Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

This is a book of unexpected drama: all eleven chief rabbis appointed in this period of unprecedented change in the Jewish communities of the Fertile Crescent became the subject of controversy and...

Leon Roth (1896-1963) was the first Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He saw it as his purpose to encourage his students to think, and to think about their Judaism...

How do the Jews of Post-Holocaust, post-communist Europe--east and west--regard themselves? Do they perceive themselves as a religious minority, an ethnic group, or simply as ordinary members of the...

Mysticism, which transcends the boundaries of time and space and refers to a reality not grasped by means of ordinary human cognition, is one of the central sources of inspiration of religious...

Thorough and meticulously researched, this study is based on a comprehensive reading of philosophical arguments drawn from all the major Jewish sources, published and unpublished, from the Geonic...

Wartime sermons reveal how Jews perceive themselves in relation to the majority society and how Jewish and national values are reconciled when the fate of a nation is at stake. They also illustrate...

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Anthologies and Collections Award, 2012. Two of the most pervasive aspects of modern Jewish life are interaction with people of other faiths and exposure...

In the postmodern, relativist world-view with its refutation of a single, objective, and ultimate truth, it has become difficult if not impossible to argue in favour of one's own beliefs as...

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies, 2013.The encounter of Jews with the Enlightenment has so far been considered almost entirely from a masculine...

The Jewish Cultural Studies series offers a contemporary view of Jewish culture around the globe. Multidisciplinary, multi-focused, and eclectic, it covers the cultural practices of secular Jews as...

For a Jew, describing a place as 'home' conveys connotations of heritage as well as of residence. Additionally, feeling 'at home' suggests a sense of comfort in one's social surroundings. The...

This fascinating tour of the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Middle East, on the eve of the changes that would come to unsettle the Ottoman territories, reveals a surprisingly varied world...

This sociological reading of the kabbalistic ideas of the early modern period suggests that they gained acceptance because they responded to the needs of contemporary Jewish society. Although they...

This masterly collection of essays offers a multifaceted analysis of how Jewish leaders in medieval and early modern times responded to the challenges presented by a changing world. Based largely on...

One of the key ways in which the traditional Jewish world of eastern Europe responded to the challenges of modernity in the nineteenth century was to change the system for educating young men so as...

This survey history of Jewish life and culture in early modern Europe is the first to focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a radically new phase in Jewish history. The book lays...

The Ba'al Shem Tov is an elusive subject for historians because documentary evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal. Until now, much of what was known about him was based on stories compiled...

Hasidism has been a seminal force and source of controversy in the Jewish world since its inception in the second half of the eighteenth century. Indeed, almost every ideological trend that has made...

Shmuel Feiner's innovative book recreates the historical consciousness that fired the Haskalah--the Jewish Enlightenment movement. The proponents of this movement advocated that Jews should capture...

Leon Weinberger draws on a wealth of material, much of it previously available only in Hebrew, to trace the history of Jewish hymnography from its origins in the eastern Mediterranean to its...

Many books on Maimonides have been written and still more will appear. Few present Maimonides, as Menachem Kellner does against the actual religious background that informed his many innovative and...

Alexander Altmann's acclaimed, wide-ranging biography of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-96) was first published in 1973, but its stature as the definitive biography remains unquestioned. In fact, there has...

Joseph Weiss (1918-69) showed a single-minded commitment to identifying and describing the mystical element in hasidism and to unravelling the spiritual and historical meaning of the hasidic movement...

Hyam Maccoby's now classic study focuses on the major Jewish--Christian disputations of medieval Europe: those of Paris (1240), Barcelona (1263), and Tortosa (1413-14). It examines the content of...

For Louis Jacobs, the quest--the process of engaging with and thinking about Jewish faith--was a lifelong pursuit. He offered a model in the 1960s, a period characterized by general religious crisis,...

The latter part of the thirteenth century is regarded as a key period in the history of Italian Jewry. During that time many Jewish communities sprang up in the regions of central and northern Italy...

Maimonides was not the first rabbinic scholar to take an interest in philosophy, but he was unique in being a towering figure in both areas. His law code, the Mishneh torah, stands with Rashi's...

The story of the Marranos (the Jewish converts to Christianity in Spain and Portugal) has long been a source of fascination for Jews interested in their heritage and for all those concerned with the...

The historical consciousness of medieval Jewry has engendered lively debate in the scholarly world. The focus in this book is on the historical consciousness of the Jews of Spain and southern France...

The wondrous fables of Ibn Sahula in Meshal haqadmoni, presented here in English for the first time, provide a most unusual introduction to the intellectual and social universe of the Sephardi Jewish...