This volume is a reference book on more than a thousand Jewish writers--rabbis, physicians and laymen--active in 18th-century Italy. Each author has a biographical notice, followed by a list of his printed works and manuscripts, their location in the major international judaica collections and a bibliography of the relevant secondary sources. The book is illustrated with more than forty portraits of authors and includes rich analytical and thematic indexes. This work is intended to be a fundamental instrument for scholars interested in the Jewish Italian Enlightenment. It allows us to...

This comparative analysis of the records of four Ashkenazi communities in the Dutch Republic of the eighteenth century reveals new insights into the administrative structures and processes of these communities and into the records themselves.

The tension between the "book" and the "body" has in recent years attracted the attention of scholars interested in the perception of the body in Judaism and the impact of religious law and performance on the body. The fifteen contributions in this volume deal with perceptions of the "Jewish body" in a broad range of legal, poetic, mystical, philosophical and polemical early modern Jewish sources. The first part of the book examines the construction of the body in specific historical and social contexts. Part two discusses normative texts and the notion of an "ideal Jewish body." Part three...

As Adolf Hitler strategised his way to power, he knew that it was necessary to gain the support of theology and the Church. This study begins two hundred years earlier, however, looking at roots of theological anti-Semitism and how Jews and Judaism were constructed, positively and negatively, in the biblical interpretation of German Protestant theology. Following the two main streams of German theology, the salvation-historical and the Enlightenment-oriented traditions, it examines leading exegetes from the 1750s to the 1950s and explores how theology legitimises or delegitimises oppression...