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645 books match the query 'Judaism' and 45 start with j

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Jerusalem 1900

The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities

Vincent Lemire

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Perhaps the most contested patch of earth in the world, Jerusalem’s Old City experiences consistent violent unrest between Israeli and Palestinian residents, with seemingly no end in sight. Today, Jerusalem’s endless cycle of riots and arrests appears intractable—even unavoidable—and it looks unlikely that harmony will ever be achieved in the city. But with Jerusalem 1900, historian Vincent Lemire shows us that it wasn’t always that way, undoing the familiar notion of Jerusalem as a lost cause and revealing a unique moment in history when a more peaceful future seemed possible.

In this masterly history, Lemire uses newly opened archives to explore how Jerusalem’s elite residents of differing faiths cooperated through an intercommunity municipal council they created in the mid-1860s to administer the affairs of all inhabitants and improve their shared city. These residents embraced a spirit of modern urbanism and cultivated a civic identity that transcended religion and reflected the relatively secular and cosmopolitan way of life of Jerusalem at the time. These few years would turn out to be a tipping point in the city’s history—a pivotal moment when the horizon of possibility was still open, before the council broke up in 1934, under British rule, into separate Jewish and Arab factions. Uncovering this often overlooked diplomatic period, Lemire reveals that the struggle over Jerusalem was not historically inevitable—and therefore is not necessarily intractable. Jerusalem 1900 sheds light on how the Holy City once functioned peacefully and illustrates how it might one day do so again.

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Jerusalem of Lithuania

A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History

Jerold C. Frakes

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Yerusholayim d’lite: di yidishe kultur in der lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania: A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History) by Jerold C. Frakes contains cultural, literary, and historical readings in Yiddish that vividly chronicle the central role Vilnius (Lithuania) played in Jewish culture throughout the past five centuries. It includes many examples of Yiddish literature, historiography, sociology, and linguistics written by and about Litvaks and includes work by prominent Yiddish poets, novelists, raconteurs, journalists, and scholars. In addition, Frakes has supplemented the primary texts with many short essays that contextualize Yiddish cultural figures, movements, and historical events.

Designed especially for intermediate and advanced readers of Yiddish (from the second-year of instruction), each text is individually glossed, including not only English definitions, but also basic grammatical information that will enable intermediate readers to progress to an advanced reading ability.

Because of its unique content, Yerusholayim d’lite will be of interest not only to university students of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, but it will be an invaluable resource for scholars and Yiddish reading groups and clubs worldwide, as well as for all general readers interested in Yiddish-language culture.

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Jerusalem

Or on Religious Power and Judaism

Moses Mendelssohn

Brandeis University Press, 1983

A classic text of enduring significance, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) stands as a powerful plea for the separation of church and state and also as the first attempt to present Judaism as a religion eminently compatible with the ideas of the Enlightenment. Allan Arkush’s new translation, drawing upon the great strides made by Mendelssohn research in recent decades, does full justice to contemporary insights into the subject while authentically reflecting a distinguished eighteenth-century text. Alexander Altmann’s learned introduction opens up the complex structure and background of Mendelssohn’s ideas. His detailed commentary, keyed to the text, provides references to literary sources and interpretations of the philosopher’s intent.

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Jew

Baker, Cynthia M

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Jew. The word possesses an uncanny power to provoke and unsettle. For millennia, Jew has signified the consummate Other, a persistent fly in the ointment of Western civilization’s grand narratives and cultural projects. Only very recently, however, has Jew been reclaimed as a term of self-identification and pride.

With these insights as a point of departure, this book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the key word Jew—a term that lies not only at the heart of Jewish experience, but indeed at the core of Western civilization. Examining scholarly debates about the origins and early meanings of Jew, Cynthia M. Baker interrogates categories like “ethnicity,” “race,” and “religion” that inevitably feature in attempts to define the word. Tracing the term’s evolution, she also illuminates its many contradictions, revealing how Jew has served as a marker of materialism and intellectualism, socialism and capitalism, worldly cosmopolitanism and clannish parochialism, chosen status, and accursed stigma.

Baker proceeds to explore the complex challenges that attend the modern appropriation of Jew as a term of self-identification, with forays into Yiddish language and culture, as well as meditations on Jew-as-identity by contemporary public intellectuals. Finally, by tracing the phrase new Jews through a range of contexts—including the early Zionist movement, current debates about Muslim immigration to Europe, and recent sociological studies in the United States—the book provides a glimpse of what the word Jew is coming to mean in an era of Internet cultures, genetic sequencing, precarious nationalisms, and proliferating identities.

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Jewish Allegory in Eighteenth-Century Christian Imagination

Rebecca K. Esterson

SBL Press, 2023

Rebecca K. Esterson explores how Christian methods of biblical interpretation shifted during the eighteenth century, producing a rhetorical rejection of allegory while embracing literalism. Under the influence of Enlightenment concepts of human reason and advances in the experimental sciences, Christian interpreters began casting Jewish biblical interpretation as allegorical, while presenting Christian interpretation as literal. This shift in self-understanding allowed Christians to portray their own interpretations as scientifically, philosophically, and historically superior, resulting in a new way of othering the Jewish people. This study of biblical exegesis, theology, philosophy, and the arts in English, Swedish, and German contexts is an essential resource for scholars interested in biblical reception history and the history of Jewish-Christian relations.

