Category: Judaism

At a time while hostilities and violence within the heart East and Persian Gulf constantly threaten the realm with warfare, someone looking to comprehend the present state of affairs needs to get to grips with the interrelationships of the Jewish and Arab cultures. This publication makes a speciality of the forces, occasions, and personalities that over the last a hundred and fifty years have formed the Jewish groups of the Arab international, altering the relatives among Jews and Arabs extra significantly than whatever because the upward thrust of Islam approximately 1400 years in the past. Norman A. Stillman is the Schusterman/Josey Professor of Judaic background on the college of Oklahoma and is an across the world well-known authority at the background and tradition of the Islamic international and on Sephardic and Oriental Jewry.

By Samuel Yosef Agnon

Shira is Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s ultimate, epic novel. Unfinished on the time of his dying in 1970, the Hebrew unique was once released a 12 months later. With this newly revised English translation via Zeva Shapiro, together with archival fabric by no means earlier than released in English, The Toby Press launches its S.Y. Agnon Library – the fullest selection of Agnon’s works in new and revised translations. “Shira is S. Y. Agnon’s culminating attempt to articulate in the course of the complete kind of the radical his imaginative and prescient of the position of paintings in human reality…Enacted opposed to the heritage of Jerusalem lifestyles within the collecting shadows of a historic cataclysm of unattainable proportions, Shira is so brilliantly rendered that, even with no an finishing, it merits a spot one of the significant glossy novels."

By Noah J. Efron

Scholars have struggled for many years to provide an explanation for why Jews have succeeded extravagantly in sleek technological know-how. quite a few arguable theories―from such intellects as C. P. Snow, Norbert Wiener, and Nathaniel Weyl―have been promoted. Snow hypothesized an advanced genetic predisposition to medical luck. Wiener steered that the breeding conduct of Jews sustained hereditary features conducive for studying. Economist and eugenicist Weyl attributed Jewish highbrow eminence to "seventeen centuries of breeding for scholars."

Rejecting the concept that Jews have performed good in technology as a result of uniquely Jewish characteristics, Jewish brains, and Jewish behavior of brain, historian of technological know-how Noah J. Efron techniques the Jewish affinity for technology in the course of the geographic and cultural conditions of Jews who have been pressured to settle in new worlds within the early 20th century.

Seeking reduction from spiritual persecution, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled within the usa, Palestine, and the Soviet Union, with huge concentrations of settlers in big apple, Tel Aviv, and Moscow. technological know-how performed a wide function within the lives and livelihoods of those immigrants: it used to be a common strength that transcended the arbitrary outdated international orders that had lengthy ensured the exclusion of all yet a couple of Jews from the seats of strength, wealth, and public esteem. even though the 3 locations have been some distance aside geographically, the hyperlinks one of the groups have been enduring and lively. This shared experience―of dealing with the longer term in new worlds, either actual and conceptual―provided a new release of Jews with possibilities in contrast to any their mom and dad and grandparents had known.

The tumultuous fresh century of Jewish heritage, which observed either a methodical crusade to blot out Europe's Jews and the inexorable absorption of Western Jews into the societies during which they now reside, is illuminated through where of honor technology held in Jewish imaginations. technology was once critical to their goals of constructing new worlds―welcoming worlds―for a persecuted people.

This provocative paintings will attract historians of technological know-how in addition to students of faith, Jewish reports, and Zionism.

A tender spider desires to take part as he watches a relations organize to have fun Rosh Hashanah.

