A collection of 15 essays, most of which were published between 1980-90. The following deal with antisemitism and the Holocaust:

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Essays examining the emergence of Jewish scholarship during the period 1818 - 1919, concentrating on the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement.

All religious groups have codes to guide the lives of adherents, but the Druze, Dr. Ruth tells us, are especially interesting. She has observed the Druze's special art of adjustment in all walks of life, whether religious or secular, and for all people, young and old. Their key is an ancient custom called a-takiyya. During times of communal stress, the Druze refrain from accentuating their religious identity, thus reducing the possibilities of conflict with neighboring groups and allowing them to concentrate on internal community building. According to Druze custom, they predate the Hebrew people in the area surrounding Palestine--particularly in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. Thus, like many "native" peoples, they do not feel bound by the customs and religions brought into the area by later settlers. This, of course, has led to a long history of strife with their neighbors. Consequently, the Druze people have had to build an inner strength of individuals and community in order to survive as an identifiable ethnic group. Through stories, personal encounters, and historical context, Dr. Ruth Westheimer describes with great warmth the roots of that strength, how the story of the Druze has played out over the millennia, how they influence today's situation in the Middle East, and what Westerners can learn from them and their way of life.

Based on two extant Jewish sources describing the pogroms in the Rhineland in 1096, the Mainz Anonymous and the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, narrates the history of the massacre of Jews by the Crusaders and by burghers who joined them, in Mainz, Worms, Köln, and Speyer. The Pope, who conceived the Crusade, did not call for the massacre of Jews, nor did the secular authorities approve of it; it was Count Emicho's army that unleashed the murders. Clergymen and imperial officials, as well as some burghers, tried to protect the Jews, not always successfully. The revulsion toward Christianity, the readiness for martyrdom evinced by the Rhineland Jews, the mass suicides, and even the murder of their families by Jews themselves only incited the Crusaders to greater excesses. Despite the brutality of the massacres of 1096, the bulk of Ashkenazic Jewry survived them unharmed. Although later Jewish literature sometimes praised the Jews' behavior during the First Crusade, this pattern was not repeated in other disasters which befell European Jewry.

"Antiquarian, lawyer, and cat lover Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637), was a 'prince' of the Republic of Letters and the most gifted French intellectual in the generation between Montaigne and Descartes. From Peiresc's study in Aix-en-Provence, his insatiable curiosity poured forth in thousands of letters that traveled the Mediterranean, seeking knowledge of matters mundane and exotic--travel times and insurance premiums, rare manuscripts and objects from the Orient. Mining the remarkable 70,000-page archive of this Provençal humanist and polymath, Peter N. Miller recovers a lost Mediterranean world of the early seventeenth century that was dominated by the sea: the ceaseless activity of merchants, customs officials, and ships' captains at the center of Europe's sprawling maritime networks. Peiresc's Mediterranean World reconstructs the web of connections that linked the bustling port city of Marseille to destinations throughout the Western Mediterranean, North Africa, the Levant, and beyond. As Miller also makes clear, Peiresc's mastery of practical details and his collaboration with local traders and fixers as well as scholars, sheds new light on the structure of knowledge-making in the age of Bacon, Galileo, and Rubens. Miller shows that Peiresc's pursuit of Oriental studies, for example, depended crucially on his abilities as a man of action. Exploring the historian's craft today against the backdrop of Peiresc's diverse research activities, Peiresc's Mediterranean World suggests new possibilities for scholarship on the past, but also for the relationship between the writing of history and its readers"--Provided by publisher

This work traces the "civilizing" of manners in Western Europe since the Middle Ages, and shows how this was related to the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them. Originally published as two volumes: "The History of Manners" and "State Formation and Civilization".

"Anti-Catholicism has become the last acceptable prejudice in what passes for polite society and has become so obvious and so pronounced that to even repeat the fact seems banal." Columnist, television host, author, and practicing Catholic, Michael Coren examines critical aspects of Catholicism as they are encountered, understood, and more importantly, misunderstood, today. For some, Catholicism is the only permanent, absolute body of truth, while for others it is the last permanent, absolute body that has to be opposed and stopped. Opening with a frank discussion of the abuse scandal, Why Catholics Are Right confronts four key issues in Catholic history-the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and Galileo-often used by critics of the Catholic Church to undermine its position and authority. Michael Coren looks at Catholics and theology, explaining what and why Catholics believe what they do-Papal Infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, the Church rather than the Bible alone. Finally, he sets out the pro-life position, and why it is crucial to the Catholic Faith. In this challenging, provocative, and personal book, Michael Coren draws on history, politics, and theology to present the arguments for the truth of Catholicism, and its vital message for the world. As he comments, "The importance of Catholicism is that in a culture where various forms of religious and atheistic fundamentalism, crass materialism, and clawing decadence eat away at civility and civilization the only permanent, consistent and logically complete alternative is the Roman Catholic Church."

