Studies in Jewish History and Culture / Studies in Musar

In this volume, Alessandro Grazi offers the first intellectual biography of the Italian Jewish writer and politician David Levi (1816-1898). In this intriguing journey through the mysterious rites of Freemasonry and the bizarre worldviews of Saint-Simonianism, you can discover Levi’s innovative interpretation of Judaism and its role in modernity. As a champion of dialogue with Catholic intellectuals, Levi’s importance transcends the Jewish world. The second part of the book presents an unpublished document, Levi’s comedy “Il Mistero delle Tre Melarancie”, a phantasmagorical adventure in search of his Jewish identity, with an English translation of its most relevant excerpt.

Rosa Manus (1881–1942) uncovers the life of Dutch feminist and peace activist Rosa Manus, co-founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, vice-president of the International Alliance of Women, and founding president of the International Archives for the Women’s Movement (IAV) in Amsterdam, revealing its rootedness in Manus’s radical secular Jewishness. Because the Nazis looted the IAV (1940) including Manus’s large personal archive, and subsequently arrested (1941) and murdered her (1942), Rosa Manus has been almost unknown to later generations. This collective biography offers essays based on new and in-depth research on pictures and documents from her archives, returned to Amsterdam in 2003, as well as other primary sources. It thus restores Manus to the history from which the Nazis attempted to erase her.

Contributors include: Margot Badran, Mineke Bosch, Ellen Carol DuBois, Myriam Everard, Karen Garner, Francisca de Haan, Dagmar Wernitznig, and Annika Wilmers.

"The volume touches on all of the important themes of that history—the centrality of peace activism, the impact of the world wars and the rise of fascism, the tensions over imperialism and nationalist resistance in colonized countries, the importance of resources to the persistence of the movement, the vital glue of intimate relationships—and brings to the fore additional ones, including the role of Jewish women, the centrality of Dutch feminists in transnational feminism, and the struggle over preserving the history of the movement." - Leila J. Rupp, University of California, Santa Barbara, in: Women's History Review (2018)

In Modernizing Jewish Education in Nineteenth Century Eastern Europe Mordechai Zalkin offers a new path through which the Eastern European traditional Jewish society underwent a rapid and significant process of modernization - the Maskilic system of education. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century a few local Jews, affected by the values and the principles of the European Enlightenment, established new private modern schools all around The Pale of Settlement, in which thousands Jewish boys and girls were exposed to different disciplines such as sciences and humanities, a process which changed the entire cultural structure of contemporary Jewish society.

Bovo d'Antona by Elye Bokher (Elyiahu ben Asher haLevi Ashkenazi, 1469-1549) is a chivalry poem written in Yiddish in Padoa, in the year 1507, and printed under the author's supervision in Isny (Germany) in the year 1541. The present book intends to present a critical edition of this poem, together with a commentary. An introduction will focus on various related questions, such as the place of the Bovo d'Antona in European literature and in Italian literature, Bovo d'Antona and the chivalric genre in Old Yiddish literature, the analysis of the manuscript versions in comparison with the printed edition, the relationship with the Italian source and the readership. An appendix will deal with later transformations of the Bovo-Bukh.

"Bovo Bukh is an excellent example of the relationship between romances and folktales,and Rosenzweigʼs introduction and edition of this important early Yiddish text will be appreciated by scholars of early Modern literature and folk narrative." - Dr. David Elton Gay, Indiana University, in: Fabula 59:1-2 (2018)

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533-1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. His collection of sermons, Sefer Nefuṣot Yehudah, belongs to the very centre of his important homiletic and philosophical oeuvre. Composed in Mantua and published in Venice in 1589, the collection of 52 sermons addresses the subject of the Jewish festivals, focusing on philosophy, mysticism, sciences, and rites. This volume concludes the translation of the sermons and includes monographic studies about Moscato’s library, philosophical significance with an added Appendix containing his poetical compositions.

