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"This accessibly written volume examines the major periods of Jewish history around the world, from their distant origins in antiquity through the beginnings of the modern period and the emergence of secular culture. Although Jews are a small minority, they have settled in almost every part of the world, developing many different subcultures. They have had an outsized impact on global religion even as they have faced prejudice and persecution, and their history makes for a fascinating story of cultural change, adaptation and survival that is continuing to unfold in the present. Now in new edition as a split volume, this first volume of a comprehensive history of the Jews draws on up to date ...
Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism have long been studied separately. Yet, scholars are becoming ever more aware of the need to merge them into a single field of Jewish Studies. This volume opens new perspectives and bridges traditional gaps. The authors are not simply contributing to their respective fields of Sephardic or Ashkenazic Studies. Rather, they all include both Sephardic and Ashkenazic perspectives as they reflect on different aspects of encounters and reconsider traditional narratives. Subjects range from medieval and early modern Sephardic and Ashkenazic constructions of identities, influences, and entanglements in the fields of religious art, halakhah, kabbalah, messianism, and charity to modern Ashkenazic Sephardism and Sephardic admiration for Ashkenazic culture. For reasons of coherency, the contributions all focus on European contexts between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries.
The volume offers a broad introduction to the rabbinical literature written in the two major traditional Jewish languages of Europe: Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe, and Ladino (or Judezmo or Judeo-Spanish), the language of the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The scope is wide-ranging. Some of the contributions highlight the lives and work of outstanding rabbinical figures who wrote in Yiddish or Ladino, and the crucial role they played in the transmission of rabbinical knowledge among the more popular sectors of their communities, as well as in the shaping of the Yiddish and Ladino reading p...
The burgeoning field of Mediterranean Studies, which favors intersectionality over compartmentalisation, has resulted in fresh ways of understanding pre-modern interreligious relationships. This volume will introduce advanced students and non-specialists to various historical interactions between Christians, Jews, and Muslims within the frame of the “sea at the centre”. Its chronological range is the long central Middle Ages (1000 to 1600 CE), and includes most Mediterranean regions: Iberia, North Africa, the Levant, Asia Minor, the Balkans, Italy, Provence, and the sea itself.
"The reality of diaspora has shaped Jewish history, its demography, its economic relationships, and the politics which that impacted the lives of Jews with each other and with the non-Jews among whom they lived. Jews have moved around the globe since the beginning of their history, maintaining relationships with their former Jewish neighbors, who had chosen other destinations and at the same time forging relationships in their new homes with Jews from widely different places of origin"--
Examines the relationship between money and power in modern Jewish history. -- Dust jacket.
A sweeping biography that opens a window onto the gilded age of Jewish philanthropy. Baron Maurice de Hirsch was one of the emblematic figures of the nineteenth century. Above all, he was the most influential Jewish philanthropist of his time. Today Hirsch is less well known than the Rothschilds, or his gentile counterpart Andrew Carnegie, yet he was, to his contemporaries, the very embodiment of the gilded age of Jewish philanthropy. Hirsch's life provides a singular entry point for understanding Jewish philanthropy and politics in the late nineteenth century, a period when, as now, private benefactors played an outsize role in shaping the collective fate of Jewish communities. Hirsch's vas...