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Jewish Biblical Exegesis from Islamic Lands

The Medieval Period

Meira Polliack

SBL Press, 2019

An accessible point of entry into the rich medieval religious landscape of Jewish biblical exegesis s

Medieval Judeo-Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible and their commentaries provide a rich source for understanding a formative period in the intellectual, literary, and cultural history and heritage of Jews in Islamic lands. The carefully selected texts in this volume offer intriguing insight into Arabic translations and commentaries by Rabbanite and Karaite Jewish exegetes from the tenth to the twelfth centuries CE, arranged according to the three divisions of the Torah, the Former and Latter Prophets, and the Writings. Each text is embedded within an essay discussing its exegetical context, reception, and contribution.

Features:

Focus on underrepresented medieval Jewish commentators of the Eastern world
A list of additional resources, including major Judeo-Arabic commentators in the medieval period
Previously unpublished texts from the Cairo Geniza

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Jewish Childhood in Kraków

A Microhistory of the Holocaust

Joanna Sliwa

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Winner of the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Holocaust Library

Jewish Childhood in Kraków is the first book to tell the history of Kraków in the second World War through the lens of Jewish children’s experiences. Here, children assume center stage as historical actors whose recollections and experiences deserve to be told, analyzed, and treated seriously.

Sliwa scours archives to tell their story, gleaning evidence from the records of the German authorities, Polish neighbors, Jewish community and family, and the children themselves to explore the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and in Kraków in particular. A microhistory of a place, a people, and daily life, this book plumbs the decisions and behaviors of ordinary people in extraordinary times.

Offering a window onto human relations and ethnic tensions in times of rampant violence, Jewish Childhood in Kraków is an effort both to understand the past and to reflect on the position of young people during humanitarian crises.

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Jewish Continuity in America

Creative Survival in a Free Society

Abraham J. Karp

University of Alabama Press, 1998

Presents an overview of a life's work by a preeminent scholar and brings new insight to the challenge of American Jewish continuity

Jews have historically lived within a paradox of faith and fear: faith that they are an eternal people and fear that their generation may be the last. In the United States, the Jewish community has faced to a heightened degree the enduring question of identity and assimilation: How does the Jewish community in this free, open, pluralistic society discover or create factors-both ideological and existential-that make group survival beneficial to the larger society and rewarding to the individual Jew?

Abraham J. Karp's Jewish Continuity in America focuses on the three major sources of American Judaism's continuing vitality: the synagogue, the rabbinate, and Jewish religious pluralism. Particularly illuminating is Karp's examination of the coexistence and unity-in-diversity of American religious Jewry's three divisions-Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative-and of how this Jewish religious pluralism fits into the larger picture of American religious pluralism.

Informing the larger enterprise through sharp and full delineation of discrete endeavors, the essays collected in Jewish Continuity in America-some already acknowledged as classics, some appearing here for the first time-describe creative individual and communal responses to the challenge of Jewish survival. As the title suggests, this book argues that continuity in a free and open society demands a high order of creativity, a creativity that, to be viable, must be anchored in institutions wholly pledged to continuity.

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Jewish Education

Ari Y Kelman

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Most writing about Jewish education has been preoccupied with two questions: What ought to be taught? And what is the best way to teach it? Ari Y Kelman upends these conventional approaches by asking a different question: How do people learn to engage in Jewish life? This book, by centering learning, provides an innovative way of approaching the questions that are central to Jewish education specifically and to religious education more generally.

At the heart of Jewish Education is an innovative alphabetical primer of Jewish educational values, qualities, frameworks, catalysts, and technologies which explore the historical ways in which Jewish communities have produced and transmitted knowledge. The book examines the tension between Jewish education and Jewish Studies to argue that shifting the locus of inquiry from “what people ought to know” to “how do people learn” can provide an understanding of Jewish education that both draws on historical precedent and points to the future of Jewish knowledge.

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Jewish Fictional Letters from Hellenistic Egypt

The Epistle of Aristeas and Related Literature

L. Michael White

SBL Press, 2017

The first Greek text of the Epistle of Aristeas published in more than a century

The Greek text Epistle of Aristeas is a Jewish work of the late Hellenistic period that recounts the origins of the Septuagint. Long recognized as a literary fiction, the Epistle of Aristeas has been variously dated from the third century BCE to the first century CE. As a result, its epistolary features, and especially those in which the putative author, Aristeas, addresses his brother and correspondent, Philocrates, have largely been ignored. In light of more recent scholarship on epistolary literature in the Greco-Roman world, however, this volume presents for the first time a complete Greek text and English Translation with introduction, notes, and commentary of the Epistle of Aristeas with key testimonia from Philo, Josephus, and Eusebius, as well as other related examples of Jewish fictional letters from the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.

