{"title":"Jewish Culture And Contexts","description":"\u003cp\u003eDelve into the rich tapestry of Jewish history, tradition, and contemporary life with this compelling book series. Explore diverse perspectives and insightful analyses of Jewish culture and its global contexts.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"maimonides-and-the-merchants-book-mark-r-cohen-9780812249149","title":"Maimonides and the Merchants","description":"The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Jews living in the Middle East, and Talmudic law, compiled in and for an agrarian society, was ill equipped to address an increasingly mercantile world. In response, and over the course of the seventh through eleventh centuries, the heads of the Jewish yeshivot of Iraq sought precedence in custom to adapt Jewish law to the new economic and social reality.  In Maimonides and the Merchants, Mark R. Cohen reveals the extent of even further pragmatic revisions to the halakha, or body of Jewish law, introduced by Moses Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah, the comprehensive legal code he compiled in the late twelfth century. While Maimonides insisted that he was merely restating already established legal practice, Cohen uncovers the extensive reformulations that further inscribed commerce into Jewish law. Maimonides revised Talmudic partnership regulations, created a judicial method to enable Jewish courts to enforce forms of commercial agency unknown in the Talmud, and even modified the halakha to accommodate the new use of paper for writing business contracts. Over and again, Cohen demonstrates, the language of Talmudic rulings was altered to provide Jewish merchants arranging commercial collaborations or litigating disputes with alternatives to Islamic law and the Islamic judicial system.  Thanks to the business letters, legal documents, and accounts found in the manuscript stockpile known as the Cairo Geniza, we are able to reconstruct in fine detail Jewish involvement in the marketplace practices that contemporaries called \"the custom of the merchants.\" In Maimonides and the Merchants, Cohen has written a stunning reappraisal of how these same customs inflected Jewish law as it had been passed down through the centuries.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729903034641,"sku":"NGR9780812249149","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740234314001,"sku":"NIN9780812249149","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812249143.jpg?v=1750786257"},{"product_id":"jews-of-eastern-europe-1772-1881-book-israel-bartal-9780812219074","title":"The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881","description":"In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730001010961,"sku":"NGR9780812219074","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50560103481617,"sku":"CIN0812219074G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50930496930065,"sku":"CIN0812219074A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008074645777,"sku":"NIN9780812219074","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812219074.jpg?v=1752317698"},{"product_id":"mixed-multitude-book-pawel-maciejko-9780812223439","title":"The Mixed Multitude","description":"In 1756, Jacob Frank, an Ottoman Jew who had returned to the Poland of his birth, was discovered leading a group of fellow travelers in a suspect religious service. At the request of the local rabbis, Polish authorities arrested the participants. Jewish authorities contacted the bishop in whose diocese the service had taken place and argued that since the rites of Frank's followers involved the practice of magic and immoral conduct, both Jews and Christians should condemn them and burn them at the stake. The scheme backfired, as the Frankists took the opportunity to ally themselves with the Church, presenting themselves as Contra-Talmudists who believed in a triune God. As a Turkish subject, Frank was released and temporarily expelled to the Ottoman territories, but the others were found guilty of breaking numerous halakhic prohibitions and were subject to a Jewish ban of excommunication. While they professed their adherence to everything that was commanded by God in the Old Testament, they asserted as well that the Rabbis of old had introduced innumerable lies and misconstructions in their interpretations of that holy book.  Who were Jacob Frank and his followers? To most Christians, they seemed to be members of a Jewish sect; to Jewish reformers, they formed a group making a valiant if misguided attempt to bring an end to the power of the rabbis; and to more traditional Jews, they were heretics to be suppressed by the rabbinate. What is undeniable is that by the late eighteenth century, the Frankists numbered in the tens of thousands and had a significant political and ideological influence on non-Jewish communities throughout eastern and central Europe.  Based on extensive archival research in Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, Germany, the United States, and the Vatican, The Mixed Multitude is the first comprehensive study of Frank and Frankism in more than a century and offers an important new perspective on Jewish-Christian relations in the Age of Enlightenment.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731609329937,"sku":"NGR9780812223439","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008130744593,"sku":"NIN9780812223439","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53044322042129,"sku":"CIN0812223438VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812223438.jpg?v=1752316017"},{"product_id":"bible-the-talmud-and-the-new-testament-book-elijah-zvi-soloveitchik-9780812250992","title":"The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament","description":"Born in Slutzk, Russia, in 1805, Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik is a largely forgotten member of the prestigious Soloveitchik rabbinic dynasty. Before Hayyim Soloveitchik developed the standard Brisker method of Talmudic study, or Joseph Dov Soloveitchik helped to found American Modern Orthodox Judaism, Elijah Soloveitchik wrote Qol Qore, a rabbinic commentary on the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Qol Qore drew on classic rabbinic literature, and particularly on the works of Moses Maimonides, to argue for the compatibility of Christianity with Judaism. To this day, it remains the only rabbinic work to embrace the compatibility of Orthodox Judaism and the Christian Bible.  In The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, Shaul Magid presents the first-ever English translation of Qol Qore. In his contextualizing introduction, Magid explains that Qol Qore offers a window onto the turbulent historical context of nineteenth-century European Jewry. With violent anti-Semitic activity on the rise in Europe, Elijah Soloveitchik was unique in believing that the roots of anti-Semitism were theological, based on a misunderstanding of the New Testament by both Jews and Christians. His hope was that the Qol Qore, written in Hebrew and translated into French, German, and Polish, would reach Jewish and Christian audiences, urging each to consider the validity of the other's religious principles. In an era characterized by fractious debates between Jewish communities, Elijah Soloveitchik represents a voice that called for radical unity amongst Jews and Christians alike.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731861315857,"sku":"NGR9780812250992","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007914311953,"sku":"NIN9780812250992","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812250990.jpg?v=1752316593"},{"product_id":"prague-and-beyond-book-hillel-kieval-9780812253115","title":"Prague and Beyond","description":"Prague's magnificent synagogues and Old Jewish Cemetery attract millions of visitors each year, and travelers who venture beyond the capital find physical evidence of once vibrant Jewish communities in towns and villages throughout today's Czech Republic. For those seeking to learn more about the people who once lived and died at those sites, however, there has until now been no comprehensive account in English of the region's Jews.  Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today's Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors.  Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738840342801,"sku":"NGR9780812253115","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008056295697,"sku":"NIN9780812253115","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B08Z2XPKSB.jpg?v=1752316012"},{"product_id":"rise-and-fall-of-jewish-american-literature-book-benjamin-schreier-9780812252576","title":"The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature","description":"Benjamin Schreier argues that Jewish American literature's dominant cliché of \"breakthrough\"—that is, the irruption into the heart of the American cultural scene during the 1950s of Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley—must also be seen as the critically originary moment of Jewish American literary study. According to Schreier, this is the primal scene of the Jewish American literary field, the point that the field cannot avoid repeating and replaying in instantiating itself as the more or less formalized academic study of Jewish American literature. More than sixty years later, the field's legibility, the very condition of its possibility, remains overwhelmingly grounded in a reliance on this single ethnological narrative.  In a polemic against what he sees as the unexamined foundations and stagnant state of the field, Schreier interrogates a series of professionally powerful assumptions about Jewish American literary history—how they came into being and how they hardened into cliché. He offers a critical genealogy of breakthrough and other narratives through which Jewish Studies has asserted its compelling self-evidence, not simply under the banner of the historical realities Jewish Studies claims to represent but more fundamentally for the intellectual and institutional structures through which it produces these representations. He shows how a historicist scholarly narrative quickly consolidated and became hegemonic, in part because of its double articulation of a particular American subject and of a transnational historiography that categorically identified that subject as Jewish. The ethnological grounding of the Jewish American literary field is no longer tenable, Schreier asserts, in an argument with broad implications for the reconceptualization of Jewish and other identity-based ethnic studies.