Time and eternity are concepts that have occupied an important place within Jewish mystical thought. This present volume gives pride of place to these concepts, and is one of the first works to bring together diverse voices on the subject. It offers a multivalent picture of the topic of time and eternity, not only by including contributions from an array of academics who are leaders in their fields, but by proposing six diverse approaches to time and eternity in Jewish mysticism: the theoretical approach to temporality, philosophical definitions, the idea of time and pre-existence, the idea of historical time, the idea of experiential time, and finally, the idea of eternity beyond time. This multivocal treatment of Jewish mysticism and time as based on variant academic approaches is novel, and it should lay the groundwork for further discussion and exploration.

In discoursing on music, three early modern Jewish scholars stand out for their originality. The first is Judah Moscato, who, as chief rabbi in Mantua, preached sermons, one of them on music: there Moscato presents music as a cosmic and spiritual phenomenon. The second scholar is Leon Modena, the foremost Jewish intellectual in early seventeenth-century Venice. Modena deals with music in two responsa to questions put to him for rabbinical adjudication, one of them an examination of biblical and rabbinical sources on the legitimacy of performing art music in the synagogue. Abraham Portaleone, the third scholar, treated music in a massive disquisition on the Ancient Temple and its ritual, describing it as an art correlating with contemporary Italian music. The introduction surveys the development of Hebrew art music from the Bible through the Talmud and rabbinical writings until the early modern era. The epilogue defines the special contribution of Hebrew scholars to early modern theory.

Winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Award in the category of Modern Jewish History. This award, the highest honor the Association for Jewish Studies bestows on scholarship, was established in 2008 by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation to honor scholars whose work embodies the best in the field: rigorous research, theoretical sophistication, innovative methodology, and excellent writing.

Presented here to the public for the first time, the Pinkas of the Metz Beit Din is the official register of civil cases that came before the Metz rabbinic court in the two decades prior to the French Revolution. Brimming with details of commercial transactions, inheritance disputes, women’s roles in economic life, and the interplay between French law and Jewish law, the Metz Pinkas offers remarkable evidence of the engagement of Jews with the surrounding society and culture. The two volumes of Protocols of Justice comprise the complete text of the Metz Pinkas Beit Din, which is fully annotated by the author, and a thorough analysis of its significance for history and law at the threshold of modernity.

Through his painstaking and path-breaking treatment of this incredibly nuanced and rich text, Jay Berkovitz has placed before academics and all other interested readers a heretofore untapped resource of vast importance. His insightful and extensive introductory monograph beautifully sets the stage for scholars in a wide array of fields to mine this material, which will undoubtedly yield significant new results in the history of Jewish and non-Jewish society in eighteenth-century Europe and beyond. Ephraim Kanarfogel, E. Billi Ivry University Professor of Jewish History, Literature and Law, Yeshiva University

Protocols of Justice is a scholarly tour de force. Jay Berkovitz has not only brought to life a type of source that has been all but ignored in the study of Jewish life in Europe in the early modern period but offers a rich introduction that places the material in its historical context. This is a book that will stand the test of time and is a must for academic libraries. Edward Fram, Department of Jewish History, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

"Author Jay Berkovitz, Professor and Chair of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has painstakingly transcribed the pinkas, which provides fascinating and new insights in the lives of the Jews of Metz. Through his work, Berkovitz has opened a manuscript long gathering dust in the YIVO archives, brought it to light, and created an invaluable resource for scholars." Ben Rothke, The Times of Israel

In sixteenth-century Marrakesh, a Flemish merchant converts to Judaism and takes his Catholic brother on a subversive reading of the Gospels and an exploration of the Jewish faith. Their vivid Spanish dialogue, composed by an anonym in 1583, has until now escaped scholarly attention in spite of its success in anti-Christian clandestine literature until the Enlightenment. Based on all nine available manuscripts, this critical edition rediscovers a pioneering work of Jewish self-expression in European languages. The introductory study identifies the author, Estêvão Dias, locates him in insurgent Antwerp at the beginning of the Western Sephardi diaspora, and describes his hybrid culture shaped by the Iberian Renaissance, Portuguese crypto-Judaism, Mediterranean Jewish learning, Protestant theology, and European diplomacy in Africa.