Features

Relevant excerpts from Eupolemus, 2 Maccabees, 3 Maccabees, and the Greek Additions to Esther with translations and introductions
A critical introduction to ancient Greek letter-writing
An outline of epistolary features in the text

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Jewish Life in Muslim Libya

Rivals and Relatives

Harvey E. Goldberg

University of Chicago Press, 1990

In 1949 more than 35,000 Jews lived in Libya, but close to ninety percent had left before Libya attained its independence in 1952. Jewish Life in Muslim Libya combines historical and anthropological perspectives in depicting the changing relations between Muslims and Jews in Libya from the early nineteenth century up to the middle of the twentieth century.

Harvey E. Goldberg shows that the cultural and religious worlds of the Jewish and Muslim communities in Libya were deeply intertwined in daily life and largely remained so despite political and social changes under successive Ottoman and Italian rule. He documents the intricate symbolic linkages of Jews and Muslims in different periods and in a variety of settings. His accounts of traditional Jewish weddings, of mock fights between Jewish teams that took place in early nineteenth-century Tripoli, and of the profession of street peddling demonstrate that, despite age-old images of Jews as outsiders or infidels, Jews were also an essential and familiar part of the local Islamic society.

Goldberg's narrative continues through the British Military Administration in Libya, a period which saw growing Libyan nationalism and, in 1945, three days of riots in which more than 130 Jews were killed. Goldberg reflects on how these events both expressed and exacerbated a rupture in the social fabric linking Muslims and Jews, setting the scene for the mass emigration of Libyan Jews from their homeland.

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Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New

Edited by Philip V. Bohlman

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Tackling the myriad issues raised by Sander Gilman’s provocative opening salvo—”Are Jews Musical?”—this volume’s distinguished contributors present a series of essays that trace the intersections of Jewish history and music from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Covering the sacred and the secular, the European and the non-European, and all the arenas where these realms converge, these essays recast the established history of Jewish culture and its influences on modernity. Mitchell Ash explores the relationship of Jewish scientists to modernist artists and musicians, while Edwin Seroussi looks at the creation of Jewish sacred music in nineteenth-century Vienna. Discussing Jewish musicologists in Austria and Germany, Pamela Potter details their contributions to the “science of music” as a modern phenomenon. Kay Kaufman Shelemay investigates European influence in the music of an Ethiopian Jewish community, and Michael P. Steinberg traces the life and works of Charlotte Salomon, whose paintings staged the destruction of the Holocaust. Bolstered by Philip V. Bohlman’s wide-ranging introduction and epilogue, and featuring lush color illustrations and a complementary CD of the period’s music, this volume is a lavish tribute to Jewish contributions to modernity.

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Jewish Peoplehood

An American Innovation

Pianko, Noam

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Winner of the 2017 Saul Viener Book Prize from the American Jewish Historical Society

Although fewer American Jews today describe themselves as religious, they overwhelmingly report a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Indeed, Jewish peoplehood has eclipsed religion—as well as ethnicity and nationality—as the essence of what binds Jews around the globe to one another. In Jewish Peoplehood, Noam Pianko highlights the current significance and future relevance of “peoplehood” by tracing the rise, transformation, and return of this novel term.

The book tells the surprising story of peoplehood. Though it evokes a sense of timelessness, the term actually emerged in the United States in the 1930s, where it was introduced by American Jewish leaders, most notably Rabbi Stephen Wise and Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, with close ties to the Zionist movement. It engendered a sense of unity that transcended religious differences, cultural practices, geographic distance, economic disparity, and political divides, fostering solidarity with other Jews facing common existential threats, including the Holocaust, and establishing a closer connection to the Jewish homeland. But today, Pianko points out, as globalization erodes the dominance of nationalism in shaping collective identity, Jewish peoplehood risks becoming an outdated paradigm. He explains why popular models of peoplehood fail to address emerging conceptions of ethnicity, nationalism, and race, and he concludes with a much-needed roadmap for a radical reconfiguration of Jewish collectivity in an increasingly global era.

Innovative and provocative, Jewish Peoplehood provides fascinating insight into a term that assumes an increasingly important position at the heart of American Jewish and Israeli life.

For additional information go to:

http://www.noampianko.net

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Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848

Sven-Erik Rose

Brandeis University Press, 2014

In this book Rose illuminates the extraordinary creativity of Jewish intellectuals as they reevaluated Judaism with the tools of a German philosophical tradition fast emerging as central to modern intellectual life. While previous work emphasizes the “subversive” dimensions of German-Jewish thought or the “inner antisemitism” of the German philosophical tradition, Rose shows convincingly the tremendous resources German philosophy offered contemporary Jews for thinking about the place of Jews in the wider polity. Offering a fundamental reevaluation of seminal figures and key texts, Rose emphasizes the productive encounter between Jewish intellectuals and German philosophy. He brings to light both the complexity and the ambivalence of reflecting on Jewish identity and politics from within a German tradition that invested tremendous faith in the political efficacy of philosophical thought itself.

