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Introduces a rigorous comparative dimension to the study of Jewish civilization and culture
A history of the Jewish community in Britain, including resettlement, integration, acculturation, economic transformation and immigration.
A history of the Jewish community in Britain, including resettlement, integration, acculturation, economic transformation and immigration.
This volume seeks to expand the horizons of modern Jewish historiography by focusing on 'ordinary' rather than exceptional Jews, arguing that what ordinary people did or felt can do more to deepen our understanding of Jewish history than what a few exceptional individuals thought and wrote. The text makes a strong case for comparative history, showing convincingly that only a comparison across national borders can identify the Germanness of German Jewish history or the Englishness of English Jewish history, and thereby reveal what is unique about each. The book redefines the area under consideration and deftly restates the need for Jewish social history to counterbalance the current focus on cultural studies. The book offers an important examination of the major trends in the writing of modern Jewish history and the assumptions that have guided historians in their narration of the Jewish past.
Sorkin seeks to reorient Jewish history by offering the first comprehensive account in any language of the process by which Jews became citizens with civil and political rights in the modern world.
"Ruderman uncovers a fascinating episode in the history of European Jewry and Jewish-Christian intellectual relations. Connecting the Covenants is compelling as both narrative and history."—Matt Goldish, The Ohio State University
Redcliffe Salaman (1874–1955) was an English Jew of many facets: a country gentleman, a physician, a biologist who pioneered the breeding of blight-free strains of potatoes, a Jewish nationalist, and a race scientist. A well-known figure in his own time, The Last Anglo-Jewish Gentleman restores him to his place in the history of British science and the British Jewish community. Redcliffe Salaman was also a leading figure in the Anglo-Jewish community in the 20th century. At the same time, he was also an incisive critic of the changing character of that community. His groundbreaking book, The History and Social Influence of the Potato, first published in 1949 and in print ever since, is a classic in social history. His wife Nina was a feminist, poet, essayist, and translator of medieval Hebrew poetry. She was the first (and to this day, only) woman to deliver a sermon in an Orthodox synagogue in Britain. The Last-Anglo Jewish Gentleman offers a compelling biography of a unique individual. It also provides insights into the life of English Jews during the late-19th and early-20th centuries and brings to light largely unknown controversies and tensions in Jewish life.
The series Studies and Texts in Scepticism contains monographs, translations, and collected essays exploring scepticism in its dual manifestation as a purely philosophical tradition and as a set of sceptical strategies, concepts, and attitudes in the cultural field - especially in religions, perhaps most notably in Judaism. In such cultural contexts scepticism manifests as a critical attitude towards different dimensions and systems of secular or revealed knowledge and towards religious and political authorities. It is not merely an intellectual or theoretical worldview, but a critical form of life that expresses itself in such diverse phenomena as religion, literature, and society. Further book series of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies are Jewish Thought, Philosophy, and Religion and the Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advances Studies.
Publication of Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor in 1982 inspired a generation of scholarly inquiry into historical images and myths, the construction of the Jewish past, and the making and meaning of collective memory. Here, eminent scholars in their respective fields extend the lines of his seminal study into topics that range from medieval rabbinics, homiletics, kabbalah, and Hasidism to antisemitism, Zionism, and the making of modern Jewish identity. Essays are clustered around four central themes: historical consciousness and the construction of memory; the relationship between time and history in Jewish thought; the demise of traditional forms of collective memory; and the writing of Jewish history in modern times.