The latter part of the thirteenth century is regarded as a key period in the history of Italian Jewry. During that time many Jewish communities sprang up in the regions of central and northern Italy. Their appearance marked a turning-point in the history of Jews in the Italian peninsula as the Jewish presence had previously been focused on Rome and the south. In this much-acclaimed study, originally published in Italian, Ariel Toaff captures all the intricacies of everyday life in the medieval Jewish communities of Umbria. A thorough examination of Hebrew and Italian archival sources enables him to characterize in detail the defining features of Jewish life in the region at that time and to show clearly how the common stereotype of a single, undifferentiated Jewish community does not reflect the reality. Instead, he presents a picture of a complex society that--far from being a 'mere' minority and somewhat isolated--actually contributed greatly to contemporary society and played a significant role in shaping it, while at the same time also being influenced by the surrounding Christian society. Professor Toaff elaborates contemporary Jewish traditions and practices associated with love, marriage, food, work, sickness, and death in the context of everyday social relations between Christians and Jews. In so doing he presents a full and fascinating reconstruction of the Jewish life of the period that faithfully reflects the links and divides between the two communities. Engagingly written, Love, Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria will be of interest to the general reader, while its detailed references to archival documentation make it a particularly valuable source for students of medieval Jewish history and specialists in the social history of medieval and Renaissance Italy.

In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution.Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation. Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.

"The Nazi Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish is a history of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia, Berlin, Paris, & New York, 1932-1966), the only attempt to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia of universal knowledge in the Yiddish language. In the decade after World War I, the potential for Yiddish was seemingly limitless.The global number of speakers of Yiddish was estimated at between nine and ten million, with major communities in Poland, the Soviet Union, and the United States. But by the early 1930s, as Jews were becoming invested in their host states, a dramatic rise in antisemitism from the political right threatened their new status. Extreme nationalists sought to undo Jewish participation in civic life, limit Jewish migration and settlement, and contain - or even purge - Jews' political, economic, cultural, and racial influence. This combination of factors led many within the Yiddishist camp both to reassert their commitment to the language and to a distinct Jewish national identity, increasing the urgency for the Entsiklopedye's architects to embark upon their project. Uncertainty over the Jewish future began to be reflected in the Entsiklopedye itself. The volumes of 1936 and 1937 contain otherwise out-of-place monograph-length entries on the specifically Jewish topics of "Antisemitism" and "Land of Israel," presaging a shift away from general subjects and toward more specifically Jewish content. In September 1939, the German invasion of Poland cut the Entsiklopedye off from its major source of readers and trapped many of its contributors who were based there. Just as the second Yidn volume was being sent to subscribers in Spring 1940, Germany invaded France. Making matters even worse, the copies of the second Yidn volume were sent to the United States, and but most copies were lost at sea. A few volumes that had been sent via the regular mail arrived safely in New York, however. The encyclopedia's editors themselves fled and, after making a harrowing escape via Spain and Portugal, arrived in New York by late summer / early autumn 1940. With the end of World War II and as the enormity of the Nazi Holocaust was becoming understood, the editors decided that the Entsiklopedye should continue. The post-war Yidn volumes contain descriptive essays on Jewish life on the eve of the Holocaust, a study of Jewish life in the Americas, and the last two volumes (1964 and 1966) are historical overviews of the Holocaust. By the release of the final volume in 1966, few of the original editors of The Algemeyne Entsiklopedye were still alive. Many of the great Jewish scholars who contributed to the project had also passed. In the Foreword, the administrator of the Entsiklopedye Iser Goldberg outlined the task of future Jewish scholarship as one of creating a new corpus of work dedicated to the Holocaust. He declared that this project that once was to guide millions of Yiddish readers into the modern world was now dedicated to "the thousands of readers and subscribers in Jewish communities" with the much more modest goal of making "an important contribution to the growing khurbn [Holocaust] literature." By bringing this neglected and unique work of Jewish scholarship back into studies of modern Jewish history, Trachtenberg makes a significant contribution to current historiographical debates on the content and boundaries of Jewish knowledge in the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth-century. In large measure because of the lack of researchers able to work in the Yiddish language, the significance and history of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye has been overlooked, despite the fact that it was one of the great (and few) collaborative projects involving the twentieth century's most influential Jewish scholars. This monograph will inform recent scholarly discussions on the function of Yiddish before, during, and after World War II, on the extent to which Eastern European Jews turned away from Diaspora Nationalism on the eve of war, and to what degree Jews in the United States were "silent" in the decades following the Nazi Holocaust"--

"Tearing down stereotypes about Jews, Richard Marceau tells us about himself, using his own story to convey Jewish history and culture. He draws an original portrait of the State of Israel, the role it plays in today's Jewish identity, and helps us discover Quebec's Jewish community. Denouncing prejudices and intellectual dishonesty, identifying himself as a pro-Palestinian Zionist, Richard Marceau calls for a respectful dialogue, promoting both the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel and the creation of an independent Palestinian state."--Pub. desc.

