Books in the Jewish Culture and Contexts series

Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel continued on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases to consider how discredited beliefs became plausible to educated European elites.

"The slaughter of the Jews in the Rhineland in 1096 is one of the better-known events of the First Crusade. Cohen analyzes the texts of the Jewish accounts of these massacres in light of the martyrdom tradition of Masada, well-known at that time, and the contemporary Christian cult of self-sacrifice... Recommended."-Choice

In Speaking Infinities, Ariel Evan Mayse explores the life and work of the Hasidic figure Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman of Mezritsh (1704-1772) to elucidate his theory of language in which all human tongues, even in their mundane forms, have the potential to become sacred when returned to their divine source.

In A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, Diana Lobel explores the full extent to which Duties of the Heart marks the flowering of the "Jewish-Arab symbiosis," the interpenetration of Islamic and Jewish civilizations.

Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben Samuel he-hasid, Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," is a compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah''s messages advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for centuries.In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive, yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

In The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, Shaul Magid presents the first-ever English translation of Rabbi Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Qol Qore, a rabbinic commentary on the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.

"Superb... The contributors probe the degree of positive interactions between Jews and Christian and also uncover heretofore-hidden Jewish contributions to the Western intellectual tradition."-Choice

Elisheva Baumgarten offers a fresh assessment of Jewish daily practices in medieval Ashkenaz. The first study to address the practices of men and women together, Baumgarten explores how Jews who were not learned alongside those who were expressed their convictions and reinforced their identities as Jews within a Christian world.

Explains how and why Judeoconversos built and rebuilt their religious and social identities, and what it meant to them to be both Jewish and Christian given the constraints they faced in their time and place in history.

Looking to contexts ranging from premodern Spain and Italy to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, and America, the contributors to this volume explore the ways the political and intellectual aspirations of successive historical presents have repeatedly reshaped the forms and narratives of Jewish cultural memory.

This book traces the evolution of Orthodox Judaism's approach to its nonpracticing brethren, shedding new light on the emergence of Orthodoxy as a specific movement within modern Jewish society.

This volume explores forms of Jewish experience that span the period from antiquity to the present and encompass a wide range of textual, ritual, spatial, and visual materials. Chapters devote sustained attention to three key concepts-authority, diaspora, and tradition-that have long been central to the study of Jews and Judaism.

Delves into Jewish religion and culture at a time of profound social and political revolution in the wider European culture.

Applying analytical strategies from linguistics, literature, and history, Kirsten Fudeman demonstrates that language played a central role in the formation, expression, and maintenance of medieval Jewish identity and that it brought Christians and Jews together even as it set them apart.

Considers a range of texts-including the Book of Watchers, Book of Jubilees, legal documents from the Dead Sea scrolls, writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation-to explore the tensions inherent in Second Temple Judaism's emphasis on ancestry as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel.

David B. Ruderman examines a chapter in the history of Jewish-Christian relations in nineteenth-century Europe, focusing on evangelical missionary Alexander McCaul and his associates, both allies and foes, who were engaged in conversation about the nature of Christianity, Judaism, and their intertwined destinies in the past and present.

Provides a feminist inquiry into the Hebrew poetry and prose forms cultivated in Muslim and Christian Spain, Italy, and Provence in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. This book considers the positions and positioning of female figures and female voices within Jewish male discourse.

In The Third Pillar, Geoffrey Hartman, one of the most influential scholars and teachers of English and Comparative Literature of recent decades, has brought together some of the most important and eloquent essays he has written since the 1980s on the major texts of the Jewish tradition.

In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Moshe Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a cosmopolitan, mostly European, context.

The Censor, the Editor, and the Text examines the impact of Catholic censorship on the publication and dissemination of Hebrew literature in the early modern period. Raz-Krakotzkin argues that the regulation of Hebrew print provided an avenue for the integration of Hebrew literature into the Christian corpus.

Dana E. Katz reveals how Italian Renaissance painting became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence from the real world onto a symbolic world. While the rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews.

This volume revisits issues of empire from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and other Romans in the third to sixth centuries. Through case studies, the contributors bring Jewish perspectives to bear on longstanding debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity.

Biblical interpretation is not simply study of the Bible's meaning. This volume focuses on signal moments in the histories of scriptural interpretation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the ancient period to the early modern, and shows how deeply intertwined these religions have always been.

The first comprehensive investigation of premodern Jewish travel writing about the Islamic world, Reorienting the East examines Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries that subvert, or reorient a decidedly Christian vision of the region and reflect changing Jewish self-perceptions.

This Noble House examines the importance of biblical ancestry-especially the claim of descent from King David-for Jews living in the medieval Islamic world.

"Ruderman uncovers a fascinating episode in the history of European Jewry and Jewish-Christian intellectual relations. Connecting the Covenants is compelling as both narrative and history."-Matt Goldish, The Ohio State University

In this multidisciplinary volume, leading historians provide new understanding of a time that sent shockwaves through Jewish communities in and beyond the Russian Empire and transformed the way Jews thought about the politics of ethnic and national identity.

Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. In this pioneering work Shmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in this process by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings.

This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the challenges of modernity. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world-or, alternatively, an art to being modern in the Jewish world-and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.