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740053905681,"sku":"NGR9780812252576","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008053575953,"sku":"NIN9780812252576","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51422047404305,"sku":"CIN0812252578G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812252578.jpg?v=1752317298"},{"product_id":"secrecy-and-esoteric-writing-in-kabbalistic-literature-book-jonathan-dauber-9781512822748","title":"Secrecy and Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature","description":"Secrecy and Esoteric Writing in Kabbalistic Literature examines the strategies of esoteric writing that Kabbalists have used to conceal secrets in their writings, such that casual readers will only understand the surface meaning of their texts while those with greater insight will grasp the internal meaning. In addition to a broad description of esoteric writing throughout the long literary history of Kabbalah, this work analyzes kabbalistic secrecy in light of contemporary theories of secrecy. It also presents case studies of esoteric writing in the work of four of the first kabbalistic authors—Abraham ben David, Isaac the Blind, Ezra ben Solomon, and Asher ben David—and thereby helps recast our understanding of the earliest stages of kabbalistic literary history.  The book will interest scholars in Jewish mysticism and Jewish philosophy, as well as those working in medieval Jewish history. Throughout, Jonathan V. Dauber has endeavored to write an accessible work that does not require extensive prior knowledge of kabbalistic thought. Accordingly, it finds points of contact between scholars of various religious traditions.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743711109393,"sku":"NGR9781512822748","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52751175123217,"sku":"NIN9781512822748","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1512822744.jpg?v=1763221890"},{"product_id":"revolution-of-1905-and-russia-s-jews-book-stefani-hoffman-9780812240641","title":"The Revolution of 1905 and Russia's Jews","description":"The 1905 Revolution in Russia ushered in an unprecedented (though brief) period of social and political freedom in the Russian Empire. This environment made possible the emergence of mass Jewish politics and the flourishing of a new, modern Jewish culture expressed in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian. Unfortunately, 1905 also unleashed popular anti-Semitism in the shape of pogroms on a scale previously unknown.  Russian Jewry, by far the largest Jewish community in the world at that time, faced fateful decisions. Should the Jews strive to uphold Jewish national uniqueness either in the context of the Russian Empire or by emigrating to Palestine\/the Land of Israel, or should they identify with and merge into the general revolutionary or liberal movements in their country of birth? What direction should Jewish culture and social organizations take within the context of democratization and modernization? In what language or languages should this culture be expressed? How should Jews abroad react to the revolutionary crisis and to the dilemmas of their coreligionists?  The thought-provoking essays in this volume shed new light on these issues while placing them in the larger context of the historical, social, and cultural developments within the Russian Empire. The authors, representing various disciplines, emphasize both the highly varied Jewish responses to the great crisis and the degree to which these responses shared certain vital characteristics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49789337567505,"sku":"CIN0812240642G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51333248680209,"sku":"CIN0812240642VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53251446898961,"sku":"NIN9780812240641","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812240642.jpg?v=1751362313"},{"product_id":"old-worlds-new-mirrors-book-moshe-idel-9780812222104","title":"Old Worlds, New Mirrors","description":"There emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings, or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of religious beliefs. In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a cosmopolitan, mostly European, context.  Idel—himself one of the world's most eminent scholars of Jewish mysticism—focuses in particular on the mystical aspects of his subjects' writings. Avoiding all attempts to discern anything like a single \"essence of Judaism\" in their works, he nevertheless maintains a sustained effort to illumine especially the Kabbalistic and Hasidic strains of thought these figures would have derived from earlier Jewish sources. Looming large throughout is Gershom Scholem, the thinker who played such a crucial role in establishing the study of Kabbalah as a modern academic discipline and whose influence pervades Idel's own work; indeed, the author observes, much of the book may be seen as a mirror held up to reflect on the broader reception of Scholem's thought.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49797940871441,"sku":"CIN0812222105G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008079560977,"sku":"NIN9780812222104","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812222105.jpg?v=1752315827"},{"product_id":"bastards-and-believers-book-theodor-dunkelgrn-9780812251883","title":"Bastards and Believers","description":"A formidable collection of studies on religious conversion and converts in Jewish history  Theodor DunkelgrÜn and Pawel Maciejko observe that the term \"conversion\" is profoundly polysemous. It can refer to Jews who turn to religions other than Judaism and non-Jews who tie their fates to that of Jewish people. It can be used to talk about Christians becoming Muslim (or vice versa), Christians \"born again,\" or premodern efforts to Christianize (or Islamize) indigenous populations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It can even describe how modern, secular people discover spiritual creeds and join religious communities.  Viewing Jewish history from the perspective of conversion across a broad chronological and conceptual frame, Bastards and Believers highlights how the concepts of the convert and of conversion have histories of their own. The volume begins with Sara Japhet's study of conversion in the Hebrew Bible and ends with Netanel Fisher's essay on conversion to Judaism in contemporary Israel. In between, Andrew S. Jacobs writes about the allure of becoming an \"other\" in late Antiquity; Ephraim Kanarfogel considers Rabbinic attitudes and approaches toward conversion to Judaism in the Middles Ages; and Paola Tartakoff ponders the relationship between conversion and poverty in medieval Iberia. Three case studies, by Javier CastaÑo, Claude Stuczynski, and Anne Oravetz Albert, focus on different aspects of the experience of Spanish-Portuguese conversos. Michela Andreatta and Sarah Gracombe discuss conversion narratives; and Elliott Horowitz and Ellie Shainker analyze Eastern European converts' encounters with missionaries of different persuasions.  Despite the differences between periods, contexts, and sources, two fundamental and mutually exclusive notions of human life thread the essays together: the conviction that one can choose one's destiny and the conviction that one cannot escapes one's past. The history of converts presented by Bastards and Believers speaks to the possibility, or impossibility, of changing one's life.  Contributors: Michela Andreatta, Javier CastaÑo, Theodor DunkelgrÜn, Netanel Fisher, Sarah Gracombe, Elliott Horowitz, Andrew S. Jacobs, Sara Japhet, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Pawel Maciejko, Anne Oravetz Albert, Ellie Shainker, Claude Stuczynski, Paola Tartakoff.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49809463607569,"sku":"CIN0812251881VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008005734673,"sku":"NIN9780812251883","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51686781878545,"sku":"CIN0812251881G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812251881.jpg?v=1752317181"},{"product_id":"jewish-enlightenment-book-shmuel-feiner-9780812237559","title":"The Jewish Enlightenment","description":"At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.   Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity.   The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49900445040913,"sku":"CIN0812237552VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812237552.jpg?v=1751297546"},{"product_id":"entangled-histories-book-elisheva-baumgarten-9780812248685","title":"Entangled Histories","description":"From Halakhic innovation to blood libels, from the establishment of new mendicant orders to the institutionalization of Islamicate bureaucracy, and from the development of the inquisitorial process to the rise of yeshivas, universities, and madrasas, the long thirteenth century saw a profusion of political, cultural, and intellectual changes in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. These were informed by, and in turn informed, the religious communities from which they arose. In city streets and government buildings, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived, worked, and disputed with one another, sharing and shaping their respective cultures in the process. The interaction born of these relationships between minority and majority cultures, from love and friendship to hostility and violence, can be described as a complex and irreducible \"entanglement.\" The contributors to Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century argue that this admixture of persecution and cooperation was at the foundation of Jewish experience in the Middle Ages.  The thirteen essays are organized into three major sections, focusing in turn on the exchanges among intellectual communities, on the interactions between secular and religious authorities, and on the transmission of texts and ideas across geographical, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. Rather than trying to resolve the complexities of entanglement, contributors seek to outline their contours and explain how they endured. In the process, they examine relationships not only among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities but also between communities within Judaism—those living under Christian rule and those living under Muslim rule, and between the Jews of southern and northern Europe. The resulting volume develops a multifaceted account of Jewish life in Europe and the Mediterranean basin at a time when economic, cultural, and intellectual exchange coincided with heightened interfaith animosity.  Contributors: Elisheva Baumgarten, Piero Capelli, Mordechai Z. Cohen, Judah Galinsky, Elisabeth Hollender, Kati Ihnat, Ephraim Kanarfogel, Katelyn Mesler, Ruth Mazo Karras, Sarah J. Pearce, Rami Reiner, Yossef Schwartz, Uri Shachar, Rebecca Winer, Luke Yarbrough.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50023521616145,"sku":"GOR013838386","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008061538577,"sku":"NIN9780812248685","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812248686.jpg?v=1752316276"},{"product_id":"kingdom-of-priests-book-martha-himmelfarb-9780812239508","title":"A Kingdom of Priests","description":"According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, \"You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation\" (19:6). The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance between the honor due the priest and the actual behavior of some who filled the role? What can the people do to make itself truly a kingdom of priests?  