Melilah is an interdisciplinary journal concerned with Jewish law, history, literature, religion, culture and thought in the ancient, medieval and modern eras. It was launched in 2004 by Bernard Jackson and Ephraim Nissan under the auspices of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester as the New Series of the journal of the same name founded by Edward Robertson and Meir Wallenstein, published in Hebrew by Manchester University Press from 1944 to 1955. Five substantial volumes, each of around two hundred pages, were produced before the series was discontinued. In his editorial foreword to the first edition, Robertson explained that Melilah had been established to promote Jewish scholarship in the face of the threat posed by the War and its aftermath. The title of the journal refers to the ears of corn that are plucked to rub in the hands before the grains can be eaten (Deut. 23:25).

Contents

This supplementary volume of Melilah (Normative Judaism? Jews, Judaism and Jewish Identity: The Proceedings of the British Association for Jewish Studies 2008) is a collection of short case studies considers the issue of normatively in Judaism and Jewish identity. The questions of how and why certain aspects of Jewish life and thought come to be regarded as authoritative or normative, rather than inauthentic or marginal, have been and continue to be contentious ones. The approach adopted here is to allow distinct case studies, mainly but not exclusively from the modern period, to speak for themselves. Topics include the philosopher Moses Maimonides, the composer Felix Mendelssohn, the self-perception of communal leadership in Manchester during the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, a comparison of unpublished sermons by a British Orthodox and a British Reform Rabbi during the First World War, Orthodox rabbinic debate about war in general, representations of Jews in photographic exhibitions, the idea of Jewish music, and the academic study of Judaism itself.