"The Marrakesh Dialogues has been mentioned only rarely in the scholarly literature, and Wilke’s edition and extended discussion constitute the first attempt at editing the text based upon all the textual evidence, placing it into its historical context, identifying the author and the dramatis personae of the text, analysing the treatise’s contents, and presenting it to a wide audience. He is successful because of his broad knowledge of the political and religious trends in early modern Europe, coupled with close familiarity with converso life and literature." - Daniel L. Lasker, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in: Journal of Jewish Studies Vol. LXVII No. 2, pp. 428-35

A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar Across Disciplines and Faiths reflects on medieval and early modern Hebrew linguistics as a discipline that crossed geographic and religious borders and linked up with a plethora of scholarly activities, from Judaeo-Arabic Bible translations to the Renaissance search for the holiest alphabet. This collection of articles presents a cross-section of new research avenues on Hebraism, Karaite, Rabbanite and Christian, with an emphasis on the transmission of linguistic ideas through time and space among different communities, cultures and religious currents. The resulting picture is one of intrinsic variation and dynamic growth as opposed to the linear paradigm of development, culmination and stagnation current in the historiography of Hebrew linguistics.

From Renaissance to Risorgimento, the Hebrew tombstones of Padua express the cultural currents of their age, in text and art. The inscriptions are mainly rhymed and metered poems, about life, love and faith, while the design and ornamentation of the actual stones reflect prevailing architectural and artistic tastes. Additionally, the inscriptions illuminate the society of Padua's Jews, and the social and cultural changes they underwent during the 330 years covered by this study. Thus these tombstones capture the flow of Italian Jewish culture from Renaissance to Baroque, and from the early modern to the modern era.

This book presents the critical edition of Joseph Seniri’s commentary on the Former Prophets. Son of the famous poet Isaac Ha-Seniri, Joseph Seniri lived in Beaucaire at the turn of the thirteenth century. His work, which follows the Provençal tradition of Jewish exegesis combining the teachings of northern France with those of Spain, contains numerous Provençal glosses ( le’azim). Through Kogel’s analysis of the text and the study of the grammatical terminology, it is possible to see the main sources of influence Seniri’s influence: Rashi’s commentary and Ibn Janaḥ’s grammar.

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. The book Sefer Nefuṣot Yehudah belongs to the very centre of his important homiletic and philosophical oeuvre. Composed in Mantua and published in Venice in 1589, the collection of 52 sermons addresses the subject of the Jewish festivals, focussing on philosophy, mysticism, sciences and rites. This and subsequent volumes will provide a critical edition of the original Hebrew text, accompanied by an English translation.

Books within Books presents some recent findings and research projects on the fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts discovered in the bindings of other manuscripts and early printed books across Europe. This is the second collection of interdisciplinary articles on Hebrew binding fragments presenting current scholarship and its international scope.

From the contemporary perspective, the fragments of medieval Hebrew manuscripts preserved until today, through their numbers (estimated 30,000 fragments, so more than double of the number of the known Hebrew volumes produced in medieval Europe ), the texts they carry (some of them have been previously unknown), the insights into book making techniques and finally their economic impact, are an unprecedented source for our knowledge of the Hebrew book culture and literacy as well as the economic and intellectual exchanges between the Jewish minority and their non-Jewish neighbours.

This two-volume work, Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies sheds new light on an under-investigated phenomenon of European medieval intellectual history: the transmission of knowledge and texts from Latin into Hebrew between the twelfth and the fifteenth century. Because medieval Jewish philosophy and science in Christian Europe drew mostly on Hebrew translations from Arabic, the significance of the input from the Christian majority culture has been neglected. Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies redresses the balance. It highlights the various phases of Latin-into-Hebrew translations and considers their disparity in time, place, and motivations. Special emphasis is put on the singular role of the translations of Latin medical and philosophical literature. Volume One: Studies, offers 18 studies and Volume Two: Texts in Contexts, includes editions and analyses of hitherto unpublished texts of medieval Latin-into-Hebrew translations. Both volumes are available separately or together as a set. This groundbreaking work is indispensable for any scholar interested in the history of medieval philosophic and scientific thought in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic in relationship to the vicissitudes of Jewish-Christian relations.

