History

When the rabbis composed the Mishnah in the late second or early third century C.E., the Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed for more then a century. Why, then, do the Temple and its ritual feature so prominently in the Mishnah? Against the view that the...

This provocative study of Jerusalem's Temple Mount unravels popular scholarly paradigms about the origins of this contested sacred site and its significance in Jewish and Christian traditions. In God's Mountain, Yaron Z. Eliav reconstructs the early...

Arnold Eisen here calls for a fundamental rethinking of the story of modern Judaism. More than simply a study of Jewish thought on customs and rituals, Rethinking Modern Judaism explores the central role that practice plays in Judaism's encounter with...

Next Year in Jerusalem recognizes that Jews have often experienced or imaged periods of exile andreturn in their long tradition. The fourteen papers in this collection examine this phenomenon from different approaches, genres, and media. They cover the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780853036791Author Meir PersoffFormat HardbackPage Count 496Imprint Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdPublisher Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdWeight(grams)...

Through a symptomatic reading of Freud's corpus, from his letters to Fliess through the case of Little Hans to Moses and Montheism, this book demonstrates how "circumcision"-the fetishized signifier of Jewish difference and source of knowledge about...

The rise of printing had major effects on culture and society in the early modern period, and the presence of this new technology-and the relatively rapid embrace of it among early modern Jews-certainly had an effect on many aspects of Jewish culture...

Over the past several decades, the field of Jewish studies has expanded to encompass an unprecedented range of research topics, historical periods, geographic regions, and analytical approaches. Yet there have been few systematic efforts to trace these...

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. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and...

According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is...

Starting around 1840, French Jews began to reach out in new ways to Jews elsewhere, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. In describing these activities, they spoke of feelings of solidarite and a mission to bring civilisation to Jews...

An examination of the life and work of Alexander McCaul and his impact on Jewish-Christian relations In Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis, David B. Ruderman considers the life and works of prominent evangelical missionary Alexander McCaul (1799-1863),...

In this book Kathleen Biddick investigates the fate of the enduring timelines fabricated by early Christians to distinguish themselves from their Jewish neighbors. Ranging widely across the history of text, technology, and book art, she relates three...

This book brings together a collection of 16 essays that explore Jewish communities in North Africa, Turkey and Iraq. The discussions are located primarily in the 20th century but essays also examine the Jewish community in 16th-century Istanbul, and in...

An edition, with introduction and notes, of the unique census for religious worship, in north-east England. In 1851, for the only time in British history, a count of those attending any place of religious worship was held alongside the usual decenial...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780853033257Author Sarah PearceFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdPublisher Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780853033776Author Michael ShasharFormat HardbackPage Count 208Imprint Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdPublisher Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdWeight(grams)...

In the aftermath of the conquest of the Holy Land by the Romans and their destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos-both they and their God were rendered homeless. In a religious tradition that had...

Franz Rosenzweig's near-conversion to Christianity in the summer of 1913 and his subsequent decision three months later to recommit himself to Judaism is one of the foundational narratives of modern Jewish thought. In this new account of events, Benjamin...

Jack Lightstone's "Commerce of the Sacred" remains an original and influential contribution to Judaic studies. Lightstone offers critical perspectives on the practices and beliefs of Greco-Roman Jews who lived outside of Palestine and beyond...

Finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies Honorable Mention, 2021 Saul Viener Book Prize, given by the American Jewish Historical Society Reveals nostalgia as a new way of maintaining Jewish continuity In 2007, the...

Zvi Preigerzon wrote memoirs about his time in the Gulag in 1958, long before Solzhenitsyn and without any knowledge of the other publications on this subject. It was one of the first eyewitness accounts of the harsh reality of Soviet Gulags. Even after...

In Demonic Desires, Ishay Rosen-Zvi examines the concept of yetzer hara, or evil inclination, and its evolution in biblical and rabbinic literature. Contrary to existing scholarship, which reads the term under the rubric of destructive sexual desire,...

Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of understanding modern Orientalism. Tracing a path of modern Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Librett argues that...

Dating from the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of shtetls-Jewish settlements-in Eastern Europe that were home to a large and compact population that differed from their gentile, mostly peasant neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and...

The complicity of the Hungarian Christian church in the mass extermination of Hungarian Jews by the Nazis is a largely forgotten episode in the history of the Holocaust. Using previously unknown correspondence and other primary source materials, Moshe Y...

The earliest rabbinic commentary to the Book of Leviticus, the Sifra, is generally considered an exemplum of Rabbi Akiva's intensely scriptural school of interpretation. But, Azzan Yadin-Israel contends, the Sifra commentary exhibits two distinct layers...

In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages,...

Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal,...

This book explores the history of Jewish eating and Jewish identity, from the Bible to the present. The lessons of this book rest squarely on the much-quoted insight: 'you are what you eat.' But this book goes beyond that simple truism to recognise that...

In 1797, in what is now the Czech Republic, Pinhas Hurwitz published one of the best-selling Hebrew books of the modern era. Nominally an extended commentary on a sixteenth-century kabbalist text, The Book of the Covenant was in fact a compendium of...

Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask...

In The Other Judaisms of Late Antiquity the late Alan F. Segal is at his very best. This reissued and expanded editionanow containing his celebrated "Heavenly Ascent in Hellenistic Judaism, Early Christianity, and Their Environment"adelineates the...

The path toward modern Jewish politics, a process that required a dramatic reconstruction of Jewish life, may have emerged during a far earlier time frame and in a different geographic and cultural context than has previously been thought. Drawing upon...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780853038788Author Pam FoxFormat HardbackPage Count 350Imprint Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdPublisher Vallentine Mitchell & Co LtdWeight(grams) 771g

Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests examines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical...

The expulsion from Spain did not only result in the destruction and dispersion of Spanish Jewry but led to a crisis in Jewish faith. Don Isaac Abravanel provided a systematic treatment of the main philosophical and theological beliefs of Judaism in an...

Jesus and After uses extracts from Biblical and other writings to outline the birth and early development of the Jesus sect of Judaism - its early simplicity, its later growth, and its separation from its Jewish parent. Besides its focus on the past,...

The complete story of Jewish Harlem and its significance in American Jewish history New York Times columnist David W. Dunlap wrote a decade ago that "on the map of the Jewish Diaspora, Harlem Is Atlantis. . . . A vibrant hub of industry, artistry and...

The Golden Age of the Lithuanian Yeshivas tells the story of the last chapter of Jewish rabbinical schools in Eastern Europe, from the eve of World War I to the outbreak of World War II.The Lithuanian yeshiva established a rigorous standard for religious...