Himmelfarb argues that these questions become central in Second Temple Judaism. She considers a range of texts from this period, including the Book of Watchers, the Book of Jubilees, legal documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and goes on to explore rabbinic Judaism's emphasis on descent as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel—a position, she contends, that took on new force in reaction to early Christian disparagement of the idea that mere descent from Abraham was sufficient for salvation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50025017049361,"sku":"CIN0812239504G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008135266577,"sku":"NIN9780812239508","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812239504.jpg?v=1752316787"},{"product_id":"rites-and-passages-book-jay-r-berkovitz-9780812220087","title":"Rites and Passages","description":"In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can ignore the cultural history of the Jews during the ancien régime. It was during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that several lasting paradigms emerged within the Jewish community—including the distinction between rural and urban communities, the formation of a strong lay leadership, heightened divisions between popular and elite religion, and the strain between local and regional identities. Each of these developments reflected the growing tension between tradition and modernity before the tumultuous events of the French Revolution.  Rites and Passages emphasizes the resilience of religious tradition during periods of social and political turbulence. Viewing French Jewish history through the lens of ritual, Berkovitz describes the struggles of the French Jewish minority to maintain its cultural distinctiveness while also participating in the larger social and economic matrix. In the ancien régime, ritual systems were a formative element in the traditional worldview and served as a crucial repository of memories and values. After the Revolution, ritual signaled changes in the way Jews related to the state, French society, and French culture. In the cities especially, ritual assumed a performative function that dramatized the epoch-making changes of the day. The terms and concepts of the Jewish religious tradition thus remained central to the discourse of modernization and played a powerful role in helping French Jews interpret the diverse meanings and implications of emancipation.  Introducing new and previously unused primary sources, Rites and Passages offers a fresh perspective on the dynamic relationship between tradition and modernity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50052060840209,"sku":"GOR013846873","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363173011729,"sku":"CIN0812220080G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368064586001,"sku":"CIN0812220080VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51173153767697,"sku":"NIN9780812220087","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812220080.jpg?v=1752317833"},{"product_id":"third-pillar-book-geoffrey-hartman-9780812243161","title":"The Third Pillar","description":"Why should we be excluded from the history and literature of Judaism because the world of our fathers and mothers became a secularized one, Geoffrey Hartman asks, or because religious literacy, whatever our faith or community affiliation, has gone into relative decline? And why, he asks, do those who have no trouble finding pleasure and intellectual profit in the Greek and Roman classics or in the literary and artistic productions of two millennia of Western Christianity not easily find equal resonance and reward in the major texts in the Jewish tradition? For if Christianity and the classical inheritance stand as two pillars of Western civilization, surely the third pillar is the Jewish tradition.  In The Third Pillar Hartman, one of the most influential scholars and teachers of English and comparative literature of recent decades, has brought together some of the most important and eloquent essays he has written since the 1980s on the major texts of the Jewish tradition. In three groupings, on Bible, Midrash, and education, Hartman clarifies the relevance of contemporary literary criticism to canonical texts in the tradition, while demonstrating what has been—and what still remains to be—learned from the Midrash to enrich the interpretation of commentary and art, sacred or secular. \"The map of the discipline [of Jewish studies] is still being drawn,\" Hartman writes. \"Barely known areas tempt the explorer, and major reinterpretations remain possible. This third pillar of our civilization . . . is only now being fully excavated: we have discovered something but not everything about its structure and upholding function.\"","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50099067158801,"sku":"GOR013854759","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812243161.jpg?v=1752315824"},{"product_id":"sanctifying-the-name-of-god-book-jeremy-cohen-9780812219562","title":"Sanctifying the Name of God","description":"How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these \"Persecutions of 1096\" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history.   When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today.   The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50203136033041,"sku":"CIN0812219562G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007917883665,"sku":"NIN9780812219562","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51217602183441,"sku":"GOR007790416","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812219562.jpg?v=1752316742"},{"product_id":"art-of-being-jewish-in-modern-times-book-barbara-kirshenblatt-gimblett-9780812240023","title":"The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times","description":"The wide-ranging portrayal of modern Jewishness in artistic terms invites scrutiny into the relationship between creativity and the formation of Jewish identity and into the complex issue of what makes a work of art uniquely Jewish. Whether it is the provenance of the artist, as in the case of popular Israeli singer Zehava Ben, the intention of the iconography, as in Ben Shahn's antifascist paintings, or the utopian ideals of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, clearly no single formula for defining Jewish art in the diaspora will suffice.   The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times is the first work to analyze modern Jewry's engagement with the arts as a whole, including music, theater, dance, film, museums, architecture, painting, sculpture, and more. Working with a broad conception of what counts as art, the book asks the following questions: What roles have commerce and politics played in shaping Jewish artistic agendas? Who determines the Jewishness of art and for what purposes? What role has aesthetics played in reshaping religious traditions and rituals?   This richly illustrated volume illuminates how the arts have helped Jews confront the various challenges of modernity, including cultural adaptation and self-preservation, economic diversification, and ritual transformation. There truly is an art to being Jewish in the modern world—or, alternatively, an art to being modern in the Jewish world—and this collection fully captures its range, diversity, and historical significance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50216595751185,"sku":"CIN0812240022A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50787748905233,"sku":"CIN0812240022G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812240022.jpg?v=1751075907"},{"product_id":"jewish-body-book-robert-jtte-9780812252651","title":"The Jewish Body","description":"An encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present  That the human body can be the object not only of biological study but also of historical consideration and cultural criticism is now widely accepted. But why, Robert JÜtte asks, should a historian bother with the Jewish body in particular? And is the \"Jewish body\" as much a concept constructed over the course of centuries by Jews and non-Jews alike as it is a physical reality? To comprehend the notion and existence of a Jewish body, he contends, one needs to look both at the images and traits that have been ascribed to Jews by themselves and others, and to the specific bodily practices that have played an important role in creating the identity of a religious and cultural community.  JÜtte has written an encyclopedic survey of the Jewish body as it has existed and as it has been imagined from biblical times to the present, often for anti-Jewish purposes. He examines the techniques for caring for the body that Jews acquire in childhood from parents and authority figures and how these have changed over the course of a more than 2000-year history, most of it spent in exile. From consideration of traditional body stereotypes, such as the so-called Jewish nose, to matters of gender and sexuality, sickness and health, and the inevitable end of the body in death, The Jewish Body explores the historical foundations of the human physis in all its aspects.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50288338927889,"sku":"CIN0812252659VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50288343122193,"sku":"CIN0812252659G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50981036753169,"sku":"GOR014159003","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812252659.jpg?v=1752317659"},{"product_id":"werner-scholem-book-mirjam-zadoff-9780812249699","title":"Werner Scholem","description":"Werner Scholem never took the easy path. Born in 1895 into the Berlin Jewish middle class, he married a young non-Jewish woman of proletarian background. He was the youngest member of the Prussian Parliament in the 1920s, one of the leaders of the German Communist Party, and the editor of the influential journal The Red Flag. As an outspoken critic of Stalin, he was soon expelled from the party, only to take up a position at the head of a revolutionary Trotskyite faction in the years before 1933. Reviled by the National Socialists as a Communist and a Jew, he was among the first to be arrested when Hitler rose to power and, after a long incarceration, was murdered in Buchenwald.  