This two-volume work, Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies sheds new light on an under-investigated phenomenon of European medieval intellectual history: the transmission of knowledge and texts from Latin into Hebrew between the twelfth and the fifteenth century. Because medieval Jewish philosophy and science in Christian Europe drew mostly on Hebrew translations from Arabic, the significance of the input from the Christian majority culture has been neglected. Latin-into-Hebrew: Texts and Studies redresses the balance. It highlights the various phases of Latin-into-Hebrew translations and considers their disparity in time, place, and motivations. Special emphasis is put on the singular role of the translations of Latin medical and philosophical literature. Volume One: Studies, offers 18 studies and Volume Two: Texts in Contexts, includes editions and analyses of hitherto unpublished texts of medieval Latin-into-Hebrew translations. Both volumes are available separately or together as a set. This groundbreaking work is indispensable for any scholar interested in the history of medieval philosophic and scientific thought in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic in relationship to the vicissitudes of Jewish-Christian relations.

Jiddische Handschriften der Niederlande includes descriptions of 105 Yiddish manuscripts originating mostly in the 18th and 19th century. They reflect Ashkenazic culture of the Northern Netherlands, the Yiddish dialect of this area and the influences of Dutch and German in that culture. After 1815 the use of Dutch as the common language is obvious, but there are still several documents written in Yiddish. The monograph is organized by text-genres and the ordered chronologically. Each entry gives a detailed description of the codicology in order to raise questions and answer questions concerning motivation and style, the writing process, readership, and ownership.

Yiddish was the basic Ashkenazi vernacular in the early modern period. The vast majority of the population was not educated and Yiddish books were printed in order to assist them with keeping a solid Jewish life. Being a basically German language and never being a canonical language as Hebrew, Yiddish also functioned as a buffer language between the internal Ashkenazi Jewish culture and the culture of the environment. Studying the paratexts added to printed Yiddish books may teach us about roles of the printed Yiddish word in Ashkenazi society: contents and forms of books, their contextual framework within Ashkenazi culture, the world of Yiddish book producers on the one hand, and the envisaged readership on the other.

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. This volume is a record of the proceedings of an international conference, organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies at Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), and Mantua’s State Archives. It consists of contributions on Moscato and the intellectual world in Mantua during the 16th and 17th centuries.

The present volume of studies on the life and work of Moritz (Moshe) Steinschneider (1816-1907) seeks to modify the traditional view of Steinschneider as a “mere bibliographer” by revealing other dimensions of his scientific personality. Together, the articles show that Steinschneider’s manifold scholarly activities were rooted in a well-defined scientific agenda, which modern readers do not easily recognize but which deserves to be recovered. This volume represents a first attempt to sketch Steinschneider’s intellectual biography and highlights the continued significance of his work for Jewish studies. It is an important contribution to our understanding of the project of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums and its lasting impact on contemporary scholarly practice.

Aryeh Motzkin was an extraordinary thinker and writer. Much of his work appeared in small academic journals despite the fact that it is often quite accessible, even to non-experts. This volume assembles his most important published papers along with several unpublished papers. They all have a single theme: the encounter between the Jewish tradition and philosophy as discovered by Plato and Aristotle. The book’s first group of essays deal with the way medieval Jewish thinkers understood the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The second group deals with how these same medieval thinkers were themselves interpreted by modern thinkers, beginning with Spinoza. A recurring issue in all the essays is the difficulty inherent in any encounter between philosophia perennis and the changing history of Judaism.

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. The book Sefer Nefuṣot Yehudah belongs to the very centre of his important homiletic and philosophical oeuvre. Composed in Mantua and published in Venice in 1589, the collection of 52 sermons addresses the subject of the Jewish festivals, focussing on philosophy, mysticism, sciences and rites. This and subsequent volumes will provide a critical edition of the original Hebrew text, accompanied by an English translation.

