incl. illust. - Eginhard of Franconia ibn Khordadhbeh Judah Haleli Rabbi Petachia Rabbi Jacob Ven Rabbi R.N. Ha Cohen David Azulai and other travellers

The Black Death of 1348-50 devastated Europe. With mortality estimates ranging from thirty to sixty percent of the population, it was arguably the most significant event of the fourteenth century. Nonetheless, its force varied across the continent, and so did the ways people responded to it. Surprisingly, there is little Jewish writing extant that directly addresses the impact of the plague, or even of the violence that sometimes accompanied it. This absence is particularly notable for Provence and the Iberian Peninsula, despite rich sources on Jewish life throughout the century. In After the Black Death , Susan L. Einbinder uncovers Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century Iberia and Provence. Einbinder's original research reveals a wide, heterogeneous series of Jewish literary responses to the plague, including Sephardic liturgical poetry; a medical tractate written by the Jewish physician Abraham Caslari; epitaphs inscribed on the tombstones of twenty-eight Jewish plague victims once buried in Toledo; and a heretofore unstudied liturgical lament written by Moses Nathan, a survivor of an anti-Jewish massacre that occurred in Tàrrega, Catalonia, in 1348. Through elegant translations and masterful readings, After the Black Death exposes the great diversity in Jewish experiences of the plague, shaped as they were by convention, geography, epidemiology, and politics. Most critically, Einbinder traces the continuity of faith, language, and meaning through the years of the plague and its aftermath. Both before and after the Black Death, Jewish texts that deal with tragedy privilege the communal over the personal and affirm resilience over victimhood. Combined with archival and archaeological testimony, these texts ask us to think deeply about the men and women, sometimes perpetrators as well as victims, who confronted the Black Death. As devastating as the Black Death was, it did not shatter the modes of expression and explanation of those who survived it--a discovery that challenges the applicability of modern trauma theory to the medieval context.

Pesach Bursrein, an old trouper from the Yiddish theater, recalls dramas both onstage and off in this memoir, which he dictated to his wife, Lillian Lux Burstein. The Story of Burstein's successful stage career is played out against the background of political turmoil in Europe, vignettes of life in small towns and big cities, friendships and rivalries among theater folk, family life, emigration to the United States, and tours through Europe, South America, Israel, and South Africa. Every personal anecdote tells the larger history: theater history and also the history of the Yiddish communities who were his audiences. While Burstein is a legend in Yiddish cheater, he was little known outside that world until he was celebrated in Arnon Goldfinger's acclaimed documentary Der Komedia11t. This memoir provides the first window for English readers into the other side of Yiddish culture—the Yiddish burlesque, the traveling Yiddish theater, and the music hall. It will not only delight readers but also reveal a social and cultural history never before described in such detail. Burstein's life is the story of popular Yiddish theater in the first half of the century.

In this landmark collection of contemporary Jewish thought, the editors have drawn on the work of a wide variety of thinkers and activists in Israel and the United States, including charity workers, political demonstrators, conscientious objectors, prison workers, animal rights advocates, mothers and fathers, refuseniks, rabbis, soldiers, journalists, and academics. Gathered here are the personal testimonies and practices of an increasingly vocal and progressive number of Jews.

Explores the question of the kind of canon, privileged status, or Logos, the Torah actually has for the post-modern Western Jew. This book documents the intellectual and spiritual odyssey of one of North America's foremost Jewish biblical scholars.

From the 1850s to the 1950s, photography was one of the most open avenues for Jews in Britain to make a living, as well as to contribute to mainstream culture. If one’s picture was snapped for a price in Britain, the person behind the lens was more than likely born a Jew. Through the 1970s, Jews were prime movers behind nearly all things photographic in Britain, including photojournalism, portrait studios, collecting, applications of photography to the fine arts, and the emergence of photography criticism and history as distinct fields. Yet despite Jews having played such remarkable roles, far out of proportion to their number and in all facets of photography, little attention has been paid to ethnic-religious difference in studies of British photography.Richly illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, Jews and Photography in Britain is the first-ever historical investigation of this topic, ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to Queen Elizabeth’s controversial photo shoot with Annie Leibovitz in 2007. Michael Berkowitz explores subjects such as the attempts of H. W. Barnett to unsettle portrait conventions, the spectacular photo editing of Stefan Lorant, the influence of Erich Salomon on Fleet Street, the inception of the “Gernsheim Corpus” (a seminal resource for art historical research) conceived by Walter and Gertrud Gernsheim, the innovative photography practices at London’s Warburg Institute under Fritz Saxl, and the pioneering efforts at collecting and publishing about photography as history and art by Helmut and Alison Gernsheim.

