The fact that the two main constituents of the Western Canon, the ancient Israelite canonical text as represented by the Hebrew Bible, and the ancient Greek canonical text as represented by the Homeric poems, were being studied side by side was seen as only too natural at the time. This fruitful collaboration was interrupted, never to be revived again, in the first half of the 19^th century, when the “discovery” of Sanskrit, instead of stimulating a pluralistic approach to the widening spectrum of ancient civilizations, gave rise to the idea of an Indo-European cultural unity exclusive to the world of the Old Testament and if the ancient Near East in general. To resume the process at the point where it stopped, and thus to supersede the mutual isolation between civilizations of the ancient world which was artificially created thereby, is one of our objectives.

Similarly, the study of the other canonization processes in the ancient world, and in particular in late antiquity, seems to be in need of fresh approaches. While in the last fifty years, since the discoveries of Qumran and Nag Hammadi, dramatic new insights into the canonization processes of these texts have been provided, relatively little has been done in terms of comparison. Moreover, and perhaps

more importantly, very little attention has been paid to the fact that various canonization processes in late antiquity did not develop independently of one another, but are linked in dialectical relationships. The canonization of the Mishna, for instance, should be seen in parallel to that of the contemporary canonization of the New Testament: both were meant to provide a key to the correct understanding of the Old Testament, which both the Jewish and Christian communities claimed as their own.

The main question which brought about the establishment of the research group was the perceived chasm between the “Greek” (and the Latin) and the “Hebrew” (i.e. the Jewish-Christian) traditions. The first is usually perceived to be more “literary” by nature, while the second would be essentially “religious”. We will attempt to develop a coherent and precise language that will permit us to use the same tools in order to analyse together these rather different traditions.

 

The study of Islam has been at the cutting edge of Islamic studies in recent years. The development of Islamic law beyond the Qur’ānic stage, the rise of the schools of law (madhābib) and their geographic spread, the relationship between the rulers and the jurists, the amount of freedom enjoyed by the jurists in the development of the law – all these are being subjected to intensive scrutiny.

An important question is the development of Islamic law from the Qur’ānic layer in early Islamic history, through the books of the 8^th and 9^th centuries, to the great compendia of later periods. It was accepted until recently that the early Muslim jurists derived the law from the Qur’ān and the prophetic tradition (hadith) during the first 250 years of Islamic history by way of individual reasoning. According to this view, the freedom to exercise individual reasoning gradually shrank and the jurists relied more and more on the decisions of the predecessors. These decisions were collected in large compendia and gradually acquired unquestionable authority. At the end of this process, in the 10^th century CE, the right of individual reasoning disappeared totally and Islamic law lost its ability to adapt itself to the changing historical circumstances. If this theory is correct, a book of law written, for instance, in the 12^th century cannot be used as a document reflecting the social and legal situation in the period in which it was written, but rather the legal tradition which prevailed in the 9^th century and has remained stagnant ever since.

Recently, various scholars began to question the validity of this description and to argue that the “gates of individual reasoning” never closed and Islamic law has never lost its flexibility or ability to develop. The study of this question is a challenge for scholars of Islam. Islamic law is perceived as immutable because it is believed to represent the divine will. It therefore stands to reason that later jurists, even if they wanted to introduce changes into the law, invested much effort to present their views as identical with those of their forebears, or, at least, as derived from them. This is the reason why books of law from different periods appear very similar to each other. In order to discern changes which may have occurred in a certain field of law, it is imperative to examine numerous sources from different periods and compare them to the compendia of tradition and law from the 8^th and 9^th centuries. If we learn that Islamic law continued to develop throughout Islamic history, then books of law written in later centuries are of much greater value than that ascribed to them so far: they constitute historical documents which can shed new light not only on the development of law, but also on the social situation of the areas and periods in which these books were written.

This is one of the fields in which we will conduct research. Another is the study of the development of Islamic law in various areas of the Islamic world in different periods, as well as in the differences between the various schools of law on specific issues.

 

 

No problem has so stubbornly accompanied the investigation of Second Temple period Judaism and of early Christianity -- and the nature of the relationship between the two -- as that of "Hellenism". How deeply were both Judaism and Christianity in their formative stages influenced by the larger cultural and religious streams of the Greco-Roman age? To what extent did the phenomenon of "Hellenism" -- in its varied literary, social and political expression -- shape the defining characteristics of Jewish and Christian belief and practice in the period between Alexander and Constantine? What role did the medium of the Greek language and of Hellenistic cultural forms play in the translation of ideas and allegiances from Judaism to Christianity during the early centuries of the Common Era?

Our group will focus on precisely this problem and these questions, addressing the pendular tendency of modern scholarship to wholeheartedly affirm or passionately deny the hellenization of early Judaism and Christianity. The general orientation of recent research has been toward the Palestinian Jewish background of the early Church, with a clear proclivity for sources preserved in either Hebrew or Aramaic. In light of this trend, we will attempt to reassess the role of Greek-speaking, Hellenistic Judaism as a fertile context for Christian origins.