"Brill’s new scholarly edition and translation of the sermons (there will eventually be four volumes) is a major contribution to Jewish Renaissance studies. Even for someone who is comfortable with reading traditional Hebrew literature, this translation will be welcome. The editors identify the many references to both Jewish and Classical literature, and give brief but clear explanations when needed. The translation is also clear, and seems to accurately reflect the Hebrew text."
Jim Rosenbloom, Judaica Librarian, Brandeis University; past president of AJL

The Dialogues of Love by Yehudah Abravanel (c. 1465 – c. 1525) is one of the most interesting examples of the encounter between Renaissance Platonism and Jewish tradition. Exploring some of the dialogic models for Yehudah’s work as well as the influence of the Biblical commentaries by his father Isaac, this book re-reads the Dialogues in the light of medieval interpretations of the Song of Songs and Solomonic tradition. Already adopted by some Renaissance Jewish readers, this perspective suggests a new interpretation of the Dialogues: Yehudah’s work may be regarded as an allegory of the encounter between a Jewish teacher – Philon – and the “foreign science” of philosophy – Sophia – which both seduces him and questions his wisdom.

For over a hundred years the so called “Wallich-manuscript” has fascinated scholars of various disciplines, be it Yiddish/Jewish studies, music, comparative literature and the like. It is one of the most important sources for the study of Yiddish and German folksongs as well as Purim-plays in the Early Modern period. The unknown collector of the texts has gathered more than sixty songs, plays, parodies and so on, some of them Yiddish transcriptions of German works, others original writings. For the first time, this fascinating collection has now been edited completely and a commentary has been prepared. The result is a complex picture of Yiddish culture in Early Modern times.

"It is an important achievement of Diana Matut...that she presents a new edition of the work in her Dichtung und Musik im frühneuzeitlichen Aschkenas. The manuscript is indeed very important for our understanding of Ashkenazi culture in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, and the new edition...offers a meaningful contribution to the field." - Claudia Rosenzweig, Bar-Ilan University
"The two volumes are a carefully prepared and beautifully published edition and commentary, by Diana Matut, of two collections of Yiddish poems assembled sometime in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries..." - Don Harrán, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Arthur Ruppin’s immense contribution to the Zionist movement gave him the title “The Father of Jewish/Zionist settlement in Palestine.” Nevertheless, the common narrative sets Ruppin’s historical persona in an ambivalent position and suppresses his formative role and heritage. Part of the reason for this is that, in many ways, his history causes a crack to appear in the Zionist national “cover stories.”

This study utilizes innovative archival research and contains provocative theses which make us view the foundation of Israeli culture differently. It addresses the cultural interaction between the German Sonderweg, with all its proto-Nazi and völkische ideas, and Palestinian Zionism. The study therefore exposes the sources and presence of internal Jewish racism while also analysing the anti-Semitic aspect of Pre-Israeli culture. A particularly important section details Ruppin's crucial influence on the Labor Movement and the colonization of the Land of Israel/Palestine.

R. Samuel ben Meir (b. 1085) wrote his Torah commentary at a point in time when the French masters of Bible collected their glossae, but he wrote it also at the point in time that we today consider to be the turning point in ‘lay literacy,’ when the Anglo-Norman aristocracy patronized the production of romances. In the first half of the 12th century, Northern France was a vibrant spot. It was an era in which composing, reading, and listening to narratives and stories intensified as a complex cultural phenomenon. This book presents the idea that Rashbam tried to compete with this new intellectual movement, claiming that the literary quality of the biblical texts was at least as good as that of the nascent courtly romances, or even on a par with one another.

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. The book Sefer Nefuṣot Yehudah belongs to the very centre of his important homiletic and philosophical oeuvre. Composed in Mantua and published in Venice in 1589, the collection of 52 sermons addresses the subject of the Jewish festivals, focussing on philosophy, mysticism, sciences and rites. This and subsequent volumes will provide a critical edition of the original Hebrew text, accompanied by an English translation.

An hommage to Gad Freudenthal, this volume offers twenty-two chapters on the history of science and the role of science in Jewish cultures. Written by outstanding scholars from all over the world it is a token of appreciation for Freudenthal's accomplishments in this discipline.