With our American Philosophy and Religion series, Applewood reissues many primary sources published throughout American history. Through these books, scholars, interpreters, students, and non-academics alike can see the thoughts and beliefs of Americans who came before us.

Hans Kohn's classic work provides a comprehensive overview of the history of Western civilization in the Near East. From ancient Greece to the Islamic Golden Age, Kohn examines the ways in which Western culture has been both shaped and influenced by the Near East. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Out of the ashes of the Nazi concentration camps came an extraordinary love story which caught the public's imagination at the end of World War II. This autobiography tells how the author survived the camps and met her husband, a sergeant working for British intelligence, when he arrived to round up the SS guards for interrogation. Norman Turgel, then a young man, was among the first to enter the camp on April 15, 1945, and like so many battle-hardened soldiers, was deeply shocked and angered by the human suffering and degradation he witnessed. Yet it was here, in the midst of the living evidence of the most terrible suffering that man has ever inflicted on his fellow human beings, that he fell in love at first sight. Gena, a young Polish Jewish inmate of the camp, who had experienced indescribable loss, hardship, and deprivation, was to survive and find happiness against all odds. This is Gena's story: the autobiography of a woman whose strength of spirit enabled her to keep her mother alive and thereby save herself. When Gena married Norman in Germany in October 1945 in a wedding dress made of British parachute silk, the British Army Rabbi proclaimed their love a symbol of hope after so much death. But, Gena still lights a candle in memory of her three brothers and two sisters who died in the Holocaust. And, while her own story has a happy ending, she can never forget.

This synthetic treatment of Josephus and his times has two aims. The first is to establish Josephus' attitudes to the various Judaean aristocratic groups of the first century - priests, descendants of Herod, certain sectarians - and how these attitudes changed. The second aim is more speculative: to connect these changes with actual changes in Judaean politics and society in the c. 30 years of Josephus' literary activity, a critical period of transformation following the destruction of Jerusalem. The first chapter examines Josephus' life from his detection to Vespasian, and suggests that Josephus always retained an interest in current public affairs, particularly those of Judaea. Chapters 2-4 discuss the changes of attitude within the Josephan corpus and place them in the context of the evidence of the coins, inscriptions, Rabbinic literature and pagan historians. It is argued that these changes allow us to trace the decline of the pre-66 aristocracy groups after 70. Chapter 5 argues that there arose a new aristocracy in the 80s and 90s, a rise which left its mark in Josephus' later work.

Crucial to understanding the situation in the Middle East is a grasp of the nature of the conflict, as well as its historical roots. The Indictment shows how the Arab war against Israel has taken shape as an expertly waged propaganda war, and how latent anti-Semitism contributes to the worlds acceptance of thinly veiled lies. Drawing on documented events and news sources, Auschwitz-survivor Sabina Citron takes a fearless look at the roots of Christian anti-Semitism and how it creates a receptive audience for the Arab propaganda war on Israel.

Contents: Vol. 1. Abaúj-Torna County - Máramaros County. Vol. 2. Maros-Torda County - Zemplén County. Vol. 3. Appendixes. Vol. 1 contains a "Historical Overview" by Braham (pp. xv-xcv). Divided by counties, this encyclopedia gives information on the persecution and fate of the Jews in every village, town, and city in Greater Hungary (including areas which are today part of Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine).

When books survive as long as our biblical collection has survived, a certain discrepancy between intention and comprehension is inevitable.

"Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner's concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death"--

When Edith Hofmann sat down to write this book, she was a 19-year-old coming to terms with the fact of her own survival. It is a story which describes a struggle; the struggle to come to terms with a haunting past, the struggle to survive, and the struggle to unburden a broken heart. It also embodies a struggle to form, in language, that which at times all but defies linguistic form. When Hofmann started writing this book she had only been speaking English for two years, and yet she wanted to convey her experiences, in English, to those with whom she had made her home. The cruel reality was that no one really wanted to hear. She poured out her soul, only to be told that 'no one was interested in the war any more'. This was 1950. Some fifty years later she revisited the manuscript, wondering whether such a text would have any value. For fifty years her text had lain in her drawer, waiting to be read. Her story is a novel, but it certainly is not a fiction. Scared for her own safety, Hofmann chose to write in the third person rather than pen a memoir. Every page is bound up with the intricate details of her life, those whom she loved, and those whom she lost; the echoes of those terrible years, and the memory they imposed. In compiling this text, she decided neither to change it, by removing discrepancies or updating anything, which Hofmann wrote in the late 1940s, nor to improve her English, but rather to leave it as a raw and indelible testimony not only to her survival but to her bid to survive survival. You will be moved; not only by what she has written, but by the fact that she wrote at all.