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.

What was it like to be poor in the Middle Ages? In the past, the answer to this question came only from institutions and individuals who gave relief to the less fortunate. This book, by one of the top scholars in the field, is the first comprehensive book to study poverty in a premodern Jewish community--from the viewpoint of both the poor and those who provided for them. Mark Cohen mines the richest body of documents available on the matter: the papers of the Cairo Geniza. These documents, located in the Geniza, a hidden chamber for discarded papers situated in a medieval synagogue in Old Cairo, were preserved largely unharmed for more than nine centuries due to an ancient custom in Judaism that prohibited the destruction of pages of sacred writing. Based on these papers, the book provides abundant testimony about how one large and important medieval Jewish community dealt with the constant presence of poverty in its midst. Building on S. D. Goitein's Mediterranean Society and inspired also by research on poverty and charity in medieval and early modern Europe, it provides a clear window onto the daily lives of the poor. It also illuminates private charity, a subject that has long been elusive to the medieval historian. In addition, Cohen's work functions as a detailed case study of an important phenomenon in human history. Cohen concludes that the relatively narrow gap between the poor and rich, and the precariousness of wealth in general, combined to make charity "one of the major agglutinates of Jewish associational life" during the medieval period.

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.

This book presents an ethnographic history of the Old Yishuv. It describes and analyzes a significant community that reflected more than any other the various strands of Jewish life and the constraints and processes acting upon the Jewish world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. .

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.

Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis offers analyses of the cultural, religious, political and intellectual history of Warsaw Jewry, once the leading Jewish metropolis in Europe and the world.

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.

Discusses medieval poetry in Hebrew (plus one example in Old French) dealing with martyrdom in the face of forced conversion. Deals with the ideal of Jewish resistance to persecution, but notes also the influence of Christian culture on Jewish literature. Focuses on Jewish martyrs in Blois, Troyes, and Paris. Notes how Talmud burnings impacted on the literature, reflected in the idea of the immortality of both the Jews and their books. Elucidates how the literature, often directed at the educated Jewish elite (the Tosafists and their pupils), reflected ideals of Jewish life as well as death. Suggests the latter ideal may have led most Ashkenazi Jews to prefer "Kiddush Hashem" or exile to conversion, when faced with that choice.

Text: English, Portugese (translation)

In 1290, the Jews were banished from England. In 1655-1656, Jews once more became a part of British society, returning to the London of Oliver Cromwell, Pepys and Henry Purcell. To commemorate the 350th anniversary of this return, Michelene Wandor has written a sensuous dramatic narrative poem evoking seventeenth-century London, and telling the story of the two men who made this return possible: Oliver Cromwell and Menasseh ben Israel. "Music of the Prophets" is the third in a sequence of long poems celebrating the presence of the Jews in England. The text seduces and challenges with a delicacy and flow, combining open-form experiment with a musical delight in counterpoint, irony and wit.

This tightly focused collection of essays, from an invited seminar of international specialists, centres on the question of the apocalyptic worldview around the time of the Maccabean revolt. What was the nature of apocalyptic at this time? Did the Maccabees themselves have a distinct apocalyptic worldview? These questions lead to other, more specific queries: who of the various groups held such a view? Certain of the essays analyse the characteristics of the apocalypses and related literature in this period, and whether the apocalyptic worldview itself gave rise to historical events or, at least, influenced them. The collection begins with two introductory essays. Both the main and short papers have individual responses, and two considered responses by well-known experts address the entire collection. The volume finishes with a concluding chapter by the lead editor that gives a perspective on the main themes and conclusions arising from the papers and discussion.

Summary: Describes the Second Temple period (the first few centuries before and after the common era) and its influence on the development of Rabbinic Judaism, which is the foundation for all of modern Judaism.

"An indispensible companion text, Texts and Traditions includes the essential documents of the various religious trends of the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods as well as Josephus, Greek and Aramaic inscriptions, classical historians and talmudic sources." --Book Jacket.

"In this volume, Israel Finkelstein studies the world of ancient Israel, including the time-frame for the composition of historiographic texts in the Bible. He discusses key questions such as historical realities behind North Israelite traditions, the impact of Israel on late monarchic Jerusalem, the scope of composition of texts in the Persian period, and the legitimacy needs of the Hasmoneans."