Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture – serie

Based on archival and primary sources in Persian, Hebrew, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, and European languages, Between Foreigners and Shi'is examines the Jews' religious, social, and political status in nineteenth-century Iran. This book, which focuses on Nasir al-Din Shah's reign (1848-1896), is the first comprehensive scholarly attempt to weave all these threads into a single tapestry. This case study of the Jewish minority illuminates broader processes pertaining to other religious minorities and Iranian society in general, and the interaction among intervening foreigners, the Shi'i majority, and local Jews helps us understand Iranian dilemmas that have persisted well beyond the second half of the nineteenth century.

A Stanford University Press classic.

This collection of essays examines various representations of "the Jew" in British and American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyzes in detail the literary racism and antisemitism of some of the most important and influential writers of this period, including Dickens, Trollope, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, and Orwell, as well as such marginal figures as Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith, and Michael Gold. The contributors are all well-known Anglo-American literary, cultural, or feminist critics; some have written extensively on literary racism or antisemitism, others are working in this area for the first time.The collection does not impose a schema or new orthodoxy, but instead encourages a plurality of approaches to a difficult and always contentious issue that has been demarcated into broadly defined "politically correct" and "liberal humanist" positions. Liberal humanism asserts that the ameliorating western canon has, by definition, nothing to do with racism or antisemitism. Political correctness wishes to exclude from the academy any literary text deemed to reinforce oppressive stereotypes. This volume adopts neither position, arguing instead that these two supposedly antagonistic approaches are, in fact, mirror-images of each other.

This work seeks to understand how, in nineteenth-century Germany, Jews and non-Jews shaped and experienced Jewish emancipation, a process whereby Jews were freed from ancient discriminatory laws and, over the course of decades, became citizens. Unlike most other works on German Jewish emancipation, this book examines how so fundamental and dramatic a transformation in the relation of Jews and non-Jews was experienced by the people who lived it, how economic, social, political, and ideological forces interacted to bring about change, and how accommodation actually occurred.The book focuses on Cologne, the most populous and economically powerful city in the Rhineland. Jews, excluded since 1424, returned under French Revolutionary rule, but Napoleonic legislation in 1808 compromised their equality and gave city elders an opportunity to reassert Cologne's historic control when the territory passed to Prussia in 1814. A long struggle between municipal and state authorities ensued, with the city hostile to Jewish rights but ultimately losing its bid to exercise local sovereignty over the Jews.The 1840's saw the advent of the railway age, and Cologne's economic and political climate was transformed. The city soon became the center for Rhenish liberal advocacy of Jewish rights, led by regional entrepreneurs in association with Jewish bankers. The author demonstrates, however, that Jewish emancipation was not simply conferred on Jews from above or engineered by financial mavericks in the community. Rather, it occurred as part of a broad societal transformation and as the result of the efforts and behavior of ordinary Jews, whose voices the author records.The book reveals how such Jews responded to the lure of equality and the pressures of continued discrimination in their business and private lives, and shows how their response fostered a new, positive perception of Jews as honorable people deserving of civic inclusion. It also illustrates how Jews, enjoying unprecedented success and acceptance, fought not only for individual rights but for the right of organized Judaism to achieve a secure place in society.

This collection of essays examines various representations of "the Jew" in British and American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It analyzes in detail the literary racism and antisemitism of some of the most important and influential writers of this period, including Dickens, Trollope, James, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Woolf, and Orwell, as well as such marginal figures as Dorothy Richardson, Stevie Smith, and Michael Gold. The contributors are all well-known Anglo-American literary, cultural, or feminist critics; some have written extensively on literary racism or antisemitism, others are working in this area for the first time.The collection does not impose a schema or new orthodoxy, but instead encourages a plurality of approaches to a difficult and always contentious issue that has been demarcated into broadly defined "politically correct" and "liberal humanist" positions. Liberal humanism asserts that the ameliorating western canon has, by definition, nothing to do with racism or antisemitism. Political correctness wishes to exclude from the academy any literary text deemed to reinforce oppressive stereotypes. This volume adopts neither position, arguing instead that these two supposedly antagonistic approaches are, in fact, mirror-images of each other.

This book grapples with a wide range of contemporary ethical and religious issues through the lens of the reflections of Charles Péguy on his friend and mentor Bernard-Lazare. Both Péguy, a leading French Catholic poet and philosopher, and Bernard-Lazare, an iconoclastic Jewish intellectual, were passionately involved in the Dreyfus Affair, which forms the background of these reflections.The book is in four parts. The first sets Péguy's portrait of Bernard-Lazare in a series of contexts, analyzing it against the background of the rampant antisemitism of its time, situating it in relation to present-day discussions about the "Other," and, especially, placing it within various twentieth-century attempts to rethink religion. Péguy's great contribution in this area lies in redirecting our attention to the ways human beings respond to defeat, and to the ways the intellect is oriented by something outside itself, as keys to the discovery of the transcendent. His work reformulates the meaning of hope and incarnation.The second part of the book presents Péguy's portrait of Bernard-Lazare in a complete English translation. In the third part, the author shows the affinity of Péguy's thought to that of two Jewish thinkers, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas. All three, in rethinking the religious dimension, located it amidst the daily interactions between people. The final part explores the implications of this notion of transcendence for the task of interpretation in the social sciences and the humanities.

