Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Judaism - History

Nobel Laureate Simon Kuznets, famous as the founder of modern empirical economics, pioneered the quantitative study of the economic history of the Jews. Yet, until now, his most important work on the subject was unpublished. This second collection of previously unavailable material issued by Transaction brings to the public, for the first time, the most important economic work written on Jewish migration since that of Werner Sombart a century ago.

This volume of Kuznets' work includes three main essays. The first, titled "Immigration and the Foreign Born," was Kuznets' first work on...

A thousand years ago, the Chinese government invited merchants from one of the Chinese port synagogue communities to the capital, Kaifeng. The merchants settled there and the community prospered. Over centuries, with government support, the Kaifeng Jews built and rebuilt their synagogue, which became perhaps the world's largest. Some studied for the rabbinate; others prepared for civil service examinations, leading to a disproportionate number of Jewish government officials. While continuing orthodox Jewish practices they added rituals honouring their parents and the patriarchs, in...

Long before there were Jewish communities in the land of the tsars, Jews inhabited a region which they called medinat rusiya, the land of Russia. Prior to its annexation by Russia, the land of Russia was not a center of rabbinic culture. But in 1772, with its annexation by Tsarist Russia, this remote region was severed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its 65,000 Jews were thus cut off from the heartland of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Forced into independence, these Jews set about forging a community with its own religious leadership and institutions.

The three great...

In the years following the Russian Revolution, a bitter civil war was waged between the Bolsheviks, with their Red Army of Workers and Peasants on the one side, and the various groups that constituted the anti-Bolshevik movement on the other. The major anti-Bolshevik force was the White Army, whose leadership consisted of former officers of the Russian imperial army. In the received and simplified version of this history, those Jews who were drawn into the political and military conflict were overwhelmingly affiliated with the Reds, while from the start, the Whites orchestrated campaigns...

The medieval Islamic world comprised a wide variety of religions. While individuals and communities in this world identified themselves with particular faiths, boundaries between these groups were vague and in some cases nonexistent. Rather than simply borrowing or lending customs, goods, and notions to one another, the peoples of the Mediterranean region interacted within a common culture. Beyond Religious Borders presents sophisticated and often revolutionary studies of the ways Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers drew ideas and inspiration from outside the bounds of their own...

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. One major change that print seems to have brought to the Jewish communities of Christian Europe, particularly in Italy, was greater interaction between Jews and Christians in the production and dissemination of books.

Starting in the early sixteenth century, the locus of production for Jewish books in many places in Italy was in...

In mapping this...

At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and...

The fury that...

Deutsch is one of the first scholars to study these unique writings in detail. Examining books in which Christian authors...

Rabbi Loew (the Maharal) of Prague remains one of the most influential and prolific Jewish thinkers of his time. Widely considered one of the fathers of Hassidic thought and a harbinger of Modern Jewish philosophy, his life and work have retained their influence and remain prevalent today.

Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, this book ranges from an analysis of the historical background to Maharal s thought, to examining the relevance of this thought in the modern era, before addressing the popular cultural and folkloristic reception of Maharal s impact on modern, Western culture....

• Provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the main periods and themes of Jewish history, from Biblical Israel, through medieval and early modern periods, to Judaism since the Holocaust, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Judaism today
• Brings together an international team of established and emerging scholars across a range of disciplines
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Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in an old Egyptian synagogue the amazing story of one of the most important discoveries in modern religious scholarship.

In 1896, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered. He had entered the synagogue's genizah its repository for damaged and destroyed Jewish texts which held nearly 300,000 individual documents, many of which were over 1,000 years...