Aleph

About Aleph

Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism — Journal Profile

Aleph, in full Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism, is a peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to one meeting point and to everything that has ever happened there: the interface between Judaism and science in history. It is published by Indiana University Press in conjunction with the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it appears twice a year, and it has been publishing since 2001. The Journals World record for this post carries the journal under its short title, Aleph, with print ISSN 1565-1525 and electronic ISSN 1553-3956 — the same pairing given for the journal in standard reference listings — together with an h-index of 10 in its source data and Scopus-era coverage described as 2009–2023. That short title needs care from the very start, because Aleph is also the name of other journals, including an undergraduate research journal at the University of California, Los Angeles, with entirely different ISSNs (2639-6440 and 2639-6459) that is profiled separately on this site. The Aleph of this record is identified by its ISSN pair and by its subtitle: if the work is about science and Judaism in history, published from Jerusalem and Bloomington, it belongs here; if it is not, it belongs to one of the namesakes.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism
• Short title on this record: Aleph
• Publisher: Indiana University Press, in conjunction with the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Print ISSN: 1565-1525
• Electronic ISSN: 1553-3956 (as carried on this record; see the verification note below about a third number associated with the title in OpenAlex)
• Founded: 2001; founding editor Gad Freudenthal
• Editors: Reimund Leicht and Resianne Fontaine, serving as co-editors as of 2020 and named for editorial correspondence on the journal's Project MUSE page
• Frequency: Semi-annual — two issues a year
• Language: English
• Field: Jewish history and the history of science — the history of science in which Judaism played a part, and the history of Judaism in which science played a part
• Distribution platforms named in reference listings: JSTOR and Project MUSE
• DOAJ: No listing was returned by the DOAJ search API for either ISSN at the time of checking — see the open-access note below

History and Editorship

Aleph began publication in 2001. Its founding editor was Gad Freudenthal, a historian of medieval Jewish science whose own work on figures such as Gersonides set the intellectual tone the journal has kept: exact philology joined to serious history of science, with Jewish texts read as part of the wider scientific cultures of the Mediterranean and Europe rather than as a sealed tradition. The journal is a joint enterprise in a real, institutional sense. The Project MUSE page for the journal states that Aleph is published jointly by the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and by Indiana University Press in Bloomington, Indiana, and it directs all editorial correspondence to the editors at the Edelstein Center. Reference listings of the journal give the same partnership, naming Indiana University Press as publisher in conjunction with the Edelstein Center.

As of 2020, Reimund Leicht and Resianne Fontaine serve as co-editors, a succession recorded in reference accounts of the journal and confirmed in the present tense by the MUSE page, which asks authors to address editorial correspondence to Leicht and Fontaine at the Edelstein Center. That editorship matters for understanding the journal's range. Both editors work on medieval Jewish philosophy and science — on the transmission of Greek and Arabic learning into Hebrew, on astrology, astronomy, medicine and magic as historical practices, and on the manuscripts that carried them. A journal edited from that centre of gravity naturally welcomes work on the medieval centuries, where the surviving evidence is richest, but its stated scope is deliberately wider, and its volumes range from antiquity to the modern period, from astronomy and mathematics to medicine, natural philosophy, technology and the sciences of language and religion themselves.

Two decades of semi-annual publication have produced a journal that functions as the field's meeting place. Historians of Jewish culture who rarely read history of science, and historians of science who rarely read Jewish studies, encounter each other in its pages, in its review essays and in its editions and translations of primary texts. The founding question — what happened, historically, when Judaism and science met — has proved durable precisely because it can be asked of almost any century and almost any science, broadly understood.

Scope: Science and Judaism, Both Broadly Construed

The journal's own statement of purpose, carried on its Project MUSE page, is short enough to quote in substance and exact enough to govern any submission decision. Aleph is devoted to the exploration of the interface between Judaism and science in history. It welcomes contributions on any chapter in the history of science in which Judaism played a significant role, or on any chapter in the history of Judaism in which science played a significant role. Science is conceived very broadly, including the social sciences and the humanities, and history of science is also broadly construed, within its social and cultural dimensions.

Each clause of that statement does work. The interface can be approached from either side: a study of Jewish astronomers, physicians, mathematicians, translators or patrons contributing to a wider scientific culture belongs here, and so does a study of how scientific ideas — about the heavens, the body, nature or number — reshaped Jewish thought, law, liturgy or communal life. The broad definition of science brings in disciplines a narrower journal would turn away: not only astronomy, mathematics, optics, medicine and natural philosophy, but also the human sciences as historical actors understood them, and the scholarly practices — philology, historiography, bibliography — through which knowledge about nature and about Judaism was itself made. The social and cultural framing invites work on institutions, patronage, education, print, translation movements and the movement of texts and instruments between languages and communities. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSNs to source S117294868 at the time of checking, maps the same territory from citation data, associating Aleph with topics including medieval and classical philosophy, historical astronomy, historical, religious and philosophical studies, and the history of libraries, manuscripts and books.

