Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

Moses Hayim Luzzatto (1707-1746), rabbi, mystic, teacher, poet, playwright, and writer of ethical works, gathered around him in his 'house of study' in Padua an inner circle of devout Jews who shared...

Midrash is arguably the most ancient genre of Jewish literature, forming a voluminous body of scriptural exegesis over the course of centuries. There is hardly anything in the ancient rabbinic...

National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies, 2017. The 'Jewish mother' figure is a hallmark of Jewish culture, one which appears in the works of rabbis,...

The crucial question for today's Jewish world, Menachem Kellner argues, is not whether Jews will have Jewish grandchildren, but how many different sorts of mutually exclusive Judaisms those...

The words 'hasid' and 'hasidism' have become so familiar to people interested in the Jewish world that little thought is given to understanding exactly what hasidism is or considering its spiritual...

Judah Loew, better known as the Maharal of Prague, was a pivotal personality in late medieval European Judaism. Best known from the popular legend that credited him with the creation of a golem - an...

This volume, written by a range of scholars in history and literature, offers a new understanding of one of the central cultural and ideological movements among Jews in modern times. Disengaging the...

Leading scholars have combined forces to produce this volume on the philosophy and legal views of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) and the historical context in which he worked. The philosophical section...

Jewish society in Poland-Lithuania in the second half of the eighteenth century was by no means insular: Jews numbered about 750,000, and comprised about half the urban population of the country. The...

Addressing various aspects of Jewish life and religion, particularly in the last two centuries, this book examines different aspects of the Hasidic tradition; present-day contacts between Bobower...

From 1772-1918 Jews were concentrated more densely in Galicia than in any other area in Europe. Bartal (modern Jewish history, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Polonsky (Judaic and social studies,...

The assessment of the Nazi genocide in Poland, an issue which has deeply divided Poles and Jews, lies at the core of this volume. Also included are discussions of Polish attitudes to the nearly...

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, created in 1569, covered a wide spectrum of faiths and languages. The nobility, who were the main focus of Polishness, were predominantly Catholic, particularly...

This volume highlights new research on Jewish spiritual and religious life in Poland before modern political ideas began to transform the Jewish world. It covers a range of topics. Three articles...

Scholarship on the civilization of Polish Jews has tended to focus on elite culture and canonical literature; even modern Yiddish culture has generally been approached from the perspective of 'great...

The shtetl is one of the key concepts for our understanding of the Jewish past in Eastern Europe. Although today most Jews live in big cities, the majority of Jews in Poland historically lived in the...

Jewish women's exclusion from the public domains of religious and civil life has been reflected in their near absence in the master narratives of the East European Jewish past. As a result, the study...

Poland today is a very different country from the Poland of the past, yet attitudes inherited from the past continue to affect Polish-Jewish relations in the present. In Poland itself, now a free...

Although the reconciliation of Jewish and Polish memories of the Holocaust is the central issue in contemporary Polish-Jewish relations, this is the first attempt to examine these divisive memories...

In the mid-1960s, public opinion in Poland turned against the Gomulka regime for a variety of reasons. In an attempt to regain public support and divert attention from the real problems, Gomulka...

Boundaries--physical, political, social, religious, and cultural--were a key feature of life in medieval and early modern Poland, and this volume focuses on the ways in which these boundaries were...

Few Polish cities have evoked more affection from their Jewish inhabitants than Krak?w, and this volume brings together the work of leading historians from Israel, Poland, Great Britain, and the...

Relations between Jews and their neighbours in eastern Europe have long been perceived, both in the popular mind and in conventional scholarship, as being in a permanent state of conflict. This...

This volume of Polin, based on scholarship that has emerged since the fall of communism, is a wide-ranging contribution to the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania. Focusing on the specific...

This volume provides a comprehensive and much-needed survey of the millennium-long history of Jews in the Ukrainian lands. The book challenges the stereotyped vision of the relationship between Jews...

The Kingdom of Poland, also known as the Congress Kingdom or Russian Poland, was created by a decision of the Congress of Vienna as part of its attempt to set up a post-Napoleonic European order. It...

Since the Enlightenment, the cultural creativity of Polish Jews has found expression not only in Hebrew and Yiddish, but increasingly in Polish. There has been mutual and dynamic interaction between...

The focus is on how the Jews were affected by Polish independence in 1918. Other topics covered include Jan Blonski's article 'The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto'; Polish historiography on the...

Historians have largely tended to regard Polish Jewish history and German Jewish history, from the Middle Ages to the present, as playing out solely within national boundaries, thereby ignoring the...

A central core of articles on Jewish Warsaw over the centuries covers the history of Jewish settlement; Jewish population in the eighteenth century; the background to the 1790 pogrom; relations with...