In Werner Scholem: A German Life Mirjam Zadoff has written a book that is at once a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. It is an account of the ruptures within a society and of the growing insecurity in which German Jews lived between the two world wars—and especially of two brothers who chose opposing paths out of the shared conviction that there was no future for Jews in Germany after the First World War. While Werner pinned his hopes on a universal revolution he would never see, the younger Gerhard emigrated to Palestine where, as Gershom, he would choose revolutionary Zionism and the reanimation of ancient strains of Jewish mysticism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362262126865,"sku":"CIN0812249690VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53035320115473,"sku":"NIN9780812249699","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812249690.jpg?v=1751362324"},{"product_id":"dominion-built-of-praise-book-jonathan-decter-9780812250411","title":"Dominion Built of Praise","description":"A constant feature of Jewish culture in the medieval Mediterranean was the dedication of panegyric texts in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and other languages to men of several ranks: scholars, communal leaders, courtiers, merchants, patrons, and poets. Although the imagery of nature and eroticism in the preludes to these poems is often studied, the substance of what follows is generally neglected, as it is perceived to be repetitive, obsequious, and less aesthetically interesting than other types of poetry from the period. In Dominion Built of Praise, Jonathan Decter demurs. As is the case with visual portraits, panegyrics operate according to a code of cultural norms that tell us at least as much about the society that produced them as the individuals they portray. Looking at the phenomenon of panegyric in Mediterranean Jewish culture from several overlapping perspectives—social, historical, ethical, poetic, political, and theological—he finds that they offer representations of Jewish political leadership as it varied across geographic area and evolved over time.  Decter focuses his analysis primarily on Jewish centers in the Islamic Mediterranean between the tenth and thirteenth centuries and also includes a chapter on Jews in the Christian Mediterranean through the fifteenth century. He examines the hundreds of panegyrics that have survived: some copied repeatedly in luxurious anthologies, others discarded haphazardly in the Cairo Geniza. According to Decter, the poems extolled conventional character traits ascribed to leaders not only diachronically within the Jewish political tradition but also synchronically within Islamic and, to a lesser extent, Christian civilization and political culture. Dominion Built of Praise reveals more than a superficial and functional parallel between Muslim and Jewish forms of statecraft and demonstrates how ideas of Islamic political legitimacy profoundly shaped the ways in which Jews conceptualized and portrayed their own leadership.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362284540177,"sku":"CIN0812250419G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368781943057,"sku":"CIN0812250419VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007912608017,"sku":"NIN9780812250411","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812250419.jpg?v=1752315740"},{"product_id":"becoming-the-people-of-the-talmud-book-talya-fishman-9780812222876","title":"Becoming the People of the Talmud","description":"In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud-which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later-precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life.  What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena-the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud-were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368179175697,"sku":"CIN0812222873G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008205848849,"sku":"NIN9780812222876","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812222873.jpg?v=1752315089"},{"product_id":"unveiling-eve-book-tova-rosen-9780812237108","title":"Unveiling Eve","description":"Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title  Unveiling Eve is the first feminist inquiry into the Hebrew poetry and prose forms cultivated in Muslim and Christian Spain, Italy, and Provence in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. In the Jewish Middle Ages, writing was an exclusively male competence, and textual institutions such as the study of scripture, mysticism, philosophy, and liturgy were men's sanctuaries from which women were banished. These domains of male expertise—alongside belles lettres, on which Rosen's book focuses—served as virtual laboratories for experimenting with concepts of femininity and masculinity, hetero- and homosexuality, feminization and virilization, transvestism and transsexuality. Reviewing texts as varied as love lyric, love stories, marriage debates, rhetorical contests, and liturgical and moralistic pieces, Tova Rosen considers the positions and positioning of female figures and female voices within Jewish male discourse.  The idolization and demonization of women present in these texts is read here against the background of scripture and rabbinic literature as well as the traditions of chivalry and misogyny in the hosting Islamic and Christian cultures. Unveiling Eve unravels the literary evidence of a patriarchal tradition in which women are routinely rendered nonentities, often positioned as abstractions without bodies or reified as bodies without subjectivities. Without rigidly following any one school of feminist thinking, Rosen creatively employs a variety of methodologies to describe and assess the texts' presentation of male sexual politics and delineate how women and concepts of gender were manipulated, fictionalized, fantasized, and poeticized. Inaugurating a new era of critical thinking in Hebrew literature, Unveiling Eve penetrates a field of medieval literary scholarship that has, until now, proven impervious to feminist criticism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368350945553,"sku":"CIN0812237102G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812237102.jpg?v=1752315370"},{"product_id":"secularism-in-question-book-ari-joskowicz-9780812247275","title":"Secularism in Question","description":"For much of the twentieth century, most religious and secular Jewish thinkers believed that they were witnessing a steady, ongoing movement toward secularization. Toward the end of the century, however, as scholars and pundits began to speak of the global resurgence of religion, the normalization of secularism could no longer be considered inevitable. Recent decades have seen the strengthening of Orthodox movements in the United States and in Israel; religious Zionism has grown and radically changed since the 1960s, and new and vibrant nondenominational Jewish movements have emerged.  Secularism in Question examines the ways these contemporary revivals of religion prompt a reconsideration of many issues concerning Jews and Judaism from the early modern era to the present. Bringing together scholars of history, religion, philosophy, and literature, this volume illustrates how the categories of \"religious\" and \"secular\" have frequently proven far more permeable than fixed. The contributors challenge the problematic assumptions about the development of secularism that emerge from Protestant European and American perspectives and demonstrate that global Jewish experiences necessitate a reappraisal of conventional narratives of secularism. Ultimately, Secularism in Question calls for rethinking the very terms that animate many of the most contentious debates in contemporary Jewish life and far beyond.  Contributors: Michal Ben-Horin, Aryeh Edrei, Jonathan Mark Gribetz, Ari Joskowicz, Ethan B. Katz, Eva Lezzi, Vivian Liska, Rachel Manekin, David Myers, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Andrea Schatz, Christophe Schulte, Daniel B. 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Poor relief administrators, confronted with multiple requests and a finite communal budget, were forced to decide who would receive support and how much, and who would not. Then as now, observes Debra Kaplan, public charity tells us about both donors and recipients, revealing the values, perceptions, roles in society, and the dynamics of power that existed between those who gave and those who received.  In The Patrons and Their Poor, Kaplan offers the first extensive analysis of Jewish poor relief in early modern German cities and towns, focusing on three major urban Ashkenazic Jewish communities from the Western part of the Holy Roman Empire: Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek, Frankfurt am Main, and Worms. She demonstrates how Jewish charitable institutions became increasingly formalized as Jewish authorities faced a growing number of people seeking aid amid limited resources. 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Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves.  In ancient Jewish texts, the term for blue, tekhelet, denotes a dye that serves Jewish ritual purposes. Since medieval times, however, Jews gradually ceased to use tekhelet in their ritual life. In the nineteenth century, however, interest in restoring ancient dyes increased among European scholars. In the Jewish case, rabbis and scientists attempted to reproduce the ancient tekhelet dye. The resulting dyes were gradually accepted in the ritual life of many Orthodox Jews. In addition to being a dye playing a role in Jewish ritual, blue features prominently in the Jewish mystical tradition, in Jewish magic and popular custom, and in Jewish eschatology. Blue is also representative of the Zionist movement, and it is the only chromatic color in the national flag of the State of Israel.  Through the study of the changing roles and meanings attributed to the color blue in Judaism, Jewish Blues sheds new light on the power of a visual symbol in shaping the imagination of Jews throughout history. The use of the color blue continues to reflect pressing issues for Jews in our present era, as it has become a symbol of Jewish modernity.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50387034341649,"sku":"CIN1512823376VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51032097882385,"sku":"NIN9781512823370","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1512823376.jpg?v=1763222607"},{"product_id":"invisible-enlighteners-book-federica-francesconi-9780812253146","title":"Invisible Enlighteners","description":"Federica Francesconi writes the history of the Jewish merchants who lived and prospered in the northern Italian city of Modena, capital city of the Este Duchy, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her protagonists are men and women who stood out within their communities but who, despite their cultural and economic prominence, were ghettoized after 1638. Their sociocultural transformation and eventual legal and political integration evolved through a complex dialogue between their Italian and Jewish identities, and without the traumatic ruptures or dramatic divides that led to the assimilation and conversion of many Jews elsewhere in Europe.  