What does not belong is equally clear from the statement. Work on Judaism with no historical engagement with knowledge or science, and work on the history of science with no Jewish dimension, are both outside the brief, however good they may be. The editors' test, visible in the journal's contents over twenty years, is whether the meeting itself is the object of study.

What the Journal Publishes and How It Appears

Aleph is a semi-annual journal — two issues a year — published in English. Its contents are built from research articles, and its volumes are known in the field for long, document-rich studies: editions and translations of Hebrew scientific texts, analyses of manuscripts and their transmission, and essays that reconstruct a thinker, a school or a controversy in full context. A much-cited early example of its house style is the English publication, in Aleph, of Aviezer Ravitzky's study of Aristotle's Meteorology and the Maimonidean modes of interpreting the account of creation, a piece the journal presented as a classic of its subject, complete with the medieval Hebrew translations on which its argument rests. That combination — a substantial interpretive essay anchored in primary texts, some of them edited or translated for the occasion — remains the surest guide to what a successful Aleph submission looks like.

The journal is read principally through the platforms on which Indiana University Press journals are distributed. Reference listings name JSTOR and Project MUSE as its homes, and the MUSE page carries the journal's own description, its editorial address and its issue run from volume 1 (2001) to the current issue. Libraries, rather than individual open web readers, are the journal's main channel, a point developed in the access discussion below.

Metrics and Standing — Attributed by Source

Aleph's figures differ sharply by database, and this profile keeps them attached to their sources rather than blending them into a single flattering number. OpenAlex, at the time of checking, recorded for the source resolved from the journal's ISSNs a total of 350 works and 1,470 citations, with summary statistics of an h-index of 20 and an i10-index of 28. Those are archive-wide, database-wide counts, and OpenAlex also associates a third ISSN, 1565-5423, with the same source alongside the pair carried on this record — a reminder that identifier data for long-running titles accumulates variant electronic numbers over time. SCImago, working from Scopus, tells the more modest story of a small humanities journal: SCImago-derived listings record a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.101, a best quartile of Q4, and an h-index of 9, with categories in history and religious studies and in the history and philosophy of science. The Journals World source data behind this record carried an h-index of 10 and coverage of 2009–2023, close to the SCImago picture. Secondary aggregators quote still other figures, including impact-style numbers that this profile does not repeat, because they could not be traced to a primary metric source actually consulted.

The honest summary is that Aleph's standing in its field is considerably stronger than any of its raw citation counts suggest. It is the specialist journal for its exact subject, edited from the Hebrew University's Edelstein Center and published by a major university press, and it is the first place scholars of medieval Jewish science look and cite. In slow-citing humanities fields, that community position — who edits the journal, who publishes in it, and which library platforms carry it — is a better guide for authors than a quartile. Authors whose institutions require a Scopus or Web of Science placement should confirm the journal's current coverage in those services directly, and authors who need open access for funder compliance should read the next sections carefully.

Indexing and Abstracting

Reference listings for the journal, drawn from the Information Matrix for the Analysis of Journals (MIAR) and summarised in the journal's standard reference entry, name the following abstracting and indexing services: Academic Search Premier, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the ATLA Religion Database, Humanities Abstracts, IBZ Online, Index Islamicus, Jewish Studies Source, the Modern Language Association Database, and Scopus. That list is coherent with the journal's double identity: the arts and humanities and religion services index it as a Jewish studies title, while Scopus carries it for the history of science community. Indexing lists age, and services add and drop titles, so the list above is presented as the journal's recorded indexing in the reference sources consulted for this profile, not as a guarantee for the current year. A librarian or author who needs certainty for a tenure file or a funder report should check the title in Scopus and in the Web of Science master list under both ISSNs, 1565-1525 and 1553-3956, and keep a dated copy of the result.

Access, Fees and the DOAJ Question

Aleph is not an open-access journal in the directory sense. The DOAJ search API, queried in the foreground for both of its ISSNs during the research for this profile, returned no listing for the title — a result this profile reports as could not be verified as DOAJ-listed, in line with the journal's distribution model: it is a subscription and library-platform journal, read through JSTOR and Project MUSE and through Indiana University Press. Authors should therefore not assume that an article in Aleph will be freely readable on the open web, and anyone with a funder or institutional open-access mandate should discuss deposit and licence options with the editors and with Indiana University Press before submitting, and should archive whatever version their institution permits in a repository.

On charges, this profile is deliberately silent where the sources are silent. No article processing charge for Aleph was verified from the publisher's own pages during this research, and figures quoted by third-party aggregator websites for this journal could not be traced to the publisher and are not repeated here. The correct statement is that any fee position for Aleph could not be verified from an authoritative source consulted, and the publisher is the place to confirm it. The same caution applies to turnaround times, acceptance rates and similar statistics that aggregator sites attach to this title: none was verified from the journal or its publisher, and none is claimed here.

