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In this collection of essays, leading New Testament scholars reassess the reciprocal relationship between Matthew and Second Temple Judaism. Some contributions focus on the relationship of the Matthean Jesus to torah, temple, and synagogue, while others explore theological issues of Jewish and gentile ethnicity and universalism within and behind the text.

Ruth Christa Mathieson’s unique reading of Matthew’s parable of the royal wedding feast (Matt 22:1–14), which concludes with the king’s demand that one of the guests be bound and cast out into the outer darkness, focuses on the means of the underdressed guest’s expulsion. Using sociorhetorical interpretation, Mathieson draws the parable into conversation with early Jewish narratives of the angel Raphael binding hands and feet (1 Enoch; Tobit) and the protocol for expelling individuals from the community in Matt 18. She asserts that readers are invited to consider if the person who is bound and cast out is a danger to the little ones of the community of faith unless removed and restrained.

An intellectual biography that reassesses one of the premier Jewish humanists of the mid-twentieth century

In Maurice Samuel: Life and Letters of a Secular Jewish Contrarian, Alan T. Levenson captures the life, works, and milieu of the Romanian-born, English-educated, American belletrist Maurice Samuel. A diaspora intellectual—or a rooted cosmopolitan, as Levenson describes him—Samuel made an indelible mark on many features of contemporary Jewish thought and culture. A generalist in an age of experts, an independent scholar in an age of rabbis and professors, Samuel was one of the most productive and visible members of the group dubbed the “other” New York Jewish intellectuals.

His fame as a public intellectual and popular speaker were well warranted: no mere popularizer, Samuel contributed significantly to four seemingly unrelated but critical areas of modern Jewish thought. Samuel is characterized by some as principally a Zionist, by others as an accomplished translator and many Americans’ first entrée into the world of Yiddish literature, by still others as a polemicist and campaigner against anti-Semitism, and finally as a media-savvy Biblical critic, essayist, and radio personality. But he was all of these things, since Samuel succeeded in an era when it was possible to be a public intellectual without being an expert.

Drawing on Samuel’s vast literary opus, as well as previously unexplored archival material from three continents, this study writes Samuel back into the history of mid-twentieth-century American letters. Levenson argues that Samuel’s varied and substantive contributions demand reconsideration of our assumptions about the means and ends of cultural transmission, and merit him a place as one of twentieth-century American Jewry’s most significant cultural and intellectual voices.

 

The first study of Christian murals created by indigenous artists in sixteenth and seventeenth century Yucatán.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Maya artists painted murals in churches and conventos of Yucatán using traditional techniques to depict iconography brought from Europe by Franciscan friars. The fragmentary visual remains and their placement within religious structures embed Maya conceptions of sacredness beyond the didactic imagery. Mobilizing both cutting-edge technology and tried-and-true analytical methods, art historians Amara Solari and Linda K. Williams reexamine the Maya Christian murals, centering the agency of the people who created them.

The first volume to comprehensively document the paintings, Maya Christian Murals of Early Modern Yucatán collects new research on the material composition of the works, made possible by cutting-edge imaging methods. Solari and Williams investigate pigments and other material resources, as well as the artists and historical contexts of the murals. The authors uncover numerous local innovations in form and content, including images celebrating New World saints, celestial timekeeping, and ritual processions. Solari and Williams argue that these murals were not simply vehicles of coercion, but of cultural “grafting,” that allowed Maya artists to shape a distinctive and polyvocal legacy in their communities.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, thousands of Mayas were expelled, often violently, from their homes in San Juan Chamula and other highland communities in Chiapas, Mexico, by fellow Mayas allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). State and federal authorities generally turned a blind eye to these human rights abuses, downplaying them as local conflicts over religious conversion and defense of cultural traditions. The expelled have organized themselves to fight not only for religious rights, but also for political and economic justice based on a broad understanding of human rights.