In Modena, male and female Jewish identities were contoured by both cultural developments internal to the community and engagement with the broader society. The study of Lurianic and Cordoverian Kabbalah, liturgical and nondevotional Hebrew poetry, and Sabbateanism existed alongside interactions with Jesuits, converts, and inquisitors. If Modenese Jewish merchants were absent from the public discourse of the Estes, their businesses lives were nevertheless located at the very geographical and economic center of the city. They lived in an environment that gave rise to unique forms of Renaissance culture, early modern female agency, and Enlightenment practice. New Jewish ways of performing gender emerged in the seventeenth century, giving rise to what could be called an entrepreneurial female community devoted to assisting, employing, and socializing in the ghetto. Indeed, the ghetto leadership prepared both Jewish men and women for the political and legal emancipation they would eventually obtain under Napoleon. It was the cultured Modenese merchants who combined active participation in the political struggle for Italian Jewish emancipation with the creation of a special form of the Enlightenment embedded in scholarly and French-oriented lay culture that emerged within the European context.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50404598874385,"sku":"CINB08N424DB8VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52939598463249,"sku":"GOR014661288","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53008082993425,"sku":"NIN9780812253146","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/B08N424DB8.jpg?v=1752316706"},{"product_id":"next-year-in-marienbad-book-mirjam-zadoff-9780812244663","title":"Next Year in Marienbad","description":"From the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s, the West Bohemian spa towns of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad were fashionable destinations for visitors wishing to \"take a cure\"—to drink the waters, bathe in the mud, be treated by the latest X-ray, light, or gas therapies, or simply enjoy the respite afforded by elegant parks and comfortable lodgings. These were sociable and urbane places, settings for celebrity sightings, match-making, and stylish promenading. Originally the haunt of aristocrats, the spa towns came to be the favored summer resorts for the emerging bourgeoisie. Among the many who traveled there, a very high proportion were Jewish.  In Next Year in Marienbad, Mirjam Zadoff writes the social and cultural history of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad as Jewish spaces. Secular and religious Jews from diverse national, cultural, and social backgrounds mingled in idyllic and often apolitical-seeming surroundings. During the season, shops sold Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, kosher kitchens were opened, and theatrical presentations, concerts, and public readings catered to the Jewish clientele. Yet these same resorts were situated in a region of growing hostile nationalisms, and they were towns that might turn virulently anti-Semitic in the off season.  Next Year in Marienbad draws from memoirs and letters, newspapers and maps, novels and postcards to create a compelling and engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the years between the fin de siècle and the Second World War.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50470009078033,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50470011535633,"sku":"CIN0812244664VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52687177351441,"sku":"NLS9780812244663","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53035319984401,"sku":"NIN9780812244663","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812244664.jpg?v=1752315607"},{"product_id":"occupied-words-book-hannah-pollin-galay-9781512825909","title":"Occupied Words","description":"How Yiddish changed to express and memorialize the trauma of the Holocaust  The Holocaust radically altered the way many East European Jews spoke Yiddish. Finding prewar language incapable of describing the imprisonment, death, and dehumanization of the Shoah, prisoners added or reinvented thousands of Yiddish words and phrases to describe their new reality. These crass, witty, and sometimes beautiful Yiddish words – Khurbn Yiddish, or “Yiddish of the Holocaust” – puzzled and intrigued the East European Jews who were experiencing the metamorphosis of their own tongue in real time. Sensing that Khurbn Yiddish words harbored profound truths about what Jews endured during the Holocaust, some Yiddish speakers threw themselves into compiling dictionaries and glossaries to document and analyze these new words. Others incorporated Khurbn Yiddish into their poetry and prose. In Occupied Words, Hannah Pollin-Galay explores Khurbn Yiddish as a form of Holocaust memory and as a testament to the sensation of speech under genocidal conditions.   Occupied Words investigates Khurbn Yiddish through the lenses of cultural history, philology, and literary interpretation. Analyzing fragments of language consciousness left behind from the camps and ghettos alongside the postwar journeys of three intellectuals—Nachman Blumental, Israel Kaplan and Elye Spivak—Pollin-Galay seeks to understand why people chose Yiddish lexicography as a means of witnessing the Holocaust. She then turns to the Khurbn Yiddish words themselves, focusing on terms related to theft, the German-Yiddish encounter and the erotic female body. Here, the author unearths new perspectives on how Jews experienced daily life under Nazi occupation, while raising questions about language and victimhood. Lastly, the book explores how writers turned ghetto and camp slang into art—highlighting the poetry and fiction of K. Tzetnik (Yehiel Di-Nur) and Chava Rosenfarb. Ultimately, Occupied Words speaks to broader debates about cultural genocide, asking how we might rethink the concept of genocide through the framework of language.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50505802219793,"sku":"GOR013976607","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":50941183557905,"sku":"NGR9781512825909","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51032656904465,"sku":"NIN9781512825909","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1512825905.jpg?v=1752316495"},{"product_id":"speaking-infinities-book-ariel-evan-mayse-9780812252187","title":"Speaking Infinities","description":"A study of the life and work of 'the Maggid\"—a major figure in the mystical thought of early Hasidism  Enshrined in Jewish memory simply as \"the Maggid\" (preacher), Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman of Mezritsh (1704-1772) played a critical role in the formation of Hasidism, the movement of mystical renewal that became one of the most important and successful forces in modern Jewish life. In Speaking Infinities, Ariel Evan Mayse turns to the homilies of the Maggid to explore the place of words in mystical experience. He argues that the Maggid's theory of language is the key to unpacking his abstract mystical theology as well as his teachings on the devotional life and religious practice.  Mayse shows how Dov Ber's vision of language emerges from his encounters with Ba'al Shem Tov (the BeSHT), the founder of Hasidic Judaism, whose teaching put forward a vision of radical divine immanence. Taking the BeSHT's notion of God's immanence as a kind of linguistic vitality echoing in the cosmos, Dov Ber developed a theory of language in which all human tongues, even in their mundane forms, have the potential to become sacred when returned to their divine source.  Analyzing homilies and theological meditations on language, Mayse demonstrates that Dov Ber was an innovative thinker and contends that, in many respects, it was Dov Ber, rather than the BeSHT, who was the true founder of Hasidism as it took root, and the foremost shaper of its early theology. Speaking Infinities offers an exploration of this introspective mystic's life, gleaned from scattered anecdotes, legends, and historical sources, distinguishing the historical personage from the figure that emerges from the composite array of textual and oral traditions that have shaped the memory of the Maggid and his legacy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50853814960401,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50853816369425,"sku":"CIN0812252187G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812252187.jpg?v=1763483171"},{"product_id":"connecting-histories-book-david-b-ruderman-9780812250916","title":"Connecting Histories","description":"Whether forced by governmental decree, driven by persecution and economic distress, or seeking financial opportunity, the Jews of early modern Europe were extraordinarily mobile, experiencing both displacement and integration into new cultural, legal, and political settings. This, in turn, led to unprecedented modes of social mixing for Jews, especially for those living in urban areas, who frequently encountered Jews from different ethnic backgrounds and cultural orientations. Additionally, Jews formed social, economic, and intellectual bonds with mixed populations of Christians. While not necessarily effacing Jewish loyalties to local places, authorities, and customs, these connections and exposures to novel cultural settings created new allegiances as well as new challenges, resulting in constructive relations in some cases and provoking strife and controversy in others.  The essays collected by Francesca Bregoli and David B. Ruderman in Connecting Histories show that while it is not possible to speak of a single, cohesive transregional Jewish culture in the early modern period, Jews experienced pockets of supra-local connections between West and East—for example, between Italy and Poland, Poland and the Holy Land, and western and eastern Ashkenaz—as well as increased exchanges between high and low culture. Special attention is devoted to the impact of the printing press and the strategies of representation and self-representation through which Jews forged connections in a world where their status as a tolerated minority was ambiguous and in constant need of renegotiation.  Exploring the ways in which early modern Jews related to Jews from different backgrounds and to the non-Jews around them, Connecting Histories emphasizes not only the challenging nature and impact of these encounters but also the ambivalence experienced by Jews as they met their others.  Contributors: Michela Andreatta, Francesca Bregoli, Joseph Davis, Jesús de Prado Plumed, Andrea Gondos, Rachel L. Greenblatt, Gershon David Hundert, Fabrizio Lelli, Moshe Idel, Debra Kaplan, Lucia Raspe, David B. Ruderman, Pavel Sládek, Claude B. Stuczynski, Rebekka Voß.