Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of eastern Europe. This wide-ranging survey of sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, and many other languages fills a gap in the study of...

This study of the Jewish legal system (the Halakhah) demonstrates that the law embraces every corner of life.Author: Louis JacobsPublisher: Littman Library of Jewish CivilizationPublication Date: Aug...

Pauline Wengeroff was born in 1833 into a pious Jewish family in Bobruisk in the Pale of Settlement (now Belarus); she died in 1916 in Minsk. Her life, as recounted in this biography, based in part...

Ars Judaica is an annual publication of the Department of Jewish Art at Bar-Ilan University. It showcases the Jewish contribution to the visual arts and architecture from antiquity to the present...

Bringing to light little-known artistic traditions, the latest volume of Ars Judaica focuses on the local and temporal contexts of objects and their images and explores collective and personal...

Artist and illustrator Arthur Szyk was a Polish Jew whose work was overwhelmingly Jewish in theme and content. In a lifetime of creativity that spanned many of the major events of the twentieth...

According to the author the Hellenistic tradition played a role as a model for Jewish modernisers to draw upon as they perceived a lack in Jewish culture. The author believes that Greek and...

Habsburg Bukovina no longer exists, save in the realms of historiography, nostalgia, and collective memory. Remembered for its remarkable multinational, multi-faith character, Bukovina and its...

The span of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg's life (1884-1966) illuminates the religious and intellectual dilemmas that traditional Jewry has faced over the past century. Rabbi Weinberg became a central...

How did British Jewry respond to the Holocaust, how prominent was it on the communal agenda, and what does this response tell us about the values, politics, and fears of the Anglo-Jewish community?...

In Broadening Jewish History Todd Endelman seeks to expand the horizons of modern Jewish historiography by focusing on 'ordinary' rather than exceptional Jews, arguing that what ordinary people did...

Continuing his major contribution to medieval Jewish intellectual history, Haym Soloveitchik focuses here on the radical German Pietists and their main literary work Sefer ?asidim, and on the...

The essays in this volume reflect the author's lifelong interest in the history of halakhah. What stimulated change, and why? What happened when strong forces impinged on halakhic observance and...

In this second volume of his essays on the history of halakhah, Haym Soloveitchik grapples with much-disputed topics in medieval Jewish history and takes issue with a number of reigning views. His...

Isaac Mayer Wise (1819-1900), founder of the major institutions of Reform Judaism in America, was a man of his time--a pioneer in a pioneer's world. When he came to America from his childhood Bohemia...

Dogma in Medieval Jewish Thought is an essay in the history of ideas which traces the development of creed formation in Judaism from its inception with Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) to the beginning...

The realities of Jewish life in eastern Europe that concerned the average Jew meant the way their children grew up, the way they studied, how they married, and all the subsequent stages of the life...

Modernity offers people choices about who they want to be and how they want to appear to others. The way in which Jews choose to frame their identity establishes the dynamic of their social relations...

This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. Following the Dreyfus...

Isaac Orobio de Castro, a crypto-Jew from Portugal, was one of the most prominent intellectual figures of the Sephardi Diaspora in the seventeenth century. After studying medicine and theology in...

Gersonides (1288-1344), known also as Ralbag, was a philosopher of the first rank as well as an astronomer and biblical exegete, yet this is the first English-language study of the significance of...

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies, 2012.In February 1912 thirty-eight American Jewish women met at Temple Emanuel in New York and founded Hadassah,...

With the social and cultural upheavals of early modern Europe, rabbis were constantly struggling to preserve Jewish tradition. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi (1658--1718), the independent-minded chief rabbi...

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2018.Hasidism, a movement of religious awakening and social reform, originated in the mid-eighteenth...

From its very beginnings in the eighteenth century, the Hasidic movement was suffused with a joyous enthusiasm and optimism derived from the notion of God being in all things. This led to an...

Analysing the political relations between the Kingdom of Poland and the hasidic movement, this book examines plans formulated by the government and by groups close to government circles regarding...

Hasidism Beyond Modernity: Essays in Habad Thought and HistoryAuthor: Naftali LoewenthalPublisher: Littman Library of Jewish CivilizationPublication Date: Jan 03, 2025Number of Pages: 456...

The conflict between Haskalah and hasidism was one of the most important forces in shaping the world of Polish Jewry for almost two centuries, but our understanding of it has long been dominated by...

The years 950-1200 are often called the Golden Age of the Jews in Spain. During this period, the Jews reached a peak of achievement in all aspects of their life--political, spiritual, and cultural...

With great vigour and from the vantage point of long experience of writing and teaching Jewish history, Moshe Rosman treats the key questions that postmodernism raises for the writing of Jewish...