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Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice

The Works of Sarra Copia Sulam in Verse and Prose Along with Writings of Her Contemporaries in Her Praise, Condemnation, or Defense

Sarra Copia Sulam

University of Chicago Press, 2009

The first Jewish woman to leave her mark as a writer and intellectual, Sarra Copia Sulam (1600?–41) was doubly tainted in the eyes of early modern society by her religion and her gender. This remarkable woman, who until now has been relatively neglected by modern scholarship, was a unique figure in Italian cultural life, opening her home, in the Venetian ghetto, to Jews and Christians alike as a literary salon.

For this bilingual edition, Don Harrán has collected all of Sulam’s previously scattered writings—letters, sonnets, a Manifesto—into a single volume. Harrán has also assembled all extant correspondence and poetry that was addressed to Sulam, as well as all known contemporary references to her, making them available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Featuring rich biographical and historical notes that place Sulam in her cultural context, this volume will provide readers with insight into the thought and creativity of a woman who dared to express herself in the male-dominated, overwhelmingly Catholic Venice of her time.

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Jewish Prince in Moslem Spain

Selected Poems of Samuel Ibn Nagrela

Samuel Ibn Nagrela

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Translated by Leon J. Weinberger

Of all the Hebrew poets of the 'Golden Age' in Spain, Samuel Ibn Nagrela (993-1056 A.D.) remains perhaps the most fascinating personality. A leading statesman in the kingdom of Granada, he was as successful in court as on the battlefield, maintaining a position of power for several decades while walking a political tightrope. Endowed with great literary talents, he opened up new paths in Hebrew poetry, and his mastery of its metrical intricacies was as consummate as his political and military skill.

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Jewish Roots in Southern Soil

A New History

Edited by Marcie Ferris and Mark I. Greenberg

Brandeis University Press, 2006

Jews have long been a presence in the American South, first arriving in the late seventeenth century as part of exploratory voyages from Europe to the New World. Two of the nation’s earliest Jewish communities were founded in Savannah in 1733 and Charleston in 1749. By 1800, more Jews lived in Charleston than in New York City. Today, Jews comprise less than one half of one percent of the southern population but provide critical sustenance and support for their communities. Nonetheless, southern Jews have perplexed scholars. For more than a century, historians have wrestled with various questions. Why study southern Jewish history? What is the southern Jewish experience? Is southern Jewish culture distinctive from that of other regions of the country, and if so, why? Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History addresses these questions through the voices of a new generation of scholars of the Jewish South. Each of this book’s thirteen chapters reflects a response with particular attention paid to new studies on women and gender; black/Jewish relations and the role of race, politics, and economic life; popular and material culture; and the changes wrought by industrialization and urbanization in the twentieth century. Essays address historical issues from the colonial era to the present and in every region of the South. Topics include assimilation and American Jewish identity, southern Jewish women writers, the Jewish Confederacy, Jewish peddlers, southern Jewish racial identity, black/Jewish relations, demographic change, the rise of American Reform Judaism, and Jews in southern literature.

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Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Between History and Faith

Nils Roemer

University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

German Jews were fully assimilated and secularized in the nineteenth century—or so it is commonly assumed. In Jewish Scholarship and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Nils Roemer challenges this assumption, finding that religious sentiments, concepts, and rhetoric found expression through a newly emerging theological historicism at the center of modern German Jewish culture.
Modern German Jewish identity developed during the struggle for emancipation, debates about religious and cultural renewal, and battles against anti-Semitism. A key component of this identity was historical memory, which Jewish scholars had begun to infuse with theological perspectives beginning in the 1850s. After German reunification in the early 1870s, Jewish intellectuals reevaluated their enthusiastic embrace of liberalism and secularism. Without abandoning the ideal of tolerance, they asserted a right to cultural religious difference for themselves--an ideal they held to even more tightly in the face of growing anti-Semitism. This newly re-theologized Jewish history, Roemer argues, helped German Jews fend off anti-Semitic attacks by strengthening their own sense of their culture and tradition.

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Jewish Soul Food

Traditional Fare and What It Means

Carol Ungar

Brandeis University Press, 2015

Jewish traditional foods often have symbolic meanings. A Passover matzo is a taste of Egyptian slavery. The Hanukkah latke reminds us of the little jug of oil that burned, miraculously, for eight nights. Noshing hamentaschen at Purim, we remember the villain Haman, and his thwarted plan to destroy the Jews. Even more than in the synagogue, Jewish life takes place around the dining table. Jewish sages compare the dining table to an altar, and that isn’t an exaggeration. Jewish meals are ceremonies and celebrations that forge a pathway between body and soul. In this unique cookbook, Carol Ungar links the cultural and religious symbolism of Jewish foods to more than one hundred recipes drawn from international Jewish cultures and traditions. She offers easy-to-follow recipes for Shabbat meals and all the Jewish holidays, from Rosh Hashana to the nine days before Tisha b’Av, along with fascinating briefs on how many Jewish foods—challah, kreplach, farfel, and more—express core Jewish beliefs. With ingredients that can be found in any supermarket, and recipes adapted for the time- and health-conscious cook, this volume is for anyone who wishes to flavor Shabbat and holiday meals with Jewish soul.