The essays in this collection, written by a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar, deal with the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes and the categories of difference as represented in texts—in high literature, in medical literature, in art—from the last fin-de-siècle to our own. Intensely engaged in the cultural politics of everyday life and conscious of how texts reflect and shape our social practices, they deal primarily with representations and self-representations of "Jews" in the past one hundred years and focus on the question of the constructions of the Jew's body in art and literature. The title essay, "Love + Marriage = Death: STDs and AIDS in the Modern World," however, studies the image of sexually transmitted disease from Shakespeare to Martin Amis. It sets the tone for an understanding of this collection as a book about Jews and their representation, but not as a special, isolated case.The first essay, the largely autobiographical "Ethnicities: Why I Write What I Write," serves as an introduction to the collection. The other essays are: "Max Nordau, Sigmund Freud, and the Question of Conversion"; "Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the 'Modern Jewess'"; "Zwetschkenbaum's Competence: Madness and the Discourse of the Jews"; "Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud: Race and Gender in the Shaping of Psychoanalysis"; "Sibling Incest, Madness, and the Jew"; "R. B. Kitaj's 'Good Bad' Diasporism and the Body in American Jewish Postmodern Art"; and "Who Is Jewish?: The Newest Jewish Writing in German and Daniel Goldhagen."

The essays in this collection, written by a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar, deal with the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes and the categories of difference as represented in texts—in high literature, in medical literature, in art—from the last fin-de-siècle to our own. Intensely engaged in the cultural politics of everyday life and conscious of how texts reflect and shape our social practices, they deal primarily with representations and self-representations of "Jews" in the past one hundred years and focus on the question of the constructions of the Jew's body in art and literature. The title essay, "Love + Marriage = Death: STDs and AIDS in the Modern World," however, studies the image of sexually transmitted disease from Shakespeare to Martin Amis. It sets the tone for an understanding of this collection as a book about Jews and their representation, but not as a special, isolated case.The first essay, the largely autobiographical "Ethnicities: Why I Write What I Write," serves as an introduction to the collection. The other essays are: "Max Nordau, Sigmund Freud, and the Question of Conversion"; "Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the 'Modern Jewess'"; "Zwetschkenbaum's Competence: Madness and the Discourse of the Jews"; "Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud: Race and Gender in the Shaping of Psychoanalysis"; "Sibling Incest, Madness, and the Jew"; "R. B. Kitaj's 'Good Bad' Diasporism and the Body in American Jewish Postmodern Art"; and "Who Is Jewish?: The Newest Jewish Writing in German and Daniel Goldhagen."

This book examines representations of modernity in Yiddish literature between the Russian revolution of 1905 and the beginning of the First World War. Within Jewish society, and particularly Eastern European Jewish society, modernity was often experienced as a series of incursions and threats to traditional Jewish life. Writers explored these perceived crises in their work, in the process reconsidering the role and function of Yiddish literature itself.The orientation of nineteenth-century Yiddish fiction toward the shtetl came into conflict with the sense of reality of young writers, who felt themselves part of a rapidly changing modern urban environment. This opposition between the generations was reflected in their principles of plot construction. The conservatives employed cyclical patterns, producing mythological schemes for incorporating the new experience into the traditional order. Modernists emphasized the uniqueness of the new, and therefore preferred a linear organization of plot with emphasis on the transformation of individual character. The texts under discussion (primarily novels and novellas) are analyzed with respect to the way they represent different aspects of the modern world: economic change, revolutionary politics, emigration, and the emancipation of women. The author's methodology draws upon a variety of semiotic, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches, informed by insights derived from the Soviet Marxist tradition.The writers treated in the book include the classical figures Sholem Aleichem and Y. L. Peretz, their lesser-known contemporaries Yankev Dinezon, Mordkhe Spektor, and S. Ansky, younger authors from Russia and Poland, including Sholem Asch, David Bergelson, and Itche-Meir Weissenberg, and the American Yiddish writers Leon Kobrin, David Ignatov, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and Morris-Jonah Haimowitz.