"Beyond the immediate issues of politics and economics lie the larger and deeper realities of history and fidelity. As a Jew I am asking in these essays traditional religious questions in light of our present circumstances: What does it mean to be Jewish after the Holocaust and the consolidation of our empowerment in Israel/Palestine? Coming from a situation of oppression, what does it mean for Jewish history and theology to continue oppressing the Palestinian people? Has our empowerment in Israel brought us the freedom we so urgently needed, or has our abuse of power in Israel brought us a new enslavement and ghettoization which we did not seek, but now pursue almost blindly? Can we be healed of our trauma of Holocaust by finalizing the trauma of the Palestinian people which we as Jews have inflicted? At the lighting of the Shabbat candles, shall we bless our endeavor and thank God for making us into a warrior people?"--

Encountering Edward Said on Yom Kippur: Reflections on the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic is a fascinating and controversial collection of journals and meditations on the plight and possibility of the prophetic witness in the modern world. In these pages, the Jewish theologian, Marc H. Ellis, explores the prophetic through his encounters with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, as a way of thinking through the stakes of contemporary Jewish history. His unexpected encounter with Said on Yom Kippur provides a fascinating window to explore the dangers and possibilities of present-day Jewish life and its future. Ellis applies Said's idea of late-style to the Jewish prophetic - what Ellis names the Late-Style Jewish Prophetic - to mean the reappearance and coming home of the Jewish prophetic as it undergoes its own deconstruction and re-emergence. At turns deeply personal and creatively theoretical, Ellis doesn't shy away from the forbidden terrains of self questioning and progressive posturing, even with people and movements he identifies with. The result is a sensitive and provocative exploration filled with questions and responses rather than definitive answers.

These essays represent a multidisciplinary approach to the study of religion and, especially, Judaism. Setting aside common scholarly concerns with source criticism and history of interpretation, Shimon Levy argues that in Numbers 11 the redactor has forged diverse elements into a unity. Observing that much of what is said about Second Commonwealth Judaic culture is speculative, Jack Lightstone calls for radical revision of accepted portrayals of the period. Ira Robinson's study of al-Kirkisani's effort to differentiate magic and miracle while demonstrating the rationality of belief in miracle locates his thoughts in the context of Rabbinic and Muslim treatments of the subject. While historians of modern Judaism have acknowledged in the influence of Kant and Hegel, Rousseau, contends Michel Despland, is often overlooked; he opened the way for changes in social and religious life. In Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history Charles Davis finds a significant combining of elements from Kabbalistic and Marxist thought. Michael Oppenheim finds a common core of concerns addressed by modern Jewish philosophers: a struggle with modernity, identification with Jewish thought and values, and commitment to their Jewish communities. Gershon Hundert's "Reflections on the 'Whig' Interpretation of Jewish History" argues--vis-à-vis the Jerusalem school of Zionist historians--that the responsibility of national historians to their community can be fulfilled only by repudiating ideologies that may stand in the way of the search for truth. Howard Joseph's survey of teh extensive literature on the Holocaust indicates the options the authors find most worthy of continued focus. Jerome Eckstein critically examines one of the few published pieces by Joseph Soloveitchik, who combines the Talmudic genius of the Lithuanian Yeshiva world with mastery of the Western intellectual tradition. B. Barry Levy's study of the Artscroll series of translations of and commentaries on biblical literature examines the assumptions and methodology of the series and the hidden agenda that emerges. Frederick Bird's comparison of charity ethics in Judaism and Christianity draws attention to the imprint on these ethics of the formative period of each religion. The volume will be of interest to student of the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity.

Traversing farflung Jewish communities in South Africa, Australia, Texas, Brazil, China, New Zealand, Quebec, and elsewhere, this collection explores the compelling notion of "frontier" in the Jewish experience as a historical/geographical reality and a conceptual framework. Articulating the tension between the center/periphery model and the frontier model. Jewries at the Frontier shows how the dynamic confrontation between and among cultures and peoples brings marginalized experiences to the center and provides a new, multivocal account of Jewish history.