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Jewish Studies

A Theoretical Introduction

Bush, Andrew

Rutgers University Press, 2011

Jewish Studies, the first volume in a groundbreaking new series, Key Words in Jewish Studies, introduces the basic approach of the series by organizing discussion around key concepts in the field that have emerged over the last two centuries: history and science, race and religion, self and community, identity and memory. The book is oriented by contemporary critical theory, especially feminist and postcolonial studies, and the multidisciplinary approaches of cultural studies.

By looking backward and forward—and across continents and disciplines—to unearth the evolution of the scholarly study of Jews, Andrew Bush provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of Jewish studies from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present. In the course of engaging scholarship on periods from the classical to the contemporary and from the disciplines of history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and literary studies, Bush questions male-dominated and Ashkenazi-centric visions of the field. He concludes with an experimental exposition of a new Jewish studies for a time where attention to difference has overtaken the security of canons and commonalities.

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Jewish Temple Theology and the Mystery of the Cross

Atonement and the Two Goats of Yom Kippur

Richard J. Barry IV

Catholic University of America Press, 2023

On the Day of Atonement, two goats were brought before the high priest at the temple. One was chosen as the goat for the Lord, a spotless sacrifice, and the other was set aside for Azazel, doomed to bear sins into the wilderness. Jewish Temple Theology and the Mystery of the Cross shows how a theological appreciation for the two movements of Yom Kippur makes it possible to identify the paradox at the heart of Christian soteriology: in his single atoning act, Jesus Christ fulfills the work of both goats, without confusion, without division. Appreciation for this paradox helps illuminate many of the doctrinal debates in the history of Christian soteriology and offers a compelling way forward. Jewish Temple Theology and the Mystery of the Cross begins with a survey of biblical geography: first, a rich theological pilgrimage to Mount Zion, the home of beauty, goodness, and truth, and then to the surrounding desert, the wilderness of sin and sorrow. To appreciate the Yom Kippur liturgy, and to understand the priestly word “atonement,” one must be oriented by this cosmic stage. Drawing on the best modern historical-critical scholarship, this volume reveals the wonders hidden in Leviticus and shows how a sophisticated theological interpretation of this book leads to breakthroughs in our understanding of Christ’s saving work. Seeing the mystery of the cross from the perspective of the ancient Jewish scriptures has surprising results. For example, Richard Barry shows how Hans Urs von Balthasar’s controversial theology of Holy Saturday is a compelling development of Azazel-goat soteriology; it is not only biblically licit but is in some ways mandated by the logic of Yom Kippur. At the same time, David Bentley Hart is celebrated for the way he powerfully advances modern YHWH-goat soteriology, yet obedience to the logic of Yom Kippur also necessitates a nuanced biblical critique of his muscular universalism. How can Christ fulfill the seemingly contradictory movements of both goats in a single saving work? Grappling with that question, Jewish Temple Theology and the Mystery of the Cross seeks to draw nearer to the heart of the mystery of salvation.

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Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism

Edited by Geoffrey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Darwin’s theory of evolution transformed the life sciences and made profound claims about human origins and the human condition, topics often viewed as the prerogative of religion. As a result, evolution has provoked a wide variety of religious responses, ranging from angry rejection to enthusiastic acceptance. While Christian responses to evolution have been studied extensively, little scholarly attention has been paid to Jewish reactions. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism is the first extended meditation on the Jewish engagement with this crucial and controversial theory.

The contributors to Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism—from several academic disciplines and two branches of the rabbinate—present case studies showing how Jewish discussions of evolution have been shaped by the intersections of faith, science, philosophy, and ideology in specific historical contexts. Furthermore, they examine how evolutionary theory has been deployed when characterizing Jews as a race, both by Zionists and by anti-Semites. Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism addresses historical and contemporary, as well as progressive and Orthodox, responses to evolution in America, Europe, and Israel, ultimately extending the history of Darwinism into new religious domains.

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Jewish Treasures from Oxford Libraries

Edited by Rebecca Abrams & César Merchán-Hamann

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020

Representing four centuries of collecting and a thousand years of Jewish history, this book brings together Hebrew manuscripts and rare books from the Bodleian Library and Oxford colleges. Highlights of the extraordinary collections include a fragment of Maimonides’ autograph draft of the Mishneh Torah, the earliest dated fragment of the Talmud, exquisitely illuminated manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, stunning festival prayer books, and one of the oldest surviving Jewish seals in England. Lavishly illustrated essays by experts in the field bring these outstanding works to life, exploring the personalities and diverse motivations of their original collectors.

Saved for posterity by religious scholarship, intellectual rivalry, and political ambition, these extraordinary collections also detail the consumption and circulation of knowledge across the centuries, forming a social and cultural history of objects moved across borders from person to person. Together, they offer a fascinating journey through Jewish intellectual and social history.

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Jewish Universalisms

Mendelssohn, Cohen, and Humanity’s Highest Good

Jeremy Fogel

Brandeis University Press, 2023

An original and comprehensive comparison of the universalisms of two major modern Jewish philosophers.