By Peter Mark

This booklet lines the heritage of early seventeenth-century Portuguese Sephardic investors who settled in groups on Senegal's Petite Côte. There, they lived as public Jews, less than the religious advice of a rabbi despatched to them through the newly validated Portuguese Jewish neighborhood in Amsterdam. In Senegal, the Jews have been shielded from brokers of the Inquisition via neighborhood Muslim rulers. The Petite Côte groups incorporated a number of Jews of combined Portuguese-African history in addition to African better halves, offspring, and servants. The blade guns exchange was once an immense a part of their advertisement actions. those retailers participated marginally within the slave alternate yet totally within the hands alternate, illegally providing West African markets with swords. This blade guns alternate relied on artisans and retailers dependent in Morocco, Lisbon, and northerly Europe and affected battle within the Sahel and alongside the higher Guinea Coast. After contributors of those groups moved to the United Provinces round 1620, that they had a profound effect on kinfolk among black and white Jews in Amsterdam. The examine not just discovers formerly unknown Jewish groups yet by means of doing so bargains a reinterpretation of the dynamics and methods of id development during the Atlantic international.

By Chaim Potok

For Davita Chandal, growing to be up within the manhattan of the Nineteen Thirties and '40s is an adventure of pleasure and unhappiness. Her loving mom and dad, either fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely brilliant desire of a brand new and higher global. yet because the deprivations of struggle and melancholy take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly turns to the Jewish religion that her mom had some time past deserted, discovering there either a solace for her wondering internal soreness and a try out of her budding spirit of independence.

From the Paperback edition.

By Paula Fredriksen

Now in paperback with a brand new postscript, this up-to-date version of Paula Fredriksen’s seriously acclaimed Augustine and the Jews strains the social and highbrow forces that ended in the advance of Christian anti-Judaism and exhibits how and why Augustine challenged this tradition.

Drawing us into the existence, instances, and regarded Augustine of Hippo (396–430), Fredriksen specializes in the interval of remarkable creativity that resulted in his new figuring out of Paul and to his nice vintage, The Confessions.  She indicates how Augustine’s fight to learn the Bible led him to a brand new theological imaginative and prescient, person who countered the anti-Judaism not just of his Manichaean competitors but in addition of his personal church. The Christian Empire, Augustine held, was once correct to prohibit paganism and to coerce heretics. however the resource of historical Jewish scripture and present Jewish perform, he argued, was once the exact same as that of the recent testomony and of the church—namely, God himself. therefore, he prompt, Jews have been to be left on my own. Conceived as a vividly unique method to guard Christian principles approximately Jesus and concerning the previous testomony, Augustine’s theological innovation survived the cave in of the Western Roman Empire, and it finally served to guard Jewish lives opposed to the brutality of medieval crusades.

Augustine and the Jews sheds new mild at the origins of Christian anti-Semitism and, via Augustine, opens a direction towards higher figuring out among of the world’s nice religions.

  In 1893 he went including Stephany, a Christian friend, to Borkum, a seashore summer season inn. When he sat all the way down to have his lunch on the inn, he found a letter close to his plate. with out suspecting anything he opened it and skim: 'Jews usually are not sought after here.' And so the small tales of 5 amazing men coalesced, changing into one over-arching heritage that culminated within the institution of the kingdom of Israel. The Founding Fathers of Zionism, written by way of the famed historian Professor Benzion Netanyahu, profiles the boys who showed the Jewish humans the line to survival, freedom and revival.   during this landmark paintings, Netanyahu provides us a glimpse into the eras during which Max Nordau, Leo Pinsker, Theodor Herzl, Israel Zangwill, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky toiled for an epic cause. His unique research of those males, their principles and actions, puts flesh on bone, in order that the 5 stand out in all their grandeur and specialty.

By Sean Freyne

Contents :

The geography of Galilee and its human settlement
Galilee, the increase of Hellenism and the Jewish response
Galilee lower than the Romans, sixty three B.C.E. - one hundred thirty five C.E.
The towns and the Hellenistic ethos of Galilee
Economic realities and social stratification
How progressive used to be Galilee?
The Galileans and the temple
Galilee and the halakhah
Christianity in Galilee.

"This ebook might be on the middle of next discussions approximately Galilee and will turn out to be a helpful source for the research of Judaism and Christianity of this era The writing is apparent and the arguments well-presented ..."
---David Rhoads, magazine of Biblical Literature

By Howard Fast