This pioneering ethnography tells the intertwined stories of the new communities formed by the Mayan exiles and their ongoing efforts to define and defend their human rights. Focusing on a community of Mayan Catholics, the book describes the process by which the progressive Diocese of San Cristóbal and Bishop Samuel Ruiz García became powerful allies for indigenous people in the promotion and defense of human rights. Drawing on the words and insights of displaced Mayas she interviewed throughout the 1990s, Christine Kovic reveals how the exiles have created new communities and lifeways based on a shared sense of faith (even between Catholics and Protestants) and their own concept of human rights and dignity. She also uncovers the underlying political and economic factors that drove the expulsions and shows how the Mayas who were expelled for not being "traditional" enough are in fact basing their new communities on traditional values of duty and reciprocity.

A new reading strategy for the Thanksgiving Hymns

Hasselbalch asserts that current theories about the social background of Thanksgiving Hymns are unable to explain its heterogeneous character. Instead the author suggests a reading strategy that leaves presumptions about the underlying social contexts aside to instead consider the collection’s hybridity as a clue to understanding the collection as a whole.

Features:

• Systemic Functional Linguistics applied to four Hodayot
• Analysis that highlights the role of a mediator in the agency of God
• An approach that highlights the unity of the collection

Meat and the Birth of Rome explores faunal remains from archaeological sites dating to the early Iron Age through early Republican period in Rome and its environs and challenges a prevailing view of Rome’s exceptionalism. Victoria C. Moses tempers the myth by illuminating the roles of meat production, distribution, and consumption and ritual sacrifice in the social hierarchy, economy, and religious practices as Rome grew. During the transformative period around the eighth century BCE, Romans conserved older foodways and their diverse ritual practices. These findings within the broader zooarchaeological data from peninsular Italy show that, despite Rome’s later success, it shared many early characteristics with its neighbors.

This compelling narrative adds to the current archaeological conversations and research on the history of the eternal city.

The 1935 autobiography of Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz, an Orthodox Jew whose lively recounting of his life in Tsarist Russia and his immigration to San Antonio, Texas, in 1910 captures turbulent changes in early twentieth-century Jewish history

In 1910, at the age of fifty-one, Alexander Ziskind Gurwitz made the bold decision to emigrate with his wife and four children from southeastern Ukraine in Tsarist Russia to begin a new life in Texas. In 1935, in his seventies, Gurwitz composed a retrospective autobiography, Memories of Two Generations, that recounts his personal story both of the rich history of the lost Jewish world of Eastern Europe and of the rambunctious development of frontier Jewish communities in the United States.

In both Europe and America, Gurwitz inhabited an almost exclusively Jewish world. As a boy, he studied in traditional yeshivas and earned a living as a Hebrew language teacher and kosher butcher. Widely travelled, Gurwitz recalls with wit and insight daily life in European shtetls, providing perceptive and informative comments about Jewish religion, history, politics, and social customs. Among the book’s most notable features is his first-hand, insider’s account of the yearly Jewish holiday cycle as it was observed in the nineteenth century, described as he experienced it as a child.

Gurwitz’s account of his arrival in Texas forms a cornerstone record of the Galveston Immigration Movement; this memoir represents the only complete narrative of that migration from an immigrant’s point of view. Gurwitz’s descriptions about the development of a thriving Orthodox community in San Antonio provide an important and unique primary source about a facet of American Jewish life that is not widely known.

Gurwitz wrote his memoir in his preferred Yiddish, and this translation into English by Rabbi Amram Prero captures the lyrical style of the original. Scholar and author Bryan Edward Stone’s special introduction and illuminating footnotes round out a superb edition that offers much to experts and general readers alike.

Essential reading for scholars and students interested in sociology and biblical studies

In this collection scholars of biblical texts and rabbinics engage the work of Barry Schwartz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Georgia. Schwartz provides an introductory essay on the study of collective memory. Articles that follow integrate his work into the study of early Jewish and Christian texts. The volume concludes with a response from Schwartz that continues this warm and fruitful dialogue between fields.

Features:

• Articles that integrate the study of collective memory and social psychology into religious studies
• Essays from Barry Schwartz
• Theories applied rather than left as abstract principles

An exploration of how the ancient Maya engaged with their history by using, altering, and burying stone sculptures.