Any version of universalism relevant to a more attentive, pluralistic, and postcolonial outlook would balance the urgent current need for a universalistic perspective with the desire to maintain the richness of human diversity. The modern Jewish philosophers who sought to partake in the Enlightenment’s universalistic vision while maintaining their distinct identities as members of a religious minority within Europe offer insightful answers.

Jewish Universalisms analyzes how two major figures, Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, dealt with the perceived tension between the universal values characteristic of the Enlightenment and aspects of Judaism often depicted as particularistic and parochial. Jeremy Fogel joins this lively debate in modern Jewish philosophy, offering a comparative examination of these thinkers and analyzing their worldviews from an innovative axiological perspective. Fogel writes that to gain a precise understanding of how Mendelssohn and Cohen argued for the concordance of Judaism and universalism, one must first seek out what they delineated as ultimately valuable. Then one can work out how that highest good, and the method of valuation it sustains, are universal.

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Jewish in America

Sara Blair and Jonathan Freedman, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2004

"Jewish culture in America is creating a genuinely new archive---a powerful admixture of texts old and new, Jewish and gentile, sacred and secular, on which our writers and critics offer creative commentary and to which they make compelling response. Shaped in the American crucible of race and ethnicity, pushed and pulled by the American traditions of ahistorical and individualist thinking, empowered by a powerful sacramental and hermeneutic tradition yet challenged by that tradition's stunning variety of inflections, impelled to furious response by world crisis, these writers testify not only to the anguishing and joyous complexity of being Jewish in America, but the creative energies such multiplicity generates."
-From the Introduction

This rare and original work of cultural studies offers uncommon and engaging perspectives-as well as provocative and humorous insights-on what it means to be Jewish in America.

Jewish in America features poetry, art, essays, and stories from an impressive and respected list of contributors, including among others Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Kostelanetz, Jacqueline Osherow, Robert Pinsky, Sharon Pomerantz, Nancy Reisman, Grace Schulman, Louis Simpson, Alisa Solomon, and Stephen J. Whitfield.

In addition to pieces by some of the country's leading writers, the book features a stunning gallery of original photographs that transport the viewer from the crowded Coney Island beaches of the 1940s to the landscapes of Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1990s.

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Jewish on Their Own Terms

How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism

Thompson, Jennifer A

Rutgers University Press, 0

Over half of all American Jewish children are being raised by intermarried parents. This demographic group will have a tremendous impact on American Judaism as it is lived and practiced in the coming decades. To date, however, in both academic studies about Judaism and in the popular imagination, such children and their parents remain marginal.

Jennifer A. Thompson takes a different approach. In Jewish on Their Own Terms, she tells the stories of intermarried couples, the rabbis and other Jewish educators who work with them, and the conflicting public conversations about intermarriage among American Jews. Thompson notes that in the dominant Jewish cultural narrative, intermarriage symbolizes individualism and assimilation. Talking about intermarriage allows American Jews to discuss their anxieties about remaining distinctively Jewish despite their success in assimilating into American culture.

In contrast, Thompson uses ethnography to describe the compelling concerns of all of these parties and places their anxieties firmly within the context of American religious culture and morality. She explains how American and traditional Jewish gender roles converge to put non-Jewish women in charge of raising Jewish children. Interfaith couples are like other Americans in often harboring contradictory notions of individual autonomy, universal religious truths, and obligations to family and history.

Focusing on the lived experiences of these families, Jewish on Their OwnTerms provides a complex and insightful portrait of intermarried couples and the new forms of American Judaism that they are constructing.

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Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust

Baigell, Matthew

Rutgers University Press, 1997

Jewish themes in American art were not very visible until the last two decades, although many famous twentieth-century artists and critics were and are Jewish. Few artists responded openly to the Holocaust until the 1960s, when it finally began to act as a galvanizing force, allowing Jewish-American artists to express their Jewish identity in their work. Baigell describes how artists initially deflected their responses into abstract forms or by invoking biblical and traditional figures and then in more recent decades confronted directly Holocaust imagery and memory. He traces the development of artistic work from the late 1930s to the present in a moving study of a long overlooked topic in the history of American art.

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Jewish-Catholic Engagements on Israel

Holy Land, Political Territory, or Theological Promise?

Gavin D'Costa

Catholic University of America Press, 2025

This is the first volume of its kind, bringing together a group of international Jewish and Catholic scholars in creative conversation addressing the question of the status of the land called Israel. Is Israel best viewed as political territory, the ‘Holy Land’, or part of the biblical promise? If committing to one of these options, what are the theological and political consequences? The book is divided into sections that take the reader through several related questions that bear upon this topic. There is a preface with an overview of how far Catholic Jewish conversations have gone since Nostra Aetate, and how these conversations have now begun to address the land. Then there is an attempt to advance positive theological cases by Catholics and Jews affirming the people in the land as theologically significant, not without difficulties regarding the state itself. The next section deals with the bible/Tanakh as the basis of such claims and addresses the different reading strategies by each community. One of the central questions is then addressed: what of the Palestinian people, do the biblical promise to the Jewish people spell disaster for the Palestinians? Can revelation mean dispossession? The following essays address a stumbling block for both groups: do Jewish and Christian theologies underwrite a nation state? Isn’t this option perilously close to God underwriting nationalism? The book ends with subtle critiques of the entire venture undertaken in this volume. Essential reading for Catholic Jewish relations and one that addresses one of the most pressing contemporary questions for both religions.

