Bøger i Jewish Culture and Contexts serien

Debra Kaplan offers the first extensive analysis of Jewish poor relief in early modern German cities and towns, exploring the intersections between various sectors of the populations-from wealthy patrons to the homeless and stateless poor-providing an intimate portrait of the early modern Ashkenazic community.

Adopting a comparative approach that explores Jewish interactions with Muslim and Christian learning, Mordechai Z. Cohen sheds new light on the key turns in the vibrant medieval tradition of Jewish Bible interpretation, which yielded a conception of peshat exegesis that remains a gold standard in Jewish hermeneutics to this day.

By carefully examining the place of Hebrew and rabbinic traditions in the Christian study of the Bible, The Insight of Unbelievers elaborates in new ways on the relationship between Christian and Jewish scholarship and polemic in late medieval Europe.

Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century.

Exploring the ways in which early modern Jews related to Jews from different backgrounds and to the non-Jews around them, Connecting Histories emphasizes not only the challenging nature and impact of these encounters but also the ambivalence experienced by Jews as they met their others.

In Speaking Infinities, Ariel Evan Mayse explores the life and work of the Hasidic figure Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman of Mezritsh (1704-1772) to elucidate his theory of language in which all human tongues, even in their mundane forms, have the potential to become sacred when returned to their divine source.

David B. Ruderman examines a chapter in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in nineteenth-century Europe, focusing on evangelical missionary Alexander McCaul and his associates, both allies and foes, who were engaged in conversation about the nature of Christianity, Judaism, and their intertwined destinies in the past and present.

Viewing Jewish history from the perspective of conversion across a broad chronological and conceptual frame, Bastards and Believers highlights how the concepts of the convert and of conversion have histories of their own and speaks to the possibility, or impossibility, of changing one's life.

In The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, Shaul Magid presents the first-ever English translation of Rabbi Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Qol Qore, a rabbinic commentary on the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

In Singing in a Foreign Land, Karen A. Weisman examines the uneasy literary inheritance taken from British cultural and poetic norms by early nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish authors.

"The slaughter of the Jews in the Rhineland in 1096 is one of the better-known events of the First Crusade. Cohen analyzes the texts of the Jewish accounts of these massacres in light of the martyrdom tradition of Masada, well-known at that time, and the contemporary Christian cult of self-sacrifice... Recommended."-Choice

In Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter looks at the phenomenon of panegyric in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives-social, historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological-and finds that they depict how representations of Jewish political leadership varied across space and evolved over time.

In A Historian in Exile, Jeremy Cohen shows how Solomon ibn Verga's Shevet Yehudah bridges the divide between the medieval and early modern periods, reflecting a contemporary consciousness that a new order had begun to replace the old.

Purchasing Power repositions economics in our understanding of the Jewish experience from early modern Rome to contemporary America and traces how economic circumstances have formed the context for, and even underpinned, Jewish intellectual, culture, and political development.

Secularism in Question examines how twentieth-century revivals of religion prompt a reconsideration of many issues concerning Jews and Judaism in the modern era. Scholars of Jewish history, religion, philosophy, and literature illustrate how the categories of "religious" and "secular" have frequently proven far more permeable than fixed.

A best-selling biography in Israel, available for the first time in the English language.

Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. In this pioneering work Shmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in this process by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings.

This Noble House examines the importance of biblical ancestry-especially the claim of descent from King David-for Jews living in the medieval Islamic world.

A comprehensive and nuanced historical account of the role Jews played in the Russian Civil War. Oleg Budnitskii shows that Jews were not just victims of the bloody pogroms but also active participants in the anti-Bolshevik White movement as well as the establishment of the Soviet state.

The first comprehensive investigation of premodern Jewish travel writing about the Islamic world, Reorienting the East examines Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries that subvert, or reorient a decidedly Christian vision of the region and reflect changing Jewish self-perceptions.

This volume revisits issues of empire from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and other Romans in the third to sixth centuries. Through case studies, the contributors bring Jewish perspectives to bear on longstanding debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity.

In The Third Pillar, Geoffrey Hartman, one of the most influential scholars and teachers of English and Comparative Literature of recent decades, has brought together some of the most important and eloquent essays he has written since the 1980s on the major texts of the Jewish tradition.

In A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, Diana Lobel explores the full extent to which Duties of the Heart marks the flowering of the "Jewish-Arab symbiosis," the interpenetration of Islamic and Jewish civilizations.

This volume explores forms of Jewish experience that span the period from antiquity to the present and encompass a wide range of textual, ritual, spatial, and visual materials. Chapters devote sustained attention to three key concepts-authority, diaspora, and tradition-that have long been central to the study of Jews and Judaism.

Looking to contexts ranging from premodern Spain and Italy to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, and America, the contributors to this volume explore the ways the political and intellectual aspirations of successive historical presents have repeatedly reshaped the forms and narratives of Jewish cultural memory.

Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben Samuel he-hasid, Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," is a compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah''s messages advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for centuries.In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive, yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

The eighteenth century has long been considered a formative period in the history of European racial identity. Difference of a Different Kind offers a new exploration of the ways Jewish authors confronted notions of race that began to pervade European ideology and adapted them to construct their own identity.

This book offers portraits of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Marranos: Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism but secretly retained their own faith. Merging the concerns of an anthropologist with his skills as a historian, Wachtel traces their odyssey from early modern Europe to twenty-first-century Brazil.

This collection of sophisticated, innovative essays looks at how Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers within the Islamic world drew ideas and inspiration from outside the bounds of their own religious communities.

This volume presents new research by an international group of scholars on the history of Hebrew books in Italy from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century, focusing on a range of issues related to the production and dissemination of Hebrew books as well as their audiences.