Besmirching the Denominational Enemy Within and Outside

Ephraim Nissan is a scholar with over 600 publications. Apart from his multidecade record as book series or journal editor, he has guest-edited thematic issues for journals more than twenty times, most recently a volume for the centennial of Berthold Laufer's Sino-Iranica on cultural exchanges involving Asia. His humanities research is interdisciplinary and addresses late antique, premodern, and recent cultures, mainly Jewish studies, but also Italian, folklore, humour studies, history of medicine, and more. Several more of his volumes (edited or authored) on the representation (either counter-biographical, or appropriative) of prominent characters across the religious divide are forthcoming with Palgrave. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern holds the Crown Family Chair in Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches early modern, modern Jewish, and East European history. He has published seven books focusing on the socio-cultural, intellectual, and comparative literary history of Jews in Eastern Europe. His books and articles have appeared in Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Hebrew, Spanish, and German. He has served as a visiting professor in France, Poland, Germany, Israel, and Ukraine.

• Part I Antiquity to the Middle Ages: An Iranic Locale, Outside Views.- 1. Mazdak, Mazdakism, and the Mazdakite Parenthesis in Sasanian History.- 2. “Ḥiwi” (Ḥəyyawi) of Balkh.- 3. Poor Pharaoh, Wicked Moses: The “Letter of Haman” — A Rabbinic Parody of Anti-Jewish Counter-History.- Part II Modern Contexts: Otherworldly Counter-Biography of the Other and the “Enemy Within”.- 4. Haim Vital, Founders of Other Faiths, and the Censors Nicholas I.- 5. Moses Mendelssohn, Hartwig Wessely, and Fear of the Haskalah.