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Jews and Gender

Responses to Otto Weininger

Nancy Harrowitz

Temple University Press, 1994

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Jews and Gentiles in Early America

1654-1800

William Pencak

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"Jews and Gentiles in Early America is the best account I have seen about Jews in America in this era. William Pencak's research is extensive and the informative depth with which he addresses important political issues is unsurpassed. His analysis is unfailingly sophisticated and virtually unchallengeable. He paints with a broad stroke, putting his narrative and interpretations not only in a wide American context, but also in an international scope. . . . [A]n exceptional contribution to American Jewish history and colonial history in general." -Frederic Cople Jaher, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana "Bill Pencak is no stranger either to novel topics or unconventional ideas. In this eminently readable and substantive contribution to the history of Jews in early America, Pencak has once again pushed the boundaries of debate in original and constructive ways." ---Edith Gelles, Stanford University "William Pencak has produced a learned and informative volume on the nature of Jewish-Gentile relations in colonial America. The book's reconstruction of Jewish life in colonial New York, Newport, Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia is based on a broad array of primary and secondary source materials that persuasively demonstrate the fact that, despite a truly remarkable level of social acceptance, colonial Jews simultaneously encountered bouts of rejection. Scholars and general readers alike will be indebted to Dr. Pencak for deepening our understanding of the complex and often contradictory ways in which non-Jews related to their Jewish neighbors during this formative period in the nation's history." ---Dr. Gary P. Zola, Executive Director of The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and Associate Professor of the American Jewish Experience at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Jews and Gentiles in Early America offers a uniquely detailed picture of Jewish life from the mid-seventeenth century through the opening decades of the new republic. Though the first national census in 1790 counted barely three thousand Jews, the Jewish community was nevertheless far more important in the history of early America than their numbers suggest, author William Pencak reveals in this fascinating chronicle of an often-overlooked aspect of American Jewish history. Pencak approaches his topic from the perspective of early American, rather than strictly Jewish, history. Rich in colorful narrative and animated with scenes of early American life, Jews and Gentiles in Early America tells the story of the five communities-New York, Newport, Charleston, Savannah, and Philadelphia-where most of colonial America's small Jewish population lived. How did these communities rise and fall? How did they interact with the larger gentile population? Pencak's exploration of popular anti-semitism in the pre-Revolutionary era describes the persistence of prejudices derived from traditional European society, and his abundantly detailed community studies explore the forms these prejudices took in colonial America, some of which continue to this day.

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Jews in Nazi Berlin

From Kristallnacht to Liberation

Edited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Though many of the details of Jewish life under Hitler are familiar, historical accounts rarely afford us a real sense of what it was like for Jews and their families to live in the shadow of Nazi Germany’s oppressive racial laws and growing violence. With Jews in Nazi Berlin, those individual lives—and the constant struggle they required—come fully into focus, and the result is an unprecedented and deeply moving portrait of a people.

Drawing on a remarkably rich archive that includes photographs, objects, official documents, and personal papers, the editors of Jews in Nazi Berlin have assembled a multifaceted picture of Jewish daily life in the Nazi capital during the height of the regime’s power. The book’s essays and images are divided into thematic sections, each representing a different aspect of the experience of Jews in Berlin, covering such topics as emigration, the yellow star, Zionism, deportation, betrayal, survival, and more. To supplement—and, importantly, to humanize—the comprehensive documentary evidence, the editors draw on an extensive series of interviews with survivors of the Nazi persecution, who present gripping first-person accounts of the innovation, subterfuge, resilience, and luck required to negotiate the increasing brutality of the regime.

A stunning reconstruction of a storied community as it faced destruction, Jews in Nazi Berlin renders that loss with a startling immediacy that will make it an essential part of our continuing attempts to understand World War II and the Holocaust.

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Jews in Nevada

A History

John P. Marschall

University of Nevada Press, 2011

Jews have always been one of Nevada’s most active and influential ethnic minorities. They were among the state’s earliest Euro-American settlers, and from the beginning they have been involved in every area of the state’s life as businessmen, agrarians, scholars, educators, artists, politicians, and civic, professional, and religious leaders. Jews in Nevada is an engaging, multilayered chronicle of their lives and contributions to the state. Here are absorbing accounts of individuals and families who helped to settle and develop the state, as well as thoughtful analyses of larger issues, such as the reasons Jews came to Nevada in the first place, how they created homes and interacted with non-Jews, and how they preserved their religious and cultural traditions as a small minority in a sparsely populated region.