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007845433617,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007848775953,"sku":"NIN9780812250916","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812250915.jpg?v=1752315063"},{"product_id":"rabbi-leo-baeck-book-michael-a-meyer-9780812252569","title":"Rabbi Leo Baeck","description":"Rabbi, educator, intellectual, and community leader, Leo Baeck (1873-1956) was one of the most important Jewish figures of prewar Germany. The publication of his 1905 Das Wesen des Judentums (The Essence of Judaism) established him as a major voice for liberal Judaism. He served as a chaplain to the German army during the First World War and in the years following, resisting the call of political Zionism, he expressed his commitment to the belief in a vibrant place for Jews in a new Germany. This hope was dashed with the rise of Nazism, and from 1933 on, and continuing even after his deportation to Theresienstadt, he worked tirelessly in his capacity as a leader of the German Jewish community to offer his coreligionists whatever practical, intellectual, and spiritual support remained possible. While others after the war worked to rebuild German Jewish life from the ashes, a disillusioned Baeck pronounced the effort misguided and spent the rest of his life in England. Yet his name is perhaps best-known today from the Leo Baeck Institutes in New York, London, Berlin, and Jerusalem dedicated to the preservation of the cultural heritage of German-speaking Jewry.  Michael A. Meyer has written a biography that gives equal consideration to Leo Baeck's place as a courageous community leader and as one of the most significant Jewish religious thinkers of the twentieth century, comparable to such better-known figures as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Abraham Joshua Heschel. According to Meyer, to understand Baeck fully, one must probe not only his thought and public activity but also his personality. Generally described as gentle and kind, he could also be combative when necessary, and a streak of puritanism and an outsized veneration for martyrdom ran through his psychological makeup. Drawing on a broad variety of sources, some coming to light only in recent years, but especially turning to Baeck's own writings, Meyer presents a complex and nuanced image of one of the most noteworthy personalities in the Jewish history of our age.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007883641105,"sku":"NIN9780812252569","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51330925887761,"sku":"CIN081225256XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53090009514257,"sku":"GOR011458935","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081225256X.jpg?v=1752316859"},{"product_id":"russian-jews-between-the-reds-and-the-whites-1917-1920-book-oleg-budnitskii-9780812243642","title":"Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920","description":"In the years following the Russian Revolution, a bitter civil war was waged between the Bolsheviks, with their Red Army of Workers and Peasants on the one side, and the various groups that constituted the anti-Bolshevik movement on the other. The major anti-Bolshevik force was the White Army, whose leadership consisted of former officers of the Russian imperial army. In the received—and simplified—version of this history, those Jews who were drawn into the political and military conflict were overwhelmingly affiliated with the Reds, while from the start, the Whites orchestrated campaigns of anti-Jewish violence, leading to the deaths of thousands of Jews in pogroms in the Ukraine and elsewhere.  In Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920, Oleg Budnitskii provides the first comprehensive historical account of the role of Jews in the Russian Civil War. According to Budnitskii, Jews were both victims and executioners, and while they were among the founders of the Soviet state, they also played an important role in the establishment of the anti-Bolshevik factions. He offers a far more nuanced picture of the policies of the White leadership toward the Jews than has been previously available, exploring such issues as the role of prominent Jewish politicians in the establishment of the White movement of southern Russia, the \"Jewish Question\" in the White ideology and its international aspects, and the attempts of the Russian Orthodox Church and White diplomacy to forestall the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.  The relationship between the Jews and the Reds was no less complicated. Nearly all of the Jewish political parties severely disapproved of the Bolshevik coup, and the Red Army was hardly without sin when it came to pogroms against the Jews. Budnitskii offers a fresh assessment of the part played by Jews in the establishment of the Soviet state, of the turn in the policies of Jewish socialist parties after the first wave of mass pogroms and their efforts to attract Jews to the Red Army, of Bolshevik policies concerning the Jewish population, and of how these stances changed radically over the course of the Civil War.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007890161937,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007893635345,"sku":"NIN9780812243642","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812243641.jpg?v=1752317366"},{"product_id":"practicing-piety-in-medieval-ashkenaz-book-elisheva-baumgarten-9780812223705","title":"Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz","description":"In the urban communities of medieval Germany and northern France, the beliefs, observances, and practices of Jews allowed them to create and define their communities on their own terms as well as in relation to the surrounding Christian society. Although medieval Jewish texts were written by a learned elite, the laity also observed many religious rituals as part of their everyday life. In Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz, Elisheva Baumgarten asks how Jews, especially those who were not learned, expressed their belonging to a minority community and how their convictions and deeds were made apparent to both their Jewish peers and the Christian majority.  Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz provides a social history of religious practice in context, particularly with regard to the ways Jews and Christians, separately and jointly, treated their male and female members. Medieval Jews often shared practices and beliefs with their Christian neighbors, and numerous notions and norms were appropriated by one community from the other. By depicting a dynamic interfaith landscape and a diverse representation of believers, Baumgarten offers a fresh assessment of Jewish practice and the shared elements that composed the piety of Jews in relation to their Christian neighbors.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007915622673,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007919325457,"sku":"NIN9780812223705","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812223705.jpg?v=1752316575"},{"product_id":"blood-inscriptions-book-hillel-j-kieval-9780812253764","title":"Blood Inscriptions","description":"Although the Enlightenment had seemed to bring an end to the widely held belief that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, charges of the so-called blood libel were surprisingly widespread in central and eastern Europe on either side of the turn to the twentieth century. Well over one hundred accusations were made against Jews in this period, and prosecutors and government officials in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia broke with long established precedent to bring six of these cases forward in sensational public trials. In Blood Inscriptions Hillel J. Kieval examines four cases-the prosecutions that took place at TiszaeszlÁr in Hungary (1882-83), Xanten in Germany (1891-92), PolnÁ in Austrian Bohemia (1899-1900), and Konitz, then Germany, now in Poland (1900-1902)-to consider the means by which discredited beliefs came to seem once again plausible.  Kieval explores how educated elites took up the accusations of Jewish ritual murder and considers the roles played by government bureaucracies, the journalistic establishment, forensic medicine, and advanced legal practices in structuring the investigations and trials. The prosecutors, judges, forensic scientists, criminologists, and academic scholars of Judaism and other expert witnesses all worked hard to establish their epistemological authority as rationalists, Kieval contends. Far from being a throwback to the Middle Ages, these ritual murder trials were in all respects a product of post-Enlightenment politics and culture. Harnessed to and disciplined by the rhetoric of modernity, they were able to proceed precisely because they were framed by the idioms of scientific discourse and rationality.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007922798865,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007926337809,"sku":"NIN9780812253764","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53600909492497,"sku":"CIN0812253760G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812253760.jpg?v=1751170130"},{"product_id":"historian-in-exile-book-jeremy-cohen-9780812248586","title":"A Historian in Exile","description":"In A Historian in Exile, Jeremy Cohen shows how Solomon ibn Verga's Shevet Yehudah bridges the divide between the medieval and early modern periods, reflecting a contemporary consciousness that a new order had begun to replace the old.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007937118481,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007941640465,"sku":"NIN9780812248586","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812248589.jpg?v=1752315927"},{"product_id":"renewing-the-past-reconfiguring-jewish-culture-book-ross-brann-9780812237429","title":"Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture","description":"In a penetrating exploration of the various ways memories and representations of the Jewish past have been reconfigured in new historical circumstances, Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture focuses on two key eras of encounter between Jews and non-Jews: the golden age of Sephardic culture in Islamic al-Andalus, on the one hand, and on the other, the period of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, which it inspired. The writings assembled here engage with key issues to understand how in both epochs the cultural orientation of Jewish society was profoundly reassessed and transformed by new influences filtering in from outside.  Adopting a comparative historical approach, Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture offers a view of moments of heightened interaction between Jews and their host cultures. The elevation of the ideal of rationalism provoked significant shifts in the aesthetic values and patterns of cultural memory in Sephardic al-Andalus; this same ideal once again posed insistent challenges in the era of the Enlightenment, to which Jewish intellectuals widely responded by evoking, but also refashioning, the historical precedent of the Andalusian Golden Age.  Looking to contexts ranging from premodern Spain and Italy to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, and America, the eleven contributors to this volume-drawn equally from literary and historical studies-explore the ways the political and intellectual aspirations of successive historical presents have repeatedly reshaped the forms and narratives of Jewish cultural memory.