 

The group on molecular medicine focused on the role of the new developments in molecular biology and biochemistry in the revolution in medicine which is now taking place. These new developments, including the publication of the human genome, create new opportunities for the improvement of human health. The group's work will concentrate on the ramifications of these technological revolutions for new approaches to the treatment of various cancers and other diseases in which cellular communications fail. 

The group will focus primarily on the molecular mechanisms of cell signaling, that is, how cells communicate between themselves and how cells transmit information into the cell. The group will also explore ways to remedy the aberrations in these communication networks which occur in the course of disease. The knowledge of how cell communication works will allow the development of novel therapies.

 

Our group originated in the conviction that a community's expectations of the end constitute a vital sign -- perhaps one of its most potent agents of social change -- and that the continuing role of religious tradition in nourishing those beliefs warrants scholarly attention. We took our point of departure from the premise that the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from late antiquity until the end of the Middle Ages affords a singularly instructive context for the study of eschatology and its socio-cultural significance. This period is proverbially known as the "age of faith" in the annals of Western and Mediterranean civilization, when membership in society was defined first and foremost by one's religious affiliation, and when the prophetic ideals pervading the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran undergirded virtually all expressions of cultural creativity. Talmudic and medieval Jews, perennially obsessed with their displacement in galut, diaspora, cultivated numerous permutations of the messianic idea as a basis for persevering in Christian and Muslim societies; as Gershom Scholem aptly noted, they lived their lives largely "in deferment", finding fulfillment in hope for the future rather than in the realities of the present.

Eschatological creativity, however, was not limited to an alienated Jewish minority. Apocalyptic literature and spirituality flowered in patristic and medieval Christianity, among the empowered and the orthodox who identified with the prevailing establishments, as well as among the disenchanted who could not find a satisfying niche in prevailing social structures and institutions. Though often overlooked in recent scholarship, Muslim apocalyptic proved consequential, as well, and eschatological differences highlighted the rift between Sunni and Shi'ite communities. In the worldview shared by the Jews with the Christian and Muslim majorities around them, eschatology provided the basis for a comprehensive reading of history; in its longing for future, it imbued both past and present with significance. So deeply embedded was messianic expectation in the fabric of medieval experience that cultural historian Georges Duby, in his provocative book, An 1000, An 2000, 1995, has sought to unravel our modern premillennial predicament in the terms of its medieval precedents.

Our research will study the messianic expectations of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Europe and the Middle East from the conversion of Constantine to the Sabbatean messianic movement (4th-17th centuries). While the modern study of eschatology and millennialism has progressed fruitfully within numerous academic disciplines, our group will provide a forum for historical research and conversation, incorporating historians of religion, ideas, and art.

 

The aim of our research group is to analyze new trends in the study of American and Israeli Jewry. This task will involve the documentation and intepretation of recent emerging trends in how people choose to express Jewish life and affiliate with other Jews, as well as thinking about familiar forms of Jewish diversity in new ways. We will explore the processes of historical development, as well as dynamic negotiation and choices made by Jews as individuals and as groups in forming the striking range of forms that characterize contemporary Jewish "belonging".

 

Our research group will explore the following topics:

• The religious aspects of legal systems.
• Conceptions of secularism, the specificity of Indian secularism, and the extent to which secularism might be considered a Western, Christian doctrine.
• Global justice, and caution in the attempts to extend the principles of distributive justice to the global sphere.
• Establishing universal features of criminal law that would be applied in the International Criminal Court and other international tribunals.
• Issues of political import and relevance to Israeli society.
• The relations between values and rights in the constitutional context.
• An analysis of the later drafts of the Israeli Declaration of Independence, drafted over the months April and May of 1948.

 

It is quite amazing that no proper history exists for Sanskrit belles lettres, one of the world's richest and longest literary traditions. The scholarship of the last two and a half centuries yielded, for the most part, a vast body of data on authors and their putative dates. But it failed to produce a narrative explaining developments in their poetic practice and, quite often, denied outright the very possibility of change. Indeed, the number of serious and analytical essays on representative works from the Sanskritic canon is unbelievably small. The main purpose of our research group is to begin to emend this state of affairs and produce a history of Sanskrit literature, one that, contrary to the antihistorical notion of it as monolithic and immune to change, would concentrate on innovations and turning points.

 

The group's work will concentrate on compiling a representative corpus of texts from the various geographical areas of northern and central Israel -- namely, Upper and Lower Galilee, the northern coast, the Jordan Valley, Emeq Yizree, the Carmel Mount and Carmel coast, the Triangle, Jaffa, and the Central Plains -- as well as from the Samaritans and the rural population around Jerusalem.