Although nineteenth-century Egyptian Jewry was an active and creative part of society, this work from 1969 is the main comprehensive work devoted to an analysis and appraisal of its activities. The period under review commences with the fall of the Mamluk regime in Egypt, and the incipient modernization of the state, with the resulting increase in Jewish activity. It terminates with the end of World War I and the new era in the history of modern Egypt, an era of extreme nationalism that led to the undermining of the Jewish community.

No contemporary French feminist has made a bigger impact in America than Häl_ne Cixous. Brilliant, bold, and combative, author of numerous novels and a gargantuan study of James Joyce, and sponsor of a series of notorious seminars at the Universityøof Paris about women's writing, she has exploited the roles of femme fatale and maitresse d'education in a career that has been spectacularly defiant and productive. Sihanouk is one of Cixous's most ambitious projects: the dramatic portrayal of the conflicts between old and new, East and West, North and South, religion and politics. At its center is the figure of Norodom Sihanouk. Vain when a prince, as king Sihanouk discovered his responsibility to his country and came to embody Cambodia. He used every means to keep his country growing, healthy, and out of the wars of Southeast Asia that consumed Laos and Vietnam. Cixous recognized in Sihanouk a historical figure as fascinating as a tragic king in Shakespeare: a man of uncommon intelligence on whom his country's history pivoted, a man placed by fate into a world of bad choices and surrounded by powerful and relentless antagonists. But Sihanouk gave Cixous something more: a king who is indisputably modern, who has read and loved Shakespeare, and whose story continues. First published in 1985, the play begins with Sihanouk's abdication in 1955 and ends with his arrest by the Khmer Rouge two decades later. The destiny of an entire country unfolds through the fifty characters who appear on stage.

What is meant by attributing texts to Moses in Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism? The answer depends not only on the history of texts but also on the history of concepts of textuality. This book criticizes the terms "Pseudepigraphy" and "Rewritten Bible", which presuppose conceptions of authentic attribution and textual fidelity foreign to ancient Judaism. Instead, this book develops the concept of a discourse whose creativity and authority depend on repeated returns to the exemplary figure and experience of a founder. Attribution to Moses is a central example, whose function is to re-present the experience of revelation at Sinai. Distinctive features of Mosaic discourse are studied in Deuteronomy, Jubilees, the Temple Scroll, and the works of Philo of Alexandria.

Gerald Feldman's history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources, making this a more accurate account of Allianz and the men who directed its business than was ever before possible. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis, touching on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labor camps, and the problems of denazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study--when cooperation with Nazi policies was compulsory and when it was complicit, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated--are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on open access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era. Gerald D. Feldman is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Great Disorder (Oxford, 1993) received the DAAD Book Prize of the German Historical Association and the Book Prize for Central European History from the American Historical Association. He was an invited expert at the London Gold Conference in December 1997 and at the U.S. Conference on Holocaust Assets in Washington, D.C. in December 1998 and served as an advisor to the Presidential Commision on Holocaust Assets in the United States. --

”What purpose is served by showing that England's greatest natural philosopher is flawed … like other mortals?” asks one of the characters in Newton's Darkness. “We need unsullied heroes ” But what if the hero is sullied? At stake is an issue that is as germane today as it was 300 years ago: a scientist's ethics must not be divorced from scientific accomplishments. There is probably no other scientist of whom so many biographies and other historical analyses have been published than Isaac Newton — all of them in the standard format of documentary prose because of their didactic purpose to transmit historical information. Newton's Darkness, however, illuminates the darker aspects of Newton's persona through two historically grounded plays dealing with two of the bitterest struggles in the history of science.The name of Isaac Newton appears in virtually every survey of the public's choice for the most important persons of the second millennium. Yet the term “darkness” can be applied to much of Newton's personality. Adjectives that have been used to describe facets of his personality include “remote”, “lonely”, “secretive”, “introverted”, “melancholic”, “humorless”, “puritanical”, “cruel”, “vindictive” and, perhaps worst of all, “unforgiving”. The trait most relevant to the present book is Newton's obsessively competitive nature, which was often out of proportion to the warranted facts, as demonstrated in three of Newton's best-known bitter conflicts: with the physicist Robert Hooke, the astronomer royal John Flamsteed, and a German contemporary of almost equal intellectual prowess, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the last fight eventually turning into an England vs Continental Europe competition. It is two of these three relentless drawn-out battles that are illuminated in Newton's Darkness in the form of historically grounded drama.After a summary of the historical evidence, the book starts with the Newton-Hooke struggle (Chapter 2), which was conducted mano a mano, and is then followed by little-known aspects of the Newton-Leibniz confrontation (Chapter 3), which was fought largely through surrogates — notably the infamous, anonymous committee of 11 Fellows of the Royal Society.