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Jews in the Center

Conservative Synagogues and Their Members

Wertheimer, Jack

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Why do well-educated, highly Americanized, and financially secure Jews join a synagogue and participate in its religious life? This study of Conservative Jews examines the largest movement of synagogue-affiliated Jews in the United States, a group that outnumbers the combined membership of Reform and Orthodox congregations and a population that adheres to a centrist version of Judaism. The scholars who contribute to this study ask a series of provocative questions: How do these Jews negotiate the tensions between the traditional values of their religion and modern sensibilities? What meaning do they find in synagogue participation? How crucial are rabbis in the "success" of congregations?

Written by a team of scholars employing the tools of demography, ethnography, sociology, history, and comparative religious studies, Jews in the Center offers the most comprehensive view of any religious movement within American Judaism----and indeed, one of the most detailed studies of any denomination in American religious life.

Jews in the Center seeks to understand how synagogues function as congregations and to what extent they allow for individual self-expression. By focusing on a mainstream population, this book sheds light on religious people who generally receive the least attention----the broad center who neither retreat from society nor blur all boundaries between their religion and modern American culture.

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Jews in the Center

Conservative Synagogues and Their Members

Wertheimer, Jack

Rutgers University Press, 2000

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Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona

Elka Klein

University of Michigan Press, 2006

Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona traces the development of the Jewish community of Barcelona from 1050 to 1300. Elka Klein challenges the common perception that medieval Jews lived in relative isolation from the surrounding society, argues for the existence of significant cultural common ground between Jews and Christians, and proposes a new model for understanding Jewish communal autonomy and the relationship between Jews and their rulers.

Klein traces the development of the Jewish community of Barcelona in two contexts: the parallel development of the city of Barcelona and the changing relationship of the king to urban communities, Jewish and Christian. Until the later twelfth century, the Jewish community, like the Christian city of Barcelona, was left mostly to its own devices by the counts of Barcelona, who had neither the interest nor the power to interfere in internal affairs. Klein draws on both Hebrew and Latin sources to offer a picture of a communal elite whose power, mostly informal, derived from their influence within the community. This system changed in the later twelfth century as a result of the expansion of comitial-royal administration. Four Jewish families used their positions as bailiffs, accountants, and secretaries to consolidate power within their community. The rule of this courtier elite was short lived; two episodes of communal conflict in the early thirteenth century and increased royal activism led to the institution of a new regime of elected officials in 1241. The book concludes with an examination of the new elite and the implications of increased royal interference in internal affairs.

A central argument of Jews, Christian Society, and Royal Power in Medieval Barcelona is that it is necessary to distinguish between autonomy by default, resulting from the indifference of the ruler, who leaves a community to govern itself; and autonomy by design, guaranteed by selective royal interference. Against the view that royal interference undercut Jewish autonomy, Klein argues that autonomy by default left the community with insufficient power to enforce its decisions; because Catalan kings generally interfered in support of existing structures, autonomy by design in fact strengthened the community.

This book contributes to ongoing debates about the relationship between the cultures of the three religions in the Iberian peninsula. It joins a body of recent scholarship arguing that medieval European Jews and Christians shared considerable cultural common ground.

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Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam

Modern Scholarship, Medieval Realities

Jacob Lassner

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In Jews, Christians, and the Abode of Islam, Jacob Lassner examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined—and continues to define today—the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. Lassner looks closely at the debates occasioned by modern Western scholarship on Islam to throw new light on the social and political status of medieval Jews and Christians in various Islamic lands from the seventh to the thirteenth century. Utilizing a vast array of primary sources, Lassner balances the rhetoric of literary and legal texts from the Middle Ages with other, newly discovered medieval sources that describe life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. Lassner shows just what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out at different times and places in the real world of Christian and Jewish communities under Islamic rule. Finally, he considers what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean for modern scholarship on medieval Islamic civilization and, not the least, for the highly contentious global environment of today.

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Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship

Edited by Jack Kugelmass

University of Illinois Press, 2006

To many, an association between Jews and sports seems almost oxymoronic--yet Jews have been prominent in boxing, basketball, and fencing, and some would argue that hurler Sandy Koufax is America's greatest athlete ever. In Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship, Jack Kugelmass shows that sports--significant in constructing nations and in determining their degree of exclusivity--also figures prominently in the Jewish imaginary. This interdisciplinary collection brings together the perspectives of anthropologists and historians to provide both methodological and regional comparative frameworks for exploring the meaning of sports for a minority population.

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John and Judaism

A Contested Relationship in Context

R. Alan Culpepper

SBL Press, 2017

A window into early Judaism and Christianity

The Gospel of John was written during the period of the emergence of Christianity and its separation from Judaism and bears witness to their contested relationship. This volume contains eighteen cutting-edge essays written by an international group of scholars who interpret for students and general readers what the book tells us about first-century Judaism, the separation of the church from Judaism, and how John's anti-Jewish references are being interpreted today.

Features:

A debate over the process that led to the separation of the church from Judaism, and John's place in that process
A review of recent interpretations of John's anti-Jewish references
An assessment of the current status of Jewish Christian relations

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