For the ancient Maya, monumental stone sculptures were infused with agency. As they were used, reused, altered, and buried, such sculptures retained ceremonial meaning. In Memory in Fragments, Megan E. O'Neil explores how ancient Maya people engaged with history through these sculptures, as well as how they interacted with the stones themselves over the course of the sculptures’ long “lives.” Considering Maya religious practices, historiography, and conceptions of materials and things, O’Neil explores how Maya viewers perceived sculptures that were fragmented, scarred, burned, damaged by enemies, or set in unusual locations. In each case, she demonstrates how different human interactions, amid dynamic religious, political, and historical contexts, led to new episodes in the sculptures' lives.

A rare example of cross-temporal and geographical work in this field, Memory in Fragments both compares sculptures within ancient Maya culture across Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize over hundreds of years and reveals how memory may accrue around and be evoked in material remains.

Latin America has been a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution from 1492, when Sepharad Jews were expelled from Spain, until well into the twentieth century, when European Jews sought sanctuary there from the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Vibrant Jewish communities have deep roots in countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, and Chile—though members of these communities have at times experienced the pain of being "the other," ostracized by Christian society and even tortured by military governments. While commonalities of religion and culture link these communities across time and national boundaries, the Jewish experience in Latin America is irreducible to a single perspective. Only a multitude of voices can express it.

This anthology gathers fifteen essays by historians, creative writers, artists, literary scholars, anthropologists, and social scientists who collectively tell the story of Jewish life in Latin America. Some of the pieces are personal tales of exile and survival; some explore Jewish humor and its role in amalgamating histories of past and present; and others look at serious episodes of political persecution and military dictatorship. As a whole, these challenging essays ask what Jewish identity is in Latin America and how it changes throughout history. They leave us to ponder the tantalizing question: Does being Jewish in the Americas speak to a transitory history or a more permanent one?

Menachem Kipnis (1878–1942) was one of the early twentieth-century’s greatest Jewish eastern European ethnomusicologists, folklorists, and photographers. He had a weekly column in the Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt, retelling humorous old folk stories about the fictional Polish town of Chelm, populated exclusively by fools. At the same time, his photographs of Jewish life in eastern Europe regularly appeared in the Forverts (Forward), the most popular Yiddish daily newspaper in the United States. Now, for the first time, Kipnis’s stories and photographs are published together in a single book.

Menachem Kipnis brings these photographs and stories into dialogue with one another, bridging the Jewish communities in Poland and in America during the interwar period. This dialogue, between image and text, between European metropolis and American metropolis, captures a key historical moment when American Jews sought to imagine the lives of their coreligionists in the “Old Country” and eastern European urban Jews sought to distinguish themselves from their Jewish compatriots who were still living in the shtetl. Including an introductory essay, annotations, and an epilogue by Sheila E. Jelen, Menachem Kipnis suggests new ways of understanding both visual and literary depictions of eastern European Jewish culture between the two world wars.

WINNER, Certificate of Excellence in “Publications – Other” from the Illinois State Historical Society’s 2025 Best of Illinois History Awards!

“In the World But Not of It”

Offering a glimpse into a world largely misunderstood by mainstream society, this book documents the period of eight years that Jane Flynn practiced with Mennonites in two different Southern Illinois communities: Stonefort, and Mount Pleasant in Anna. Despite her status as an outsider, Flynn was welcomed and allowed to photograph the Mennonites in their homes, making applesauce, farming, and beekeeping.

Escaping persecution from the Catholic Church in Europe, the Mennonites arrived in America in 1683, settling in what is now Pennsylvania. Today, they live in almost all 50 states, Canada, and South America. To reflect the Mennonites’ manual-labor lifestyle, Flynn processed her black-and-white photographs by hand and hand-printed them in a dark room. The imagery explores the Mennonites’ labors, leisure, and faith by documenting their homes, places of work and worship, and the Illinois Ozark landscape they inhabit.

