In 1391 many of the Jews of Spain were forced to convert to Christianity, creating a new group whose members would be continually seeking a niche for themselves in society.
The book of Genesis tells us that God made a covenant with Abraham, promising him a glorious posterity on the condition that he and all his male descendents must be circumcised.
The classical Rabbinic tradition (legal, discursive, and exegetical) claims to be Oral Torah, transmitted by word of mouth in an unbroken chain deriving its authority ultimately from diving revelation to Moses at Sinai.
The foundation for all study of biblical law is the assumption that the Covenant Code is the oldest legal code in the Hebrew Bible and that all other laws are revisions of that code.
Throughout history, the persecutions of the Jewish people have been central to their identity and to the cohesion of their religion and cultural heritage.
Sufism, the name given to Islamic mysticism, has been the subject of many studies, but the orders through which the organizational aspect of the Sufi spirit was expressed has been neglected.
This critical study traces the development of the literary forms and conventions of the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, analyzing those forms as expressions of emergent rabbinic ideology.
An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees.
An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees.
The first readable and accurate translation of twenty of the most authoritative Hindu documents pertaining to ascetic ideals and the ascetic way of life, this text opens to students a major source for the study of the Hindu ascetical institutions and of the historical changes they underwent during a period of a thousand years or more.
It was not until the emergence of the ideologies of Zionism and Socialism at the end of the last century that the Jewish communities of the Diaspora were perceived by historians as having a genuine political life.
Many studies written about the Jewish-Christian relationship are primarily historical overviews that focus on the Jewish background of Christianity, the separation of Christianity from Judaism, or the medieval disputations between the two faiths.
This is a literary and theological study of the Biblical Antiquities of Pseudo-Philo--a long, well-written reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible written by a Palestinian Jew of the first century C.
Exploring the place of women in the socioeconomic system formulated in the Mishnah, a book of legal rules with a spiritual basis compiled by Jewish sages in second-century Palestine, this study reveals a fundamental ambiguity in the role of women.
This is a study of the ancient Jewish and Christian apocalypses involving ascent into heaven, which have received little scholarly attention in comparison to apocalypses concerned primarily with the end of the world.