Bøger i Jewish Culture and Contexts serien

Next Year in Marienbad draws an engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the spa towns of Carlsbad, Marienbad, and Franzensbad, from the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s.

"Superb... The contributors probe the degree of positive interactions between Jews and Christian and also uncover heretofore-hidden Jewish contributions to the Western intellectual tradition."-Choice

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

The engaging intellectual profiles created especially for this volume by scholars from Israel, North America, and Europe represent an important rereading and reinterpretation of early modern Jewish culture and society and its broader European intellectual contexts.

Eric Zakim follows the literary and intellectual career of the powerful Zionist slogan "to build and be built" from its beginnings, when it first served as an expression of settlement aspiration in the reactions to the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, until the end of pre-state national expansion in Palestine in 1938.

In Werner Scholem: A German Life, Mirjam Zadoff has written a book that is at once a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era.

Before Fiddler on the Roof, there was Deborah, a blockbuster melodrama about a Jewish woman forsaken by her non-Jewish lover. Deborah and Her Sisters offers the first comprehensive history of this transnational phenomenon, focusing on its ability to bring Jews and non-Jews together during a period of increasing antisemitism.

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.

Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century provides a multifaceted account of Jewish life in Europe and the Mediterranean basin at a time when economic, cultural, and intellectual encounters coincided with heightened interfaith animosity.

In 1818, with a single essay of vast scope and stunning detail, Leopold Zunz launched the turn to history in modern Judaism. In Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity, Ismar Schorsch, a distinguished scholar of German Jewish culture, has written the first full-fledged biography of this remarkable man.

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.

In A Remembrance of His Wonders, David I. Shyovitz uncovers the sophisticated ways in which medieval Ashkenazic Jews engaged with the workings and meaning of the natural world, and traces the porous boundaries between medieval science and mysticism, nature and the supernatural, and ultimately, Christians and Jews.

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.

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.

Based on extensive archival research, this book explores the history of Frankism, a Jewish religious movement that began in Poland and spread into the Habsburg Empire and the German lands in the later eighteenth century.

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.

This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the challenges of modernity. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world-or, alternatively, an art to being modern in the Jewish world-and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.

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.

In this multidisciplinary volume, leading historians provide new understanding of a time that sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in and beyond the Russian Empire and transformed the way Jews thought about the politics of ethnic and national identity.

"Ruderman uncovers a fascinating episode in the history of European Jewry and Jewish-Christian intellectual relations. Connecting the Covenants is compelling as both narrative and history."-Matt Goldish, The Ohio State University

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.

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.

Biblical interpretation is not simply study of the Bible's meaning. This volume focuses on signal moments in the histories of scriptural interpretation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the ancient period to the early modern, and shows how deeply intertwined these religions have always been.