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Called by Choice "the most comprehensive survey of a magnificent era," The Jews of Moslem Spain takes the reader on a journey through history, from 711 C.E. on the slopes of Gibraltar (when the Moslems conquered the Iberian peninsula) through the centuries of the flowering of Jewish culture, "The Golden Age of Spanish Jewry" and closes with the 11th century re-conquest of Spain. The books (Volume 1 and the combined Volumes 2/3) are peopled with soldiers and rabbinic scholars, viziers in the ca...

During the era of Jewish mass migration from Eastern Europe (from the 1880s until the First World War), Switzerland with its liberal policies on foreigners became a key destination for students, revolutionaries, and travelers. The micro-studies and more general approaches of this volume interweave and facilitate a novel take on the transitory spatial history and the Lebenswelt of East European Jews in Switzerland. Topics range from the location of Switzerland on the map of East European Jewish p...

A wonderfully accessible, beautifully illustrated chronicle of Jewish life through the ages, based on the best recent scholarship. With essays by Jane Gerber, Oded Irshai, Ora Limor, Michael Marrus, Derek Penslar, Seth Schwartz, David Sorkin, and Bernard Wasserstein. Maps; black-and-white illustrations; 48 full-color pages.

Histories of ancient Israel have usually focused attention on major figures in powerful positions: kings, prophets, and patriarchs. Kessler asks about the larger social patterns that shaped the everyday life of ordinary people, from the emergence of Israel in the hills of Canaan, to the Jewish populations of Greek city-states in the Hellenistic age. The introductory section includes discussion of social history as discipline and as method, event history and the "long haul," the representation of...

This volume covers the period 1870-1933. Anti-Semitic propaganda in the years after the emancipation of the Jews drew upon an exaggerated belief in their financial, political, or intellectual successes and had as its principal theme the domination, imminent if not already achieved, of the Christian by the Jewish world. Europeans showed an increasing tendency to give a sinister interpretation to all kinds of Jewish activity, to the extent of seeing every social cataclysm, especially war and revol...

Sa'adyah Gaon was an outstanding tenth-century Jewish thinker-a prominent rabbi, philosopher, and exegete. He was a pioneer in the fields in which he toiled, and was an inspiration and basis for later Jewish writing in all these areas. The last major English-language study of his work was published in 1921, long before Genizah research changed the understanding of the time in which he lived. Robert Brody's masterly work, covering Sa'adyah's biography and his main areas of creativity in an access...

Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there - and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Streets - the Lower East Side was the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relation...

"[Dr. Reicher] lived through the Second World War in Poland, dodging bullets, uprisings and deportations--not to mention betrayal, starvation and airless hideouts--in a manner more reminiscent of a talented outlaw than a mild-mannered dermatologist ...It is the impressive simplicity of the good doctor's writing that makes [t]his book resemble [Victor] Klemperer's, and the detailed observations of its report that makes it emotionally memorable...William Carlos Williams once said that people who p...

Tudor Parfitt examines a myth which is based on one of the world's oldest mysteries - what happened to the lost tribes of Israel? Christians and Jews alike have attached great importance to the legendary fate of these tribes which has had a remarkable impact on their ideologies throughout history. Each tribe of Israel claimed descent from one of the twelve sons of Jacob and the land of Israel was eventually divided up between them. Following a schism which formed after the death of Solomon, ten...

This comprehensive collection of print and manuscript sources offers an illuminating history of one of the New World's few non-Christian communities of European origin. The sources in this collection come from the US, the UK, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. The volumes are organized chronologically.

This volume is a reference book on more than a thousand Jewish writers-rabbis, physicians and laymen-active in 18th-century Italy. Each author has a biographical notice, followed by a list of his printed works and manuscripts, their location in the major international judaica collections and a bibliography of the relevant secondary sources. The book is illustrated with more than forty portraits of authors and includes rich analytical and thematic indexes. This work is intended to be a fundamenta...

The volume, composed by excellent scholars from different academic disciplines, is a comprehensive handbook devoted to the complex relationship between modern Judaism and historical thinking in Europe, the United States, and Israel from the Enlightenment to the present. Apart from analyzing the emergence of a new scholarly historical paradigm during this period, the contributions interpret the interaction and the tensions between Jewish historiography and other disciplines such as literature, th...