Institutions and Behavior: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Democracy

We present results from a novel experiment on the effect of a policy designed to encourage cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma game. We find that the effect of this policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it was chosen democratically by the subjects than when it was exogenously imposed. This difference remains after controlling for selection (those that choose the plicy may be more likely to be affected by it). We conclude that the treatment effect of policies may depend on whether they are endogenous or exogenous to the society on which they are imposed. Therefore, democratic institutions may have an effect on behavior in addition to the effect in terms of policy choice. More generally, our findings have implications for empirical studies of treatment effects in other contexts: the effect of a treatment may depend on whether it is endogenous or exogenous.

‘My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’:On Edmond Jabès’s Writing in Exile

This chapter examines Edmond Jabès, who chose to write his oeuvre in French despite his Jewish-Arabic origins and his being conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic. French was never a true ‘mother tongue’ to him but rather ‘a foreign one’. This poetical choice was also instrumental to his creation of a cosmos that is very clearly defined by la page blanche, or the ‘blank page’. His writing develops this idea, both literally and metaphorically. A blank sheet is the only thing a writer has to work with at the start of every writing act, therefore it represents a kind of material opposition that all writers must overcome. It represents in this context an existential nothingness that precedes and simultaneously escapes both human and divine creation. In Jabès’s writings, a blank page has two connotations at once: a condition for writing and nothingness. This ambivalent condition results in the paradoxical assumption that his ‘mother tongue is a foreign language’, because it cannot offer the same spiritual intimacy as another language, say, the Holy Language, and because the writer’s ‘mother tongue’ — and, by extension, human language — is always impure and infiltrated by foreignness.Federico Dal Bo, ‘“My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’: On Edmond Jabès”s Writing in Exile’, in Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 45-83 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_3

A Priest's "Uncircumcised Heart" Some Theological-Political Remarks on a Rashi's Gloss in Tractate Sanhedrin and its Latin Translation in Extractiones de Talmud

The Latin translation of a relatively short gloss from Rashi's commentary on the Tal- mud provides an insight into the politics of conversion in the French-German Jewry between the 10th-13th centuries and allows to assume that the Hebrew term kômer might be used in post-Talmudic commentaries in order to designate Jewish apostates who converted to Christianity, either deliberately or under duress. The Latin transla- tor of the Talmud seems to be aware of this connotation and makes these inter-cultural implications manifest

Recensions

Manuel Forcano has recently published a Catalan translation of several anti-Christian Jewish texts. Each text is translated in a very readable Catalan that still is able to resonate with the rhythm of the Hebrew and Aramaic original. Useful footnotes provide an essential understanding of many textual, historical, and hermeneutical details without pedantry.Obra ressenyada: Manuel FORCANO, Els antievangelis jueus: Traducció de l'hebreu i l'arameu de Manuel Forcano. Martorell: Adesiara, 2017