This book traces the history of attitudes toward power and the use of armed force within the Zionist movement—from an early period in which most leaders espoused an ideal of peaceful settlement in Palestine, to the acceptance of force as a legitimate tool for achieving a sovereign Jewish state.Reviews"A rich and sophisticated work that nicely complements more conventional political-historical studies of the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . . Shapira sifts through a vast body of material, ranging from essays, poems, and memoir literature to the unpublished minutes of political party and youth group meetings. Shapira interprets these sources with sensitivity and insight . . . and writes with power, compassion, and warmth. . . . A landmark book that is an outstanding contribution to the history of Zionist political thought and culture."—American Historical Review"This is a superb book . . . a well-researched, detailed, and scholarly account that provides new and valuable insights into the dilemma posed by the formation and elaboration of a more forceful Israeli military posture."—The Historian"Shapira's powerful, well-written, lucid intellectual history of a segment of the Zionist movement . . . is fascinating and easy to read." —Journal of Economic Literature

This pathbreaking study uses the extraordinary life of Meir Macnin, a prosperous Jewish merchant, as a lens for examining the Jewish community of Morocco and its relationship to the Sephardi world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Macnin, a member of one of the most prominent Jewish families in Marrakesh, became the most important merchant for the sultans who ruled Morocco, and was their chief intermediary between Morocco and Europe. He lived in London for about twenty years, and then shuttled between Morocco and England for fifteen years until his death in 1835. This book challenges accepted views of Muslim-Jewish relations by emphasizing the ambivalence in the relationship. It shows how elite Jews maneuvered themselves into important positions in the Moroccan state by linking themselves to politically powerful Muslims and by establishing key positions in networks of trade. The elite Jews of Morocco were also part of a wider Sephardi world that transcended national boundaries. However, Macnin remained more connected to Morocco, where Jews were, according to Islamic law, protégés of the ruler and still subject to specific legal disabilities. The early-nineteenth-century sultan Mawlay Sulayman confined Jews in a number of Moroccan cities to newly created Jewish quarters as part of a policy of defining boundaries between Muslims and Jews. Yet Macnin remained closely tied to royal power, and in 1822 he became the principal intermediary between Morocco and the European powers for Mawlay Sulayman's successor, Mawlay 'Abd al-Rahman.At the beginning of the period covered in this book, Meir Macnin belonged to a wide, transnational Sephardi world, and moved easily between Morocco and Europe. By the end of his life, however, this Sephardi diaspora had virtually come to an end. Emancipation in Western Europe and the growing identification of European Jews with the nations in which they lived meant that their affinity to their Sephardi heritage no longer transcended their national attachments. The gap between Moroccan and European Jewry grew, and a new kind of division—between "Western" and "Oriental" Jews—now existed within the Jewish world.

Why did the social sciences become an integral part of Jewish scholarship beginning in the late nineteenth century? What part did this new scholarship play in the ongoing debate over emancipation and assimilation, Zionism and diasporism, the nature of Jewish identity, and the problem of Jewish continuity and survival. To answer these questions, this book traces the emergence and development of an organized Jewish social science in central Europe, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other social science modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and in the United States.The author locates the initial impetus for an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science in the Zionist movement, as Zionists looked to the social sciences to provide them with the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. In particular, the social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of Jewry in the diaspora. Social science also charted emancipation and assimilation, which were viewed as disintegrative agents for the dissolution of Jewish identity, and hence as a threat to the Jewish future. For Zionists, nationalism offered the means to reverse the process of dissolution. Yet Zionists were not alone in turning to the social sciences to advance their political agenda. This study also examines the involvement of non-Zionists in Jewish social science, focusing on the way liberal, assimilationist scholars utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora.Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance.

Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English. Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria's mythic and speculative ideas or on the ritual and contemplative practices he taught. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon in an actual social world. Thus the book focuses on Luria the person and on his relationship to his disciples. What attracted Luria's students to him? How did they react to his inspired and charismatic behavior? And what roles did Luria and his students see themselves playing in their collective quest for repair of the cosmos and messianic redemption?

What has the land of Israel meant for the Jewish imagination? This book provides a lively and readable answer, covering Biblical times to the present. Its aim is to pierce the mystery of the images of Israel, to grasp their meaning and function, to trace their origins and history, and to resituate in historical terms the fertile mythology that has peopled and continues to people the Jewish imagination, interposing a screen between a people and their land. Describing the real, however, is not sufficient to disqualify the myths. The authors believe, with the famous French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, that: "Things are not so simple. Myth is not opposed to the real as the false to the true; myth accompanies the real." Today, Israel is an undeniable fact and no longer has to legitimize its existence. It is in the midst of living through the crises of adulthood. The authors simply want to reconstitute and trace the genealogies of these contemporary crises. Only upon a clear understanding of this present and this past can a future be constructed.

The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing the reality of life in this important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905 Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this dynamic center of Jewish life were intertwined. Pinsk's role in the bloody aftermath of World War One is still the subject of scholarly debates: the murder of 35 Jewish men from Pinsk, many from its educated elite, provoked the American and British leaders to send emissaries to Pinsk. Shohet argues that the executions were a deliberate ploy by the Polish military and government to intimidate the Jewish population of