By the early twentieth century, biblical criticism had come to dominate the academic study of Scripture in most European universities. Jewish writers and scholars articulated a wide spectrum of responses to this historical-literary approach to the Hebrew Bible, especially in light of what they perceived to be its noxious Protestant presuppositions. In this regard, the...
The hostility that the Ku Klux Klan exhibited toward Jews and other minorities (Blacks, Catholics, immigrants) has long attracted the scholarly interest of American historians. They have shown virtually no interest in the ways in which American Jews—either collectively or individually—opposed the “Invisible Empire.” It emerged in three distinct postwar periods—after the Civil War...
This article examines three halakhic books authored by Rabbi Barukh Assabag in Casablanca during the 1930s and 1940s. Composed in Judeo-Arabic vernacular, these works were intended to cater to the general public whose proficiency in Hebrew was limited. Mindful of the nonobservance of commandments in various sectors of Morocco’s Jewish community, Assabag embarked on this literary...
This article discusses the relations between Jews and Christians in Edirne during the late Ottoman period. At the time, approximately half the city’s inhabitants were Greeks, and at least ten percent were Jews. The Jewish quarter of the city was surrounded by areas with a Greek majority, while a few Armenians also lived alongside the Greeks and Jews. Drawing on diverse sources...
Analysis of a legal ruling by Yehiel of Paris (d. ca. 1260) in a rental dispute between two Jewish men sheds light on aspects of Jewish life in a major medieval European city. Two Jews rented an apartment from a Christian owner, and a dispute arose when one of the tenants left mid-term and his replacement, also a Jewish man, tried to renew the lease directly with the landlord...
The dissertation “Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie der Juden” (A Contribution to the Anthropology of the Jews) by Berhard Blechmann was the first major study in physical anthropology that focused on the examination of Jews. It has been hitherto discussed as an early example of the othering of Jews in German nineteenth-century anthropology. Based on close reading and by exploring the...
The Stadtarchiv in Münster, Germany holds a medieval Hebrew fragment with portions of the daily Shema Yisrael prayer. Measuring 510 mm in height, this fragment is but a quarter of a large-sized parchment sheet, which was designed to be hung on a wall. This study introduces the fragment and describes its material features and then suggests its possible function against the...
This paper focuses on the story of two Jewish men who were convicted of theft and executed in Prostějov, Moravia, in the spring of 1684. Although the two were offered a pardon in exchange for converting to Christianity, they resolutely refused. Their story was recorded in a contemporaneous Yiddish song that serves as the basis for the current case-study. The informative layer of...
At the end of the nineteenth century in the historiography and popular writing of the three nationalities living in what was then Habsburg Galicia—Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian—there was an ongoing debate about the motif of the alleged leasing of Orthodox churches by Jews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The motif of the Jews “holding the keys to the church” was...
This article explores the Jewish question in the context of the 1907 Romanian Peasants’ Revolt through the novels of the Austrian Jewish communist Leo Katz. Katz witnessed the uprising as a youth from his native village situated on the border between the Habsburg Empire, Romania, and Tsarist Russia. He wrote two novels about the revolt: one in 1940 and the other in 1946. The...
Sacrilegious attitudes toward the Eucharistic host are one of the most commonplace accusations leveled against Jews in premodern Europe. Usually treated in Jewish historiography as an expression of anti-Judaism or antisemitism, they are considered a hallmark of Jewish powerlessness and persecution. In medieval and early modern Spain, however, Jews and conversos (Jewish converts...
This article focuses on shifts in Jewish historiography of Ashkenazic Jews in Europe of the pre-modern period. It describes the denouement of traditional historiography— which generally assumes that more often than not Jews and non-Jews lived separate from one another—and compares it to two trends that I denominate exchange and interaction historiography that have gained momentum...
Otto Heller, the Austrian-Czech-German communist intellectual of Jewish origin, was known almost exclusively for his 1931 orthodox Marxist book, Der Untergang des Judentums (The Decline of Judaism). A recently rediscovered unpublished manuscript of a second book on the “Jewish Question,” written by Heller in 1939 and entitled Der Jude wird verbrannt (The Jew Is to Be Burned...
The present study interprets and frames a long-standing question concerning Judah he-Ḥasid’s motivations in migrating to Regensburg against the social and geographical contexts of the Jews of Ashkenaz. By examining the use of Hebrew geographic terminology during the High Middle Ages (Loter, Ashkenaz, Ashkelonia), the article demonstrates that twelfth-century Jews perceived and...
This article examines the content and structure of the manuscripts of Sefer Ḥasidim, engaging with ideas concerning its production addressed in Ivan Marcus’s recently published book on Sefer Ḥasidim. Marcus has argued that the book was written piece by piece and not as an integral book and further suggested that each and every manuscript of Sefer Ḥasidim should be taken as a...
Based on Ivan Marcus’s concept of “open book” and considerations on medieval Ashkenazic concepts of authorship, the present article inquires into the circumstances surrounding the production of Sefer Arugat ha-Bosem, a collection of piyyut commentaries written or compiled by the thirteenth-century scholar Abraham b. Azriel. Unlike all other piyyut commentators, Abraham ben Azriel...
This essay analyzes an unpublished manuscript of a giudiata, a poem mocking Jewish funerals that was written and performed in Rome in the mid-seventeenth century. Melchiorre Palontrotti, the author of the composition, was a Roman polemist and author of other published works against Italian Jews, including, among others, the Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto, between 1640 and 1649...
The original article was published with an incorrect version of footnote 3. The correct text appears below. 3The following conventions were followed in compiling the transcription and the translation. Square brackets indicate a lacuna of any length, parentheses the completion of an abbreviated text. Different type styles have been employed to indicate the different languages used...
The original article was published with incorrect versions of footnotes 5 and 12. The correct text appears below. 5The following conventions were followed in compiling the transcription and translation. Square brackets filled by ellipses indicate a lacuna of any length, text within square brackets the editorial completion of a textual lacuna, parentheses the clarification of...