Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler, eds. Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 368 pages. Reviewed by Eliezer Segal (University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta) This rich volume originated in a research group that was hosted in 2012 to 2013 by the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies on the theme “Institutionalization, Innovation, and Conflict in 13th-Century Judaism: A Comparative View.” The results of that rather amorphous-sounding project are consolidated here into a collection of studies that, in addition to their value as exam- inations of specific historical phenomena, rep- resent a coherent argument for an approach to the study of this fascinating era in European intellectual history. While the concept of “the long thirteenth century” (beginning somewhat earlier and end- ing later than its precise mathematical dates) is one that was formulated for other historical con- texts (notably, as far as I am aware, for English economic history), it is eminently suitable for the study of medieval Judaism. The designated time frame presents us with a dazzling constellation of religious, social, literary, and political expres- sions of Jewish life and thought as they achieved prominence in assorted localities and in relation- ship to various adjacent Muslim and Christian societies. Formulations of Judaism that had taken shape during previous centuries—such as Maimonides’s synthesis of Aristotelian ratio- nalism, the esoteric hermeneutic of Kabbalah, the Ashkenazic Pietistic ethos, literal scriptural exegesis or the dialectical Talmud analysis of the Tosafot—were now establishing themselves as authentic but competing options for Jewish reli- gious self-definition. The professed policies of the rival religions toward one another were not necessarily consistent with the actual dealings between members of the respective communities or even among their leaders, and these were all subject to dynamic changes. As the editors argue articulately in the introductory chapter, their use of the “entanglement” metaphor in the volume’s title was a very carefully considered choice that underscores the complexity of the patterns that need to be discerned and the methodological diversity that must be applied in order to obtain an accurate understanding of the developments being described. The chapters in this volume are arranged according to three primary modes of “entan- gled” interrelationships: between intellectual communities, between secular and religious authorities, and the process of translation or transmission between cultural units. Each of the chapters must be assessed on its own merits, a task that would exceed the space allowed for this review, even if the reviewer could actually claim competence in all the scholarly disciplines that are requisite for a responsible assessment. Indeed, the principal theme that under- lies all these studies is the crucial necessity of approaching the facts from diverse perspectives. Of course, scholarship has long since ceased to perceive the evolution of Jewish religious insti- tutions and ideas either as uniform processes DOI | 10.26613/sjhss/1.2.24 SJHSS 2018