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007958745361,"sku":"NIN9780812237429","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812237420.jpg?v=1751010703"},{"product_id":"exclusion-and-hierarchy-book-adam-s-ferziger-9780812238655","title":"Exclusion and Hierarchy","description":"Following the Jewish Enlightenment, many eighteenth-century Jews chose not to observe the religious laws and customs that had earlier marked them as culturally different from their Christian peers. As the Jewish population became increasingly assimilated, an ultraorthodox movement also emerged, creating a discrete identity for a group within the Jewish community that opted not to move toward the mainstream but instead to embrace the traditional laws.  By tracing the evolution of the approach of the Orthodox to their nonpracticing brethren, Adam S. Ferziger sheds new light on the emergence of Orthodoxy as a specific movement within modern Jewish society. In the course of this process, German Orthodoxy in particular articulated a new hierarchical vision of Jewish identity and the structure of modern Jewish society. Viewing Orthodox Judaism as no less a nineteenth-century phenomenon than Reform Judaism or Zionism, Ferziger looks at the ways it defined itself by its relationship to the nonobservant Jewish population. Ferziger argues that as the Orthodox movement emerged, it rejected the stance that the assimilated and nonobservers were deviant outcasts. Instead, they were accepted as legitimate members of a Jewish community, in which Orthodox Jews occupied the pinnacle, as the guardians of its tradition.  This book's contribution, however, moves beyond a historical study of Orthodox Judaism. The sociological methodology that Ferziger employs enables the reader to appreciate how other religious groups have sought to carve out their places within the mosaic of modern society.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007971098897,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007974637841,"sku":"NIN9780812238655","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812238656.jpg?v=1751297549"},{"product_id":"jew-in-the-art-of-the-italian-renaissance-book-dana-e-katz-9780812240856","title":"The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance","description":"Renaissance Italy is often characterized as a place of unusual tolerance and privilege toward Jews. Unlike England, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, the princely courts of early modern Italy, particularly Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara, offered economic and social prosperity to Jews. When anti-Jewish hostilities created civic tumult in this region, secular authorities promptly contained the violence.  Yet this written record tells only one part of the story. Pictures tell another. In The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance, Dana E. Katz reveals how Renaissance paintings and sculpture became part of a policy of tolerance that deflected violence to a symbolic status. While rulers upheld toleration legislation governing Christian-Jewish relations, they simultaneously supported artistic commissions that perpetuated violence against Jews. The economic benefits Jewish toleration supplied never outweighed the animosity toward Jews' participation in the Christian community.  Katz examines how particular forms of visual representation were used to punish Jews symbolically for alleged crimes against Christianity, including host desecration, deicide, and ritual murder. The production of such imagery testifies to the distinctive Jewry policies employed in the northern Italian princedoms, republican Florence, and imperial Trent. 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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 Americas while still adhering to some of the rituals and customs of their ancestors. In a testament to the partial assimilation of these new arrivals, their faith became ever more syncretic, mixing elements of Judaism with Christian practice and theology.   In many cases, the combination was fatal. Wachtel relies on inquisitorial archives of trials and executions to chronicle legal and religious prosecutions for heresy. From the humble Jean Vicente to the fabulously wealthy slave trafficker Manuel Bautista Perez, from the untutored Theresa Paes de Jesus to the learned Francisco Maldonado de Silva, each unforgettable figure offers a chilling reminder of the reach of the Inquisition.   Sensitive to the lingering tensions within the Marrano communities, Wachtel joins the concerns of an anthropologist to his skills as a historian, and in a stunning authorial move, he demonstrates that the faith of remembrance remains alive today in the towns of rural Brazil.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007991251217,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007994790161,"sku":"NIN9780812244557","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812244559.jpg?v=1751043106"},{"product_id":"sufi-jewish-dialogue-book-diana-lobel-9780812239539","title":"A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue","description":"In A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, Diana Lobel explores the full extent to which Duties of the Heart marks the flowering of the Jewish-Arab symbiosis, the interpenetration of Islamic and Jewish civilizations.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51007996559633,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51007999836433,"sku":"NIN9780812239539","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51472134275345,"sku":"CIN0812239539G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812239539.jpg?v=1752317202"},{"product_id":"reorienting-the-east-book-martin-jacobs-9780812246223","title":"Reorienting the East","description":"Reorienting the East explores the Islamic world as it was encountered, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The first comprehensive investigation of Jewish travel writing from this era, this study engages with questions raised by postcolonial studies and contributes to the debate over the nature and history of Orientalism as defined by Edward Said.  Examining two dozen Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries, Martin Jacobs asks whether Jewish travelers shared Western perceptions of the Islamic world with their Christian counterparts. Most Jews who detailed their journeys during this period hailed from Christian lands and many sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean aboard Christian-owned vessels. Yet Jacobs finds that their descriptions of the Near East subvert or reorient a decidedly Christian vision of the region. The accounts from the crusader era, in particular, are often critical of the Christian church and present glowing portraits of Muslim-Jewish relations. By contrast, some of the later travelers discussed in the book express condescending attitudes toward Islam, Muslims, and Near Eastern Jews. Placing shifting perspectives on the Muslim world in their historical, social, and literary contexts, Jacobs interprets these texts as mirrors of changing Jewish self-perceptions. As he argues, the travel accounts echo the various ways in which premodern Jews negotiated their mingled identities, which were neither exclusively Western nor entirely Eastern.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008004620561,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008007471377,"sku":"NIN9780812246223","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812246225.jpg?v=1752317877"},{"product_id":"yigal-allon-native-son-book-anita-shapira-9780812240283","title":"Yigal Allon, Native Son","description":"Born in 1918 into the fabric of Arab-Jewish frontier life at the foot of Mt. Tabor, Yigal Allon rose to become one of the founding figures of the state of Israel and an architect of its politics. In 1945 Allon became commander of the Palmah—an elite unit of the Haganah, the semilegal army of the Jewish community—during the struggle against the British for independence. In the 1947-49 War of Independence against local and invading Arab armies, he led the decisive battles that largely determined the borders of Israel. Paradoxically, his close lifelong relations with Arab neighbors did not prevent him from being a chief agent of their sizable displacement.  A bestseller in Israel and available now translated into English, Yigal Allon, Native Son is the only biography of this charismatic leader. The book focuses on Allon's life up to 1950, his clash with founding father David Ben-Gurion, the end of his military career, and the watershed in culture and character between the Jewish Yishuv and Israeli statehood. As a statesman in his more mature years, he formulated what became known as the \"Allon Plan,\" which remains a viable blueprint for an eventual two-state partition between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet in the end, the promise Allon showed as a brilliant young military commander remained unfulfilled. The great dream of the Palmah generation was largely lost, and Allon's name became associated with the failed policies of the past.  The story of Allon's life frames the history of Israel, its relationship with its Arab neighbors, its culture and spirit. This important biography touches on matters—Israel's borders, refugees, military might—that remain very much alive today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008007536913,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008011141393,"sku":"NIN9780812240283","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52709842288913,"sku":"CIN0812240286G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812240286.jpg?v=1752316661"},{"product_id":"jewish-enlightenment-book-shmuel-feiner-9780812221725","title":"The Jewish Enlightenment","description":"At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.   Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity.   The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008077005073,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008080314641,"sku":"NIN9780812221725","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812221729.jpg?v=1763481671"},{"product_id":"origins-of-jewish-secularization-in-eighteenth-century-europe-book-shmuel-feiner-9780812242737","title":"The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe","description":"Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and other alternatives emerged and a long, circuitous search for identity began, it was no longer evident that the definition of Jewishness would be based on the beliefs and practices surrounding the study of the Torah.  In The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe Shmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in the process and by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings. On the one hand, a great majority of observant Jews still accepted the authority of the Talmud and the leadership of the rabbis; on the other, there was a gradually more conspicuous minority of \"Epicureans\" and \"freethinkers.\" As the ground shifted, each individual was marked according to his or her place on the path between faith and heresy, between devoutness and permissiveness or indifference.  