The Jewish experience on Polish lands is often viewed backwards through the lens of the Holocaust and the ethnic rivalries that escalated in the period between the two world wars. Critical to the history of Polish-Jewish relations, however, is the period prior to World War I when the emergence of mass electoral politics in Czarist Russia led to the consolidation of modern political parties. Using sources published in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian, Joshua D. Zimmerman has compiled a full-length English-language study of the relations between the two dominant progressive movements in Russian Poland. He examines the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), which sought social emancipation and equal civil rights for minority nationalities, including Jews, under a democratic Polish republic, and the Jewish Labor Bund, which declared that Jews were a nation distinct from Poles and Russians and advocated cultural autonomy. By 1905, the PPS abandoned its call for Jewish assimilation, and recognized Jews as a separate nationality. Zimmerman demonstrates persuasively that Polish history in Czarist Russia cannot be fully understood without studying the Jewish influence and that Jewish history was equally infused with the Polish influence.

The Blackwell Dictionary of Judaica contains more than 7,000 concise entries and nearly half a million words on every aspect of Jewish history, civilization and religion. It will prove invaluable not only for students and teachers, but also for everyone who is interested in the fascinating richness of the Jewish tradition. In a single volume, the wealth of the Jewish heritage is uncovered in direct and simple words. This is a vital reference work for everyone who wishes to know about the development of Judaism from ancient times to the present day, and it deserves a place in every library and every Jewish home.

Kinship, the new collection of poetry by the bilingual author, Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer, weaves together some of the principal themes in modern Jewish history: ancestry in Eastern Europe, the Shoah, antisemitism, exile, displacement and immigration, Zionism and Israel. Shrayer's richly orchestrated and formally elegant verse captures with poignancy and passion what it feels like to be a Jewish poet with Soviet roots, living in America during Russia's brutal war in Ukraine. Kinship is, ultimately, a pained and inspiring meditation on writing between languages and cultures.

Tales of America, adultery, football, incest, love, paranoia, sadism and Zionism.... Wickedly funny these stories may be, but heartless they are not. Disturbing images abound; like the loving family that feasts upon living butterflies; and other images that connect the themes with places deeper than the mind. The narrators are an extraordinary a berserk psychiatrist, a giraffe, a man with an invisible creature on his back, a Jewish private eye, a communist with a bowel fixation, and various other disillusioned souls. None the less, each story is lucid, concisely written and has a strong sense of location. In The Promised Land a diaspora Jew travels to Israel determined to plant his seed, only to find himself excluded from his erotic paradise. In Le Docteur Enchaîné, a London psychiatrist decides that he can only find satisfaction with a dumb woman and takes the remedy into his own hands. In The Luftmensh, Joshua Smolinsky, trailing a missing writer to New Orleans, becomes involved with ghosts from American and Jewish history. In A Moment of Happiness a Czech hypochondriac manipulates two tourists into providing him with ‘that single 1/60th of a second when I am not afraid’....

"In Catbird: The Ballad of Barbi Prim, the world meets an insightful, opinionated eight-year-old who's already taken a few steps toward becoming a pioneer--but also a shadow of her quirky self. Although she's corroded--sometimes literally--by a toxic but familiar social atmosphere, her love of singing propels her to become the first ordained woman cantor in 3,000 years of Jewish history. A family crisis exposes old and enduring wounds, but she begins to rescue herself--by diligently going to therapy--and embarks on an imperfect but perpetual metamorphosis, becoming the well-coiffed heroine of her own story. Barbara Ostfeld shows us that we are all brave pioneers--at becoming our true selves." -- Amazon.com.

Zvi Arbel is an Israeli historian whose field is Jewish history. His chosen topic of research is the Petliura massacres of Ukrainian Jews in 1918-1920. Arbel's work is read by the poet Shmuel Foiglman, a Holocaust survivor who sends Arbel a volume of his own poetry in Yiddish. The relationship that develops between the two men is one of ambivalence and fascination; the reserved Israeli historian is alternatively affectionate and resentful towards the enthusiastic but tormented poet. Despite his ambivalence, Arbel is manipulated into helping Foiglman. He embarks on an effort to get Foiglman's poetry translated into Hebrew, and as Foiglman begins to monopolize more and more of his time and resources, Arbel ignores all the warning signs of the effect this is having on his marriage; his wife Nora cannot be dissuaded from her feelings of revulsion towards Foiglman. As the poet unintentionally drives a wedge between them, Arbel and Nora's long and contented marriage goes sour, and in Megged's blend of past and present, lust and nostalgia - tragedy becomes the only way out.