Eighteen noted historians and political scientists analyze the history of the Jewish minority in France since the Revolution.

Merovingian Military Organization, 481–751 was first published in 1972. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In the area which is now France and was then Gaul, military institutions fundamentally influenced the successes and failures of the Merovingian dynasty, from 481 to 751. Professor Bachrach examines this period in detail, studying the forms of military organization and their relation to political power. Various aspects of the subject are controversial among scholars specializing in early medieval history, yet this is the first book-length study on the subject to be published. For a hundred years scholars have equated the military institutions of Merovingian Gaul with the customs of the Franks, a minority of the population who were rapidly acculturated. Professor Bachrach's study shows the heterogeneous nature of Merovingian military organization, composed of many institutions drawn from non-Frankish people especially from the remains of the Roman Empire. By dealing with all of the significant sources he demonstrates that there was frequent change in the military institutions rather than revolutionary change. The fluid nature of the military organization also is seen to have had profound effects upon the exercise of political power. Probably the most significant finding of the study is that Merovingian military organization, like much else in Merovingian Gaul, resembled Romania far more than Germania .

"Alexander Nemerov is one of the greatest readers of American visual culture. This book has the revelatory power that only wide-ranging curiosity and true independence of mind can achieve." Richard H. Brodhead President of Duke University and author of Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America ; "A benchmark in the writing of art history and in studies of the Civil War, Acting in the Night occupies a category unto itself. It uniquely immerses the reader in a holistic experience of the Civil War and shows Nemerov as a cosummate stylist in the field of American art history."Kathleen Pyne author of Modernism and the Feminine Voice ; "This is a work of criticism that borders on poetry, a brilliant and extremely original book that invites us to rethink to the artistic world we study."Julia Reinhard Lupton author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life ; What can the performance of a single play on one night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, D.C., on October 17, 1863--with Abraham Lincoln in attendance--to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov's inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar,"in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it. For Nemerov, that evening's performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change. --Book Jacket

"The Christian discovery of the Babylonian Talmud is a significant landmark in the long and complex history of anti-Jewish polemic. While the Talmudic corpus developed in the same period as early Christianity, this post-biblical text was largely unknown to the Christians. Full awareness of the Talmud among Christian authors did not arise until the late 1230s, when the Jewish convert Nicholas Donin presented a Latin translation of Talmudic fragments to Pope Gregory IX. Though the Talmud was subsequently put on trial (1240) and burnt (1241/2) in Paris, the controversy surrounding it continued over the following years, as Pope Innocent IV called for a revision of its condemnation. The textual basis for this revision is the Extractiones de Talmud, that is, a Latin translation of 1.922 Talmudic fragments. The articles in this volume shed new light on this monumental translation and its historical context. They also offer critical editions of related texts, such as DoninÕs anti-Talmudic polemic. Authors of the contributions are: Wout van Bekkum, Piero Capelli, Ulisse Cecini, Enric Cort s, îscar de la Cruz Palma, Federico Dal Bo, Alexander Fidora, Gšrge K. Hasselhoff, MoisŽs Orfali, Ursula Ragacs and Eulˆlia Vernet i Pons."

Hang on for a Wild Journey through the Political and Spiritual Adventures of the Baby-Boom Generation Join Wes "Scoop" Nisker as he takes us on a hilarious, wild ride through the heyday of the Beats and the Hippies and the birth of the modern environmental movement, and the surge of Buddhism in the West.

Drawing on newly declassified documents, this behind-the-scenes story of Israel's first year as a sovereign state presents revelations about the attitudes and actions of the Jewish state-builders