Quantifed possessives and direct compositionality

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Extreme laser pulses for possible development of boron fusion power reactors for clean and lasting energy

Extreme laser pulses driving non-equilibrium processes in high density plasmas permit an increase of the fusion of hydrogen with the boron isotope 11 by nine orders of magnitude of the energy gains above the classical values. This is the result of initiating the reaction by non-thermal ultrahigh acceleration of plasma blocks by the nonlinear (ponderomotive) force of the laser field, in addition to the avalanche reaction that has now been experimentally and theoretically manifested. The design of a very compact fusion power reactor is scheduled to produce then environmentally fully clean and inexhaustible generation of energy at profitably low costs. The reaction within a volume of cubic millimetres during a nanosecond can only be used for controlled power generation.Comment: 10 pages, 5 fugure

The Life of the Jews in Nineteenth Century Palestine as Described in Halakhic and Rabbinic Literature.

This work is a study of Jewish life in Palestine in the nineteenth century, based on contemporary halakhic and rabbinic documents. The period under consideration begins with the arrival of the followers of the Gaon of Vilna - the Perushim - beginning circa 1806, and ends in the late 1890's with the ascendancy of the new Yishuv, For the Jewish community, the entire period was marked by struggle. This work focuses on three aspects of this struggle: spiritual, material, and social. Section I describes the Jewish community's confrontations with ideological forces. Chapter one describes the most influential and far-reaching of these forces: the rise of the philosophy of messianic activism. The Perushim brought with them a novel perception of the role of the Jewish people in its own salvation. Instead of passively waiting for the arrival of the Messiah, they wished to rebuild the ancient Jewish homeland and thereby expedite the arrival of the messianic age. Had this radical new philosophy become the mainstream of Orthodox thinking, the subsequent history of the Jewish people might have been very different. In spite of the attempts of such proto-Zionist thinkers as Rabbi Akiva Joseph Schlesinger, however, most fundamentalist circles came to reject this revolutionary ideology. Chapter two describes what was, perhaps, the greatest threat to traditional Judaism until secularism began to dominate Jewish life towards the end of the period discussed in this thesis - the missionaries. This was a central preoccupation for the Jews of Palestine throughout the century. Chapter three recounts the controversy surrounding proposals to introduce the Jews to modern education. Section II describes the struggle of the Jews to cope with the difficult material conditions which prevailed in Palestine throughout the century. Chapter four shows the pervasive influence of what was, for many Jews, their only source of income - the halukkah charity system. Chapter five discusses the growth of the Jewish population, and the demographic changes it experienced. Chapter six describes the commercial life of those Jews who were not totally dependent on the halukkah, particularly the dramatic growth of the export trade in etrogim. Section III describes the society the Jews lived in during the period and the events that moulded it. Chapter seven describes Jewish society at the level of petty politics. Chapter eight outlines the Jews' relationships with their Abstract - iii Gentile neighbours as well as their Turkish or Egyptian rulers. Chapter nine discusses several subjects, including the string of natural disasters which befell the Jewish community, from plagues to earthquakes. The chapter also discusses many aspects of everyday life, including marriage, communications, and health. Finally, Chapter ten describes the division between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim, and the rise of the Ashkenazi community to its position of parity. The chapter analyzes the causes of friction between the two communities, as well as the bonds that united them. At the suggestion of my supervisor. Dr. T. V. Parfitt, I have limited my primary source material to rabbinic documents produced in Palestine during the period. This approach has allowed me to present the Jews of Palestine as they described themselves, rather than as outsiders saw them, and has provided a fascinating new perspective on this important historical subject. Contemporary material from non-rabbinic sources and modern historical analyses have been included only for illustrative or comparative purposes. Almost all of the translations in this thesis are mine. In certain places, I have made minor adjustments to the literal translation for the sake of clarity. The body of relevant rabbinic and halakhic literature encompasses a wide variety of texts. The rabbis and scholars of this period had many means of expressing their opinions on halakhic and other issues. This research has uncovered books, sermons, obituaries, novellae, responsa, letters, and numerous hand-written manuscripts, many of them never previously researched

Auto-Emancipation: Decolonial Perspectives on Autonomous Political Mizrahi and Sephardic Organizations in Israel, 1948-1967

