A comprehensive study of Jewish magic in the late antiquity and the early Islamic period the phenomenon, the sources, and method for its research, and the history of scholarly investigation into its nature and origin.
The first annotated English edition of a classic early-twentieth-century Yiddish memoir that vividly describes Jewish life in a small Eastern European town.
In 1631, at the epicenter of the worst excesses of the European witch-hunts, Friedrich Spee, a Jesuit priest, published the Cautio Criminalis, a book speaking out against the trials that were sending thousands of innocent people to gruesome deaths.
Inspired by recent efforts to understand the dynamics of the early modern witch hunt, Johannes Dillinger has produced a powerful synthesis based on careful comparisons.
For most of the last four centuries, the broad expanse of territory between the Baltic and the Black Seas, known since the Enlightenment as "e;Eastern Europe,"e; has been home to the world's largest Jewish population.
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.
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 "e;take a cure"e;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.
Written in Judeo-Arabic in eleventh-century Muslim Spain but quickly translated into Hebrew, Bahya Ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart is a profound guidebook of Jewish spirituality that has enjoyed tremendous popularity and influence to the present day.
While many ancient Jewish and Christian leaders voiced opposition to Greek and Roman theater, this volume demonstrates that by the time the public performance of classical drama ceased at the end of antiquity the ideals of Jews and Christians had already been shaped by it in profound and lasting ways.
Staging and Stagers in Modern Jewish Palestine sheds important light on the stagers of modern Jewish Palestine and on the processes and mechanisms that created the performative lore in other cultures, in ancient as well as modern times.
In dieser Studie wird die jüdische Aufklärung in ihrer spezifischen Ausprägung bei Isaak Satanow (1732–1804) sowie dessen einzigartige Verwendung der jüdischen Mystik zur Harmonisierung verschiedenster Wissensfelder dargestellt, analysiert und kontextualisiert.
Hasidism Incarnate contends that much of modern Judaism in the West developed in reaction to Christianity and in defense of Judaism as a unique tradition.
This book traces the mixing of musical forms and practices in Istanbul to illuminate multiethnic music-making and its transformations across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Reconstructing Ashkenaz shows that, contrary to traditional accounts, the Jews of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages were not a society of saints and martyrs.
Since the late 1700s, when the Jewish community ceased to be a semiautonomous political unit in Western Europe and the United States and individual Jews became integrated-culturally, socially, and politically-into broader society, questions surrounding Jewish status and identity have occupied a prominent and contentious place in Jewish legal discourse.
Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed and overwhelmed readers ever since it emerged mysteriously in medieval Spain toward the end of the thirteenth century.
Based on archival and primary sources in Persian, Hebrew, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, and European languages, Between Foreigners and Shi'is examines the Jews' religious, social, and political status in nineteenth-century Iran.
In the Zohar, the jewel in the crown of Jewish mystical literature, the verse "e;A river flows from Eden to water the garden"e; (Genesis 2:10) symbolizes the river of divine plenty that unceasingly flows from the depths of divinity into the garden of reality.
