Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Judaism - History

In a series of intimate and searing portraits, Nathan Wachtel traces the journeys of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Marranos Spanish and Portuguese Jews who were forcibly converted to Catholicism but secretly retained their own faith. Fleeing persecution in their Iberian homeland, some sought refuge in the Americas, where they established transcontinental networks linking the New World to the Old. The Marranos at once Jewish and Christian, outsiders and insiders nurtured their hidden beliefs within their new communities, participating in the economic development of the early...

A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish...

Over the last century, American Jews married outside their religion at increasing rates. By closely examining the intersection of intermarriage and gender across the twentieth century, Keren R. McGinity describes the lives of Jewish women who intermarried while placing their decisions in historical context. The first comprehensive history of these intermarried women, Still Jewish is a multigenerational study combining in-depth personal interviews and an astute analysis of how interfaith relationships and intermarriage were portrayed in the mass media, advice manuals, and...

Contributors to this book include Anson F. Rainey, Shmuel Safrai, Haim Beinart, and Evyatar Friesel.This is the first atlas of its kind to document in such great detail the turbulent history of the Jewish people. A work of prodigious and meticulous scholarship by some of Israel's most brilliant scholars, this atlas portrays every aspect of Jewish history that lends itself to cartographic interpretation, from biblical times to the present day. This is the fascinating story of how an ancient people, separated from their roots and dispersed throughout the world, survived in exile for two...

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A window into the Jewish understanding of God throughout history and today--written especially for Christians.

In Jewish Scripture--Christianity's foundation--God's presence is everywhere: in nature, in history and in the range of human experience. Yet the Torah, Maimonides and 4,000 years of Jewish tradition all agree on one thing: that God is beyond any form of human comprehension. How, then can Judaism be so crowded with descriptions and images of God? And what can they mean to the ways Christians understand their own faith?

In this special book, Rabbi Neil Gillman...

Human civilization will be forever indebted to the great thinkers of Jewish philosophy's golden age. Moses Maimonedes, Levi Gersonides, Judah Halevi, Saadia Gaon, Hasdai Crescas and their like grappled with some of the most challenging metaphysical issues, while the profundity of their solutions continue to engage philosophers today. Did God create the world? Can human freedom be reconciled with divine foreknowledge? What is the nature of the good life? Focusing on the central philosophical questions of the Middle Ages, Daniel Rynhold offers a concise introduction to topics such as God and...

The story of Judaism is a story of paradox. It is the story of how a small cluster of desert tribes gave birth to a monotheistic doctrine that profoundly shaped the history of human civilization. It is the story of how that initially obscure desert doctrine came to be codified into the Hebrew Bible, one of the world's greatest works of literature. It is the story of how a small minority came to be viewed by the majority as disproportionately powerful and, following pogrom and Holocaust, were driven to the edge of extinction. And it is the story of how a displaced people, globally dispersed...

How should Jews respond to an age of militant Zionism and resurgent anti-Semitism? Is insisting on a separate sense of identity anachronistic and dangerous, or is it the only way of preserving the Jewish cultural heritage?

Rabbi David Goldberg, one of today's most respected and outspoken Jewish leaders in the English-speaking world, here grapples with the dilemmas of contemporary Jewishness with characteristic candour, and sketches the emerging faultlines in the Jewish sense of identity. He offers up a completely fresh reading of Jewish history, arguing that the narrative of...

European Jews, argues Iris Idelson-Shein, occupied a particular place in the development of modern racial discourse during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Simultaneously inhabitants and outsiders in Europe, considered both foreign and familiar, Jews adopted a complex perspective on otherness and race. Often themselves the objects of anthropological scrutiny, they internalized, adapted, and revised the emerging discourse of racial difference to meet their own ends.

Difference of a Different Kind explores Jewish perceptions and representations of otherness...

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 Pollock suggests that what lay at the heart of Rosenzweig's religious crisis was not a struggle between faith and reason, but skepticism about the world and hope for personal salvation. A close examination of this important time in Rosenzweig's life, the book also sheds light on the full trajectory of his philosophical development.