326 p.This research is based on the contemporary theoretical premise developed especially among Latin-American social scientists, named by some as "the decolonial turn". The research uses the decolonial perspective and terminology in order to examine the historical political activity of Mizrahi and Sephardic autonomous organizations in Israel. The study is based on historical documents and newspapers of different organizations. It examines a broad range of organizations, but focuses primarily on the activity of the Council of the Sephardic Community of Jerusalem, under the leadership of Eliahu Eliachar. The research outlines an autonomous Mizrahi sub-political sphere that had a unique dynamic of its own, which sometimes diverged from the Ashkenazi one in its interpretations of the social reality and in its reaction to Middle Eastern political developments. Within this sphere, the dissertation analyzes the discourse and practices of independent political organizations, focusing on the way they related to Middle Eastern politics and to Israeli Palestinian Arabs, as well as on their constructions of a Mizrahi and Sephardic collective identity. The research also examines the multifaceted ways in which the colonial power structure of the Zionist regime weakened the activity of these organizations and restricted their decolonial potential. The dissertation aims to contribute to the development of the decolonial theoretical perspective in the context of the Middle East, and to the construction of a legacy of such thinking in Israel today

Auto-Emancipation: Decolonial Perspectives on Autonomous Political Mizrahi and Sephardic Organizations in Israel, 1948-1967

326 p.This research is based on the contemporary theoretical premise developed especially among Latin-American social scientists, named by some as "the decolonial turn". The research uses the decolonial perspective and terminology in order to examine the historical political activity of Mizrahi and Sephardic autonomous organizations in Israel. The study is based on historical documents and newspapers of different organizations. It examines a broad range of organizations, but focuses primarily on the activity of the Council of the Sephardic Community of Jerusalem, under the leadership of Eliahu Eliachar. The research outlines an autonomous Mizrahi sub-political sphere that had a unique dynamic of its own, which sometimes diverged from the Ashkenazi one in its interpretations of the social reality and in its reaction to Middle Eastern political developments. Within this sphere, the dissertation analyzes the discourse and practices of independent political organizations, focusing on the way they related to Middle Eastern politics and to Israeli Palestinian Arabs, as well as on their constructions of a Mizrahi and Sephardic collective identity. The research also examines the multifaceted ways in which the colonial power structure of the Zionist regime weakened the activity of these organizations and restricted their decolonial potential. The dissertation aims to contribute to the development of the decolonial theoretical perspective in the context of the Middle East, and to the construction of a legacy of such thinking in Israel today

“They Have Countless Books of This Craft”: Folklore and Folkloristics of Yemeni Jewish Amulets

The nineteenth-century voyager Yaakov Sapir published accounts of Yemeni Jewish amulets that provide significant historical and ethnographic sources for a study of Yemeni Jewish occult practices and the perception of them by non-Jews. The combination of blurred religious boundaries characterizing occult traditions, the prominent place of the Judeo Arabic language, and Arabic or pseudo-Arabic magical scripts constructed occult traditions as an essential social and cultural role for the Jewish minority, and simultaneously made these traditions the center of a polemical discourse

Donkeys under Discussion

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of nonmaximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. We propose that the denotations of such sentences produce truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, the semantic analysis defines a general schema for quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008, 2010, nor error states, contra Champollion 2016, nor singular donkey pronouns with plural referents, contra Krifka 1996, Yoon 1996. We also show that the pragmatic account improves over alternatives like Kanazawa 1994 that attribute the readings of donkey sentences to the monotonicity properties of the embedding quantifier

Some Observations About Jewish Law in Israel\u27s Supreme Court

This Article considers whether the Israeli Supreme Court\u27s effort to incorporate the parts of Jewish Law that deal with secular subjects is internally flawed. The use of Jewish law differs from the use of the law of other jurisdictions. Typically courts rely on other jurisdictions\u27 precedents to show that a rule is practical, that the court is not overstepping its authority, and that adoption of the rule will lead to interstate or international uniformity. The use of Jewish law does not satisfy these goals. There is concern that the religious elements of Jewish law are pervasive and that much of Jewish law is not well suited for a modern society. This Article considers the approach of looking to Jewish law, not for specific rules that will be applied, but as a storehouse from which one can seek enlightenment. Even under this approach, this Article finds that some Israeli Supreme Court cases have misapplied Jewish law either by taking Jewish law out of context or by reading modern legal concepts into Jewish law. This Article suggests ways that some of these cases could have better employed Jewish law and also describes cases that have properly done so. It concludes that, when used properly, Jewish law can help to link Israeli law to a rich cultural heritage. Reprinted by permission of the publisher