Response

This response to the papers “The Three Spaces City – Hebraic Urban Architype and Its Manifestation as Eruv” (Ohad Sorek), “Rabbino-Roman Cities: Tractate Eruvin and the Interdependence of Architecture and Ritual” (Gil P. Klein), and “The Court’s Fool: The Eruv as Architectural and Urbanistic Model” (Manuel Hertz), will focus on some of the broader questions regarding architecture and rabbinic Judaism in both past and present. Such questions ask, for instance, whether a concise theory of architecture can be reconstructed from rabbinic literature? Did the political conditions in Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia shape rabbinic approaches to the built environment and if so, how? And finally, are there rabbinic spatial and urban traditions, which still shape Jewish life today?