The chapters in this volume include editions and translations of source texts in different languages and focus on topics that reflect the problématiques Gad Freudenthal often tackled in his own research: aspects of knowledge transfer, translation processes and the appropriation of knowledge from one culture to another. They are contributions to a better understanding of the cross-cultural contacts in the field of science between Jews, Muslim and Christians in the Middle Ages and early modern times.

Sefer Hakhmoni by the 10th-century Jewish polymath Shabbatai Donnolo is one of the first texts written in Hebrew in medieval Europe and one of the most important documents of the “Hebrew Renaissance” of Byzantine Jewry in southern Italy between the 9th and the 11th centuries. Written as a commentary on Sefer Yeîirah (Book of Formation, an anonymous text probably written in Palestine between the 3rd and the 6th centuries), Sefer Hakhmoni is in fact a much more complex work, consisting of biblical exegesis, astrology, medicine, a detailed analysis of the neo-Platonic idea of melothesia, and the correspondence between the elements of the microcosm and macrocosm. This volume offers the critical text, an annotated English translation, and a comprehensive introduction to Donnolo and his works.

“Genizat Germania” is a project at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz focused on the search for and analysis of Hebrew and Aramaic binding fragments found in the books and files of archives and libraries. In recent years this systematic search has revealed several hundred new fragments, including some rare Talmudic, Midrashic and liturgical fragments. The new discoveries both in Germany and elsewhere in Europe have broadened the knowledge of Jewish literature in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. This volume collects the papers of international scholars which cover recent discoveries in Germany, the “European Genizah” or fragments found in Italy, Poland, Great Britain and Austria, the approaches of similar projects in Austria and the Czech Republic, as well as an extensive bibliography.

Metempsychosis was a prominent element in Renaissance conceptualizations of the human being, the universe, and the place of the human person in the universe. A variety of concepts emerged in debates about metempsychosis: human to human reincarnation, human to vegetal, human to animal, and human to angelic transmigration. As a complex and changing doctrine, metempsychosis gives us a well-placed window for viewing the complex and dynamic contours of Jewish thought in late fifteenth century Italy; as such, it enables us to evaluate Jewish thought in relation to non-Jewish Italian developments. This book addresses the problematic question of the roles and achievements of Jews who lived in Italy in the development of Renaissance culture in its Jewish and its Christian dimensions.

"Throughout the book, Ogren demonstrates the scholarly pertinacity and intellectual and linguistic versatility that crosscultural intellectual history requires. He finds and digests the essential studies and obscure remarks, in modern scholarship as well as from the fifteenth century, that substantiate the argument, and he constantly strives to discern larger patterns. This research will reward scholars who follow his leads." - Arthur M. Lesley, in: Renaissance Quarterly 63.3 (2010)

This book provides the first publication of the tract Tiferet Bahurim (The Glory of Youth) which was written in the mid-seventeenth century by R. Pinhas Barukh ben Pelatiyah Monselic in Ferrara, Italy. The tract was written as a guide for young men about to marry regarding their family life and their sexual deportment. By analyzing the Tiferet Bahurim Roni Weinstein addresses the following questions: What was the source of the growing interest in sexuality, and controlling juvenile sexuality? How is this tract related to centuries-old Jewish ethical literature, as well as literature in contemporary Catholic Italy? Is the Tiferet Bahurim part of the religious and cultural fermentation of the Counter-Reformation? Finally, did Jewish mysticism and pietism of Kabbalah tradition play a role in the composition of this tract?

Composed in Hebrew in Capua, Italy in 1054, the family chronicle of Ahima'az remains one of the most important historical sources of medieval Jewish life, folklore, culture, and mentalités in Western Europe, especially in the so-called Ashkenazi area. As such, it provides a rich resource to scholars of medieval history, cultural studies, gender studies, and anthropology. In this book Robert Bonfil provides a detailed historical introduction and new English translation of the chronicle. Readers knowledgeable in Hebrew will also greatly benefit from the new, vocalized critical edition of the Hebrew text, skillfully set up in front of the translation.

