You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism.
PaRDeS, the journal of the German Association for Jewish Studies, aims at exploring the fruitful and multifarious cultures of Judaism as well as their relations to their environment within diverse areas of research. In addition, the journal promotes Jewish Studies within academic discourse and reflects on its historic and social responsibilities. PaRDeS, die Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien e. V., erforscht die fruchtbare kulturelle Vielfalt des Judentums sowie ihre Berührungspunkte zur nichtjüdischen Umwelt in unterschiedlichen Bereichen. Daneben dient die Zeitschrift als Forum zur Positionierung der Fächer Jüdische Studien und Judaistik innerhalb des wissenschaftlichen Diskurses sowie zur Diskussion ihrer historischen und gesellschaftlichen Verantwortung.
"The story of the first Jewish public library in Europe"--
Jeremy Brown offers the first major study of the Jewish reception of the Copernican revolution, examining four hundred years of Jewish writings on the Copernican model. Brown shows the ways in which Jews ignored, rejected, or accepted the Copernican model, and the theological and societal underpinnings of their choices.
The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book covers the gamut of Hebrew literature in that century. Each entry has a descriptive text page and an accompaning reproduction. There is an extensive introduction with an overview of Hebrew printing in the seventeenth century.
DIV Elijah ben Solomon, the "Genius of Vilna,” was perhaps the best-known and most understudied figure in modern Jewish history. This book offers a new narrative of Jewish modernity based on Elijah's life and influence. While the experience of Jews in modernity has often been described as a process of Western European secularization—with Jews becoming citizens of Western nation-states, congregants of reformed synagogues, and assimilated members of society—Stern uses Elijah’s story to highlight a different theory of modernization for European life. Religious movements such as Hasidism and anti-secular institutions such as the yeshiva emerged from the same democratization of knowledge and privatization of religion that gave rise to secular and universal movements and institutions. Claimed by traditionalists, enlighteners, Zionists, and the Orthodox, Elijah’s genius and its afterlife capture an all-embracing interpretation of the modern Jewish experience. Through the story of the “Vilna Gaon,” Stern presents a new model for understanding modern Jewish history and more generally the place of traditionalism and religious radicalism in modern Western life and thought. /div
Articles on early Hebrew printing encompassing title-page motifs and entitling books; authors and places of publication including books opposed to gambling, on philology, and the massacres of tah-ve-tat (1648-48); small diverse places of printing; and on Christian-Hebraism.
Gersonides’ Afterlife is the first full-scale treatment of the reception of one of the greatest scientific minds of medieval Judaism: Gersonides (1288–1344). An outstanding representative of the Hebrew Jewish culture that then flourished in southern France, Gersonides wrote on mathematics, logic, astronomy, astrology, physical science, metaphysics and theology, and commented on almost the entire bible. His strong-minded attempt to integrate these different areas of study into a unitary system of thought was deeply rooted in the Aristotelian tradition and yet innovative in many respects, and thus elicited diverse and often impassionate reactions. For the first time, the twenty-one papers collected here describe Gersonides’ impact in all fields of his activity and the reactions from his contemporaries up to present-day religious Zionism.
Written in a lively and compelling style, this book explains the hidden relationship between Judaism and the world of infectious disease. It combines history, medicine, science, and religion and gives us a new appreciation of how Jews and Judaism have been deeply shaped by plagues and pandemics, from ancient times up to the present.
Dictionary definitions of the term mishpachah are seemingly straightforward: "A Jewish family or social unit including close and distant relatives-sometimes also close friends." As accurate as such definitions are, they fail to capture the diversity and vitality of real, flesh-and-blood Jewish families. Families have been part of Jewish life for as long as there have been Jews. It is useful to recall that the family is the basic narrative building block of the stories in the biblical book of Genesis, which can be interpreted in the light of ancient literary traditions, archaeological discoveries, and rabbinic exegesis. Rabbinic literature also is filled with discussions about interactions, r...