Cowan, Paul

This dictionary is based on old and recent manuscripts, printed texts, literary Midrashic texts, recorded oral Bible translations, folk literature, and diverse spoken registers. It has an extensive introduction, including a brief history of the Jewish dialects and their relations to older Aramaic, detailed observations on orthography, phonology, morphology, semantics, and other related grammatical features, that will serve the users well. The source for each word is indicated, including context quotations when necessary. A special effort was made to trace the origin of each and every word, be it native (classical and Talmudic Aramaic, Syriac etc.), or a loan word (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, general European). The Dictionary includes an index to all the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic words which have cognates or reflexes in Jewish Neo-Aramaic, a very important tool for the history of comparative linguistic studies of Aramaic. The Dictionary will be useful for scholars of Neo-Aramaic as well as classical and Talmudic Aramaic and Syriac, Semitic Languages, Jewish Languages, Languages in Contact, and other Near Eastern Languages in general. It is the first scholarly dictionary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, and is intended to be a linguistic monument to the community that spoke it for many centuries until its emigration to Israel.

Addressed to Jews and non-Jews alike, though aware that these two reader groups were likelyn to approach the book with very different presuppositions, Daiches sets out to define Judaism in relation to philosophy, to explain Kant's philosophy through the superiority of halakhah, defend a biblically based Jewish interpretation of history, and champion Judaism as a religion of freedom guaranteed by halakhah (Jewish law).

The Leo Baeck Institute was founded in 1955 by the Council of Jews from Germany for the purpose of collecting material on and sponsoring research into the history of the Jewish community in Germany and other German-speaking countries. This is an annual volume covering current research.

Warsaw was once home to the largest and most diverse Jewish community in the world. It was a center of rich varieties of Orthodox Judaism, Jewish Socialism, Diaspora Nationalism, Zionism, and Polonization. This volume is the first to reflect on the entire history of the Warsaw Jewish community, from its inception in the late 18th century to its emergence as a Jewish metropolis within a few generations, to its destruction during the German occupation and tentative re-emergence in the postwar period. The highly original contributions collected here investigate Warsaw Jewry's religious and cultural life, press and publications, political life, and relations with the surrounding Polish society. This monumental volume is dedicated to Professor Antony Polonsky, chief historian of the new Warsaw Museum for the History of Polish Jews, on the occasion of his 75th birthday. This book is also available in hardcover.

What if the history you thought you knew was only part of the story? What if the untold connections between two powerful cultures could change everything you thought about solidarity, struggle, and survival? The Hidden Ties: Uncovering the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews Across the Ages is an eye-opening exploration into a relationship that has been hidden in plain sight for centuries. This groundbreaking book sheds light on the profound yet often overlooked history between Black and Jewish communities, revealing the moments of cooperation, shared struggle, and mutual resistance that have shaped both cultures. From the ancient interactions between Jews and Africans in Egypt to the powerful alliance formed during the Civil Rights Movement, this book uncovers the rich tapestry of solidarity between these two resilient groups. You'll discover how Jewish activists stood side-by-side with African Americans in the fight for justice and equality, how their struggles have been intertwined through the centuries, and how both communities have risen from oppression, together. What Will You Discover? The hidden historical connections between Jews and Africans, from ancient civilizations to modern times. How shared experiences of exile, slavery, and oppression created unexpected bonds. The key moments of solidarity during pivotal movements like the Civil Rights Era. How Black and Jewish cultures have influenced one another in ways that shaped history. This book goes beyond just telling history-it dives deep into the emotional and cultural ties that continue to bind these two communities today. You'll gain a deeper understanding of the struggles, triumphs, and complex challenges faced by both Blacks and Jews as they fought side by side for justice, dignity, and freedom. Why You Need This Book: If you've ever wondered about the powerful, hidden stories of cooperation that have existed between these two remarkable groups, The Hidden Ties will open your eyes to a whole new world of shared history. You'll walk away with a deeper appreciation for the ways cultural connections shape our world-and why understanding these ties can help us build a more united future. Don't let this important history remain hidden. Order your copy today and uncover the truth that history forgot!