Similar to the Amish and the Quakers, Mennonites consider the Bible the supreme authority and insist on a separation between church and state. To enact that separation, they distinguish themselves from society in speech, dress, business, recreation, education, pacifism, and by refusing to participate in politics. They believe in nonconformity to the world, discipleship, and being born again through adult baptism. With Mennonites of Southern Illinois, Jane Flynn provides representation for these closed communities and illustrates the Mennonites’ struggle to find and maintain balance between rustic and modern life while remaining faithful to their religious beliefs. 

The rise of merchant capital in Mecca conditioned the development of Meccan social, economic, religious, and political structure. Mahmood Ibrahim traces the roots of capitalism from the emergence of merchants as the main force in Mecca through the first civil war in Islam (656–661). Through a rereading of original Arabic sources and drawing from modern scholarship on the subject, Ibrahim offers a new interpretation of the rise of Islam.

He argues that Islam contributed certain institutional beliefs and practices that unblocked obstacles and helped merchants gain political and economic hegemony over western Asia. Ibrahim contends that, with the conquest of Mecca, the newly formed Muslim state spread its control to the rest of Arabia, which mobilized a significant social force and allowed for further expansion outside Arabia, thus extending merchant control to include new surplus-producing regions, a vast network of trade routes, and wider markets.

This extensively researched study offers a new interpretation of the history of Islam, including the formation of Islamic society and the unfolding of the first civil war. In offering a better understanding of the Umayyad Caliphate that ruled Islam for a century to come, Ibrahim helps lay the groundwork for understanding the Middle East as it is today.

Of interest to scholars of Middle Eastern studies, this important work will be necessary reading for students of Near Eastern and North African history, as well as students of the history of Medieval Europe.

These eighteen essays span more than thirty years of Lavina Fielding Anderson’s concerns about and reflections on issues of inclusiveness in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including her own excommunication for “apostasy” in 1993, followed by twenty-five years of continued attendance at weekly LDS ward meetings. Written with a taste for irony and an eye for documentation, the essays are timeless snapshots of sometimes controversial issues, beginning with official resistance to professionally researched Mormon history in the 1980s. They underscore unanswered questions about gender equality and repeatedly call attention to areas in which the church does not live up to its better self. Compassionately and responsibly, it calls Anderson’s beloved religion back to its holiest nature.

Winner of the 2025 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Analytical-Descriptive Studies 

Winner of the 2023 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer First Book Prize

Judaism in the twenty-first century has seen the rise of the messianic Third Temple movement, as religious activists based in Israel have worked to realize biblical prophecies, including the restoration of a Jewish theocracy and the construction of the third and final Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Through groundbreaking ethnographic research, Messianic Zionism in the Digital Age details how Third Temple visions have gained considerable momentum and political support in Israel and abroad . 
 
The role of technology in this movement’s globalization has been critical. Feldman skillfully highlights the ways in which the internet and social media have contributed to the movement's growth beyond the streets of Jerusalem into communities of former Christians around the world who now identify as the Children of Noah (Bnei Noah). She charts a path for future research while documenting the intimate effects of political theologies in motion and the birth of a new transnational Judaic faith.
 

Engage compelling arguments that challenge prominent positions in Pauline studies

In this innovative book, William E. W. Robinson takes the reader on a journey through Romans 8:1–17 using Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory. Robinson delineates the underlying cognitive metaphors, their structure, their function, what they mean, and how Paul’s audiences then and now are able to comprehend their meaning. He examines each metaphor in the light of relevant aspects of the Greco-Roman world and Paul’s Jewish background. Robinson contends that Paul portrays the Spirit as the principal agent in the religious-ethical life of believers. At the same time, his analysis demonstrates that the conceptual metaphors in Romans 8:1–17 convey the integral role of believers in ethical conduct. In the process, he addresses thorny theological issues such as whether Spirit and flesh signal an internal battle within believers or two conflicting ways of life. Finally, Robinson shows how this study is relevant to related Pauline passages and challenges scholars to incorporate these methods into their own investigation of biblical texts.

Features:

• Sustained argument that sheds new light on how Paul communicates with his audiences
• Substantial contribution to current debates about central theological concepts
• Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Integration Theory applied to the metaphors in Romans 8:1-17