Building on his award-winning Jewish Enlightenment, Feiner unfolds the story of critics of religion, mostly Ashkenazic Jews, who did not take active part in the secular intellectual revival known as the Haskalah. In open or concealed rebellion, Feiner's subjects lived primarily in the cities of western and central Europe—Altona-Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Breslau, and Prague. They participated as \"fashionable\" Jews adopting the habits and clothing of the surrounding Gentile society. Several also adopted the deist worldview of Enlightenment Europe, rejecting faith in revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the obligation to observe the commandments.  Peering into the synagogue, observing individuals in the coffeehouse or strolling the boulevards, and peeking into the bedroom, Feiner recovers forgotten critics of religion from both the margins and the center of Jewish discourse. His is a pioneering work on the origins of one of the most significant transformations of modern Jewish history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008101810449,"sku":"NIN9780812242737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812242734.jpg?v=1752315621"},{"product_id":"biblical-women-and-jewish-daily-life-in-the-middle-ages-book-elisheva-baumgarten-9780812253580","title":"Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages","description":"In Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Elisheva Baumgarten seeks a point of entry into the everyday existence of people who did not belong to the learned elite, and who therefore left no written records of their lives. She does so by turning to the Bible as it was read, reinterpreted, and seen by the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz. In the tellings, retellings, and illustrations of biblical stories, and especially of those centered around women, Baumgarten writes, we can find explanations and validations for the practices that structured birth, marriage, and death; women's inclusion in the liturgy and synagogue; and the roles of women as community leaders, givers of charity, and keepers of the household.  Each of the book's chapters concentrates on a single figure or a cluster of biblical women—Eve, the Matriarchs, Deborah, Yael, Abigail, and Jephthah's daughter—to explore aspects of the domestic and communal lives of Northern French and German Jews living among Christians in urban settings. Throughout the book more than forty vivid medieval illuminations, most reproduced in color, help convey to modern readers what medieval people could have known visually about these biblical stories. \"I do not claim that the genres I analyze here—literature, art, exegesis—mirror social practice,\" Baumgarten writes. \"Rather, my goal is to examine how medieval Jewish engagement with the Bible offers a window onto aspects of the daily lives and cultural mentalités of Ashkenazic Jews in the High Middle Ages.\"  In a final chapter, Baumgarten turns to the historical figure of Dulcia, a late twelfth-century woman, to ponder how our understanding of those people about whom we know relatively more can be enriched by considering the lives of those who have remained anonymous. The biblical stories through which Baumgarten reads contributed to shaping a world that is largely lost to us, and can help us, in turn, to gain access to lives of people of the past who left no written accounts of their beliefs and practices.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008099057937,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008104005905,"sku":"NIN9780812253580","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812253582.jpg?v=1763481172"},{"product_id":"censor-the-editor-and-the-text-book-amnon-raz-krakotzkin-9780812240115","title":"The Censor, the Editor, and the Text","description":"In The Censor, the Editor, and the Text, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin examines the impact of Catholic censorship on the publication and dissemination of Hebrew literature in the early modern period. Hebrew literature made the transition to print in Italian print houses, most of which were owned by Christians. These became lively meeting places for Christian scholars, rabbis, and the many converts from Judaism who were employed as editors and censors.  Raz-Krakotzkin examines the principles and practices of ecclesiastical censorship that were established in the second half of the sixteenth century as a part of this process. The book examines the development of censorship as part of the institutionalization of new measures of control over literature in this period, suggesting that we view surveillance of Hebrew literature not only as a measure directed against the Jews but also as a part of the rise of Hebraist discourse and therefore as a means of integrating Jewish literature into the Christian canon.  On another level, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text explores the implications of censorship in relation to other agents that participated in the preparation of texts for publishing—authors, publishers, editors, and readers. The censorship imposed upon the Jews had a definite impact on Hebrew literature, but it hardly denied its reading, in fact confirming the right of the Jews to possess and use most of their literature.  By bringing together two apparently unrelated issues—the role of censorship in the creation of print culture and the place of Jewish culture in the context of Christian society—Raz-Krakotzkin advances a new outlook on both, allowing each to be examined through the conceptual framework usually reserved for the other.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51008137658641,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008141426961,"sku":"NIN9780812240115","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812240111.jpg?v=1751010707"},{"product_id":"land-is-mine-book-andrew-d-berns-9780812253696","title":"The Land Is Mine","description":"After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Sephardi Jews such as Isaac Abravanel, Abraham Saba, and Isaac Arama wrote biblical commentaries that stressed the significance of land. They interpreted Judaism as a tradition whose best expression and ultimate fulfillment took place away from cities and in rural settings. Iberian-Jewish authors rooted their moral teachings in an ethical treatment of the natural world, elucidating ancient agricultural laws and scrutinizing the physical context and built environments of Bible stories. The Land Is Mine asks what inspired this and suggests that the answer lies not in timeless exegetical or theological trends, but in the material realities of late medieval and early modern Iberia, during a period of drastic changes in land use.  The book uses a highly traditional source base in a decidedly untraditional way. In Jewish Studies, Andrew D. Berns observes, biblical commentary is typically studied as an intramural activity. Though scholars have conceded that Jewish scriptural exegesis welcomes material and ideas from other fields and traditions, little to no work treats premodern Hebrew Bible commentary as also drawing upon Classical and Christian sources as well as contemporary writings on land management and political economy. Abravanel, Saba, and Arama were engaged with questions that had broad resonance during their lives: the proper way to treat the land, the best occupations to pursue, and the ideal setting for human community. Scriptural commentary was the forum in which they addressed these problems and posed solutions to them.  A work of intellectual history,The Land Is Mine demonstrates that it is impossible to understand Jewish culture without considering the physical realities on which it depended.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008177471761,"sku":"NIN9780812253696","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812253698.jpg?v=1763481200"},{"product_id":"between-worlds-book-j-h-chajes-9780812221701","title":"Between Worlds","description":"Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers a strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008267288849,"sku":"NIN9780812221701","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51382856909073,"sku":"GOR012915724","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0812221702.jpg?v=1752317047"},{"product_id":"king-is-in-the-field-book-julie-e-cooper-9781512824094","title":"The King Is in the Field","description":"If politics is about the state, can a stateless people be political? Until recently, scholars were fiercely divided regarding whether Jews engaged in politics, displayed political wisdom, or penned works of political thought over the two millennia when there was no Jewish state. But over the past few decades, the field of Jewish political thought has begun to examine the ways in which Jewish individuals and communal organizations behaved politically even in diaspora.  The King Is in the Field centers writing from leading scholars that serves as an introduction to this exciting field, providing critical resources for anyone interested in thinking about politics both within and beyond the state. From kabbalistic theology to economic philanthropy, from race and nationalism in the U.S. to Israeli legal discourse and feminist activism, this key study of Jewish political thought holds the promise to reorient the field of political thought as a whole by expanding conceptions of what counts as “political.”  In a world in which statelessness now applies to 100 million individuals, this volume illuminates ways to understand how diaspora Jewish political thought functioned in adopted homelands. This approach allows the book to offer questions and analysis that add depth and breadth to academic studies of Jewish politics while simultaneously offering a blueprint for future volumes interrogating political action through multiple diasporas.  Contributors: Samuel Hayim Brody, Lihi Ben Shitrit, Julie E. 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This revitalization is unique and unprecedented in world history, and its success has been studied in fields from linguistics to cultural history. However, the role of modern technologies in mediating this revival has not yet been considered.  What happens when an ancient language meets modern technology? Lingua Ex Machina explores such a moment in its investigation of the role media technologies—including typewriters, phonographs, and computers—played in the revitalization and modernization of Hebrew from the end of the nineteenth century into the present day.  Ido Ramati examines the role sound recording technologies played in shaping the reemergence of modern Hebrew speech, reveals how the Hebraized typewriter pushed for the modernization of writing in Hebrew, and ultimately argues that these media—whose development and adoption paralleled the revitalization of Hebrew—were an active force in shaping the language as a modern communicative medium. 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