How to Submit

Editorial correspondence for Aleph is addressed to the editors, Reimund Leicht and Resianne Fontaine, at the Sidney M. Edelstein Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, using the editorial email address printed on the journal's Project MUSE page. Prospective authors should begin there and with the publisher's current author information for Indiana University Press journals, since submission mechanics for press journals change and the MUSE page, not a directory profile, is the authoritative source for the current route. In preparing a manuscript, the journal's own scope statement is the specification: frame the work as a study of the meeting of Judaism and science in history, from either side of that meeting; show the primary sources, in Hebrew or in the other languages of the evidence, doing real work in the argument; and write the piece so that a historian from the neighbouring field — the side of the interface that is not your own — can follow it. Manuscripts that are purely internal to one field, with the other field present only as background colour, are the ones the scope statement warns against. Given the semi-annual rhythm, authors should also ask the editors about the current pipeline before working to an external deadline.

Distinguishing This Aleph From Its Namesakes

Because the title is a single common word — the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet — Aleph collides with several unrelated publications, and this site itself carries one of them: a separate, deep profile for Aleph, the UCLA undergraduate research journal for the humanities and social sciences, whose ISSNs are 2639-6440 and 2639-6459 and whose publisher is the University of California, Los Angeles. That journal has nothing to do with the present title beyond the name, and citations, metrics and indexing for one must never be transferred to the other. A Brazilian journal of Jewish studies, Arquivo Maaravi, also surfaces in title searches for Aleph because of subject overlap, with its own ISSN, 1982-3053, and its own publisher, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. The rule that resolves every such case is the one this profile began with: match the ISSN pair. Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism is 1565-1525 in print and 1553-3956 online, published by Indiana University Press with the Edelstein Center, founded in 2001 and edited by Leicht and Fontaine. Anything that does not match that full description is a different publication that happens to share a name.

Similar Journals Worth Comparing

Authors weighing Aleph against neighbouring titles usually look in two directions. Within Jewish studies, AJS Review, Jewish History and the Journal of Jewish Studies publish historical work on Jewish culture in which science may appear, but none of them makes the science interface its sole brief. Within the history of science, Isis and Early Science and Medicine publish Jewish material when it bears on their wider questions, but Judaism is incidental to their scope rather than constitutive of it. Aleph occupies the ground where those two reading lists overlap, and for a study whose argument is precisely about that overlap, there is no closer comparator — which is exactly what its founders intended in 2001.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Aleph's full title? Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism. This Journals World record carries it under the short title Aleph.

What are Aleph's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1565-1525 and electronic ISSN 1553-3956 on this record and in standard reference listings. OpenAlex additionally associates the number 1565-5423 with the same source; authors citing the journal should use the ISSN printed on the issue they are citing.

Who publishes Aleph? Indiana University Press, jointly and in conjunction with the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

When was Aleph founded, and by whom? It began publication in 2001; its founding editor was Gad Freudenthal. As of 2020 its co-editors are Reimund Leicht and Resianne Fontaine.

What does Aleph publish? Studies of the interface between Judaism and science in history, approached from either side, with science broadly construed to include the social sciences and the humanities, and history of science broadly construed in its social and cultural dimensions — the journal's own formulation on its Project MUSE page.

How often does Aleph appear, and in what language? Twice a year, in English.

Is Aleph open access or listed in DOAJ? No DOAJ listing was returned for either ISSN when the DOAJ search API was checked for this profile; the journal is distributed through JSTOR and Project MUSE and the publisher. Any fee position could not be verified from an authoritative source consulted, and aggregator figures for this title should not be relied on.

What are Aleph's metrics? By source: OpenAlex recorded 350 works, 1,470 citations, an h-index of 20 and an i10-index of 28 at the time of checking; SCImago-derived listings recorded an SJR of 0.101, Q4 and an h-index of 9; the source data behind this record carried an h-index of 10. Each figure measures a different database and should be quoted with its source.

Verifying This Record

This record's identity is the pairing of the short title Aleph with ISSNs 1565-1525 and 1553-3956 and the subtitle Historical Studies in Science and Judaism. The numeric codes that appeared as a supposed publisher in the earlier thin version of this page were not a publisher name; the publisher is Indiana University Press with the Edelstein Center, as set out above. The one identifier complication found in research, OpenAlex's additional association of ISSN 1565-5423 with the same source, is reported openly in the metrics section rather than silently substituted for the record's own pair, because the live record governs this profile. Twin checks for this post found no other Journals World record carrying either of its ISSNs; the similarly named records found are distinct journals, profiled in the namesakes section above.