This inventory provides a survey of the extant Yiddish sources in Dutch archives and collections outside of Amsterdam. Until now, an overview and quantitative summary of the available Yiddish sources in The Netherlands was lacking. The compilation represents only a modest beginning, for the amount of material that has survived is enormous. An inventory relating to the Jewish community of Amsterdam requires a separate volume. The present inventory aims to stimulate new research-projects on the history of Ashkenazi Jewry in the Netherlands and to facilitate the research of the west-Yiddish speech variant that was spoken by the Ashkenazi Jews in The Netherlands.

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 of Jews, in part through still-prevailing paradigms. This is the first comprehensive analysis of its kind, and the result of the analysis of the interplay between biblical exegesis and attitudes to Jews and Judaism is a fascinating and often frightening portrait of theology as a servant of power.

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 explores body, mind and soul in Jewish philosophy and mysticism. The last section of the book discusses body issues in Jewish-Christian discourse.
The volume includes contributions by Howard Tzvi Adelman, Ruth Berger, Saverio Campanini, Maria Diemling, Eleazar Gutwirth, Don Harrán, Moshe Idel, Sergius Kodera, Arthur M. Lesley, Gianfranco Miletto, Giuseppe Veltri, Roni Weinstein, Elliot R. Wolfson, Jeffrey R. Woolf and Nimrod Zinger.

"Maria Diemling and Giuseppe Veltri have assembled an accomplished group of scholars and collected an important store of articles concerning physicality in early modern Jewish culture. Its contents are broad enough to appeal to a wide readership of scholars and students in gender studies, cultural history, intellectual history, anthropology, religious studies, Kabbalah — even the history of music and art. In spite of this considerable topical and thematic diversity the book avoids losing focus; in one way or another each contribution responds to Diemling and Veltri’s organizing question: how did early modern Jews react to the period’s increased emphasis on and interest in corporeality?" - Andrew Berns, University of Pennsylvania, in: Renaissance Quarterly 63.1 (2010)

From Iraq to Spain, from Germany to Cataluña, from Italy to Yemen, poetry has been for centuries a privileged mode of expression in the Jewish world. Sometimes borrowing from the poetry of the land in which they lived, but always reinventing it in relationship to the Hebrew language and to the Jewish cultural references, the "medieval" Hebrew poets created an immense, variegated and fascinating corpus. In this book, some of the best specialist of the field analyse different themes and authors of this tradition, providing new insights to well-known authors or proposing less celebrated works as equally worthy of study. As a result of this scholarship, the English reader will be able to penetrate the different social and historical contexts of significant portions of Medieval Hebrew poetry as well as the cultural implications of technical choices apparently neutral.

Scholars of the rich history of the Jews in the Dutch Republic have tended to concentrate on the remarkable story of Amsterdam. In fact, numerous communities existed in other parts of the country, of which records survive from some, occasionally extending back to the late eighteenth century.
This study examines the records of four provincial Ashkenazi communities in eighteenth-century Netherlands: The Hague, Middelburg, Leeuwarden, and Oisterwijk. These internal sources, compiled by the officials of the Jewish communities concerned, known as pinkassei kahal, have often been neglected by historians. The present study reveals how pinkassim can shed light on the administrative structures and history of Jewish communities, in addition to examining the phenomenon in general, and showing them to be the central and most authoritative documents of Jewish communities in early modern Europe.

Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book is a collection of twenty-four essays on various aspects of Hebrew book production in the 16th through 18th centuries. The subject matter encompasses little known printing-presses, makers of Hebrew books, and book arts. The print-shops were in such locations as Padua, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Verona, and the first presses in Livorno. Among the makers of Hebrew books are a peripatetic printer, a chief rabbi accused of plagiarism, a convert to Judaism, and a court Jew. Book arts address the titling of Hebrew books, dating by means of chronograms, printers’ pressmarks, mirror-image monograms, and the development of the Talmudic page. The book is completed with miscellaneous but related articles on early Hebrew book sale catalogues, worker to book production ratio in an eighteenth century press, and an attempt to circumvent the Inquisition’s ban on the printing of the Talmud in sixteenth Century Italy.

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 address, from a sociological and quantitative perspective, questions such as: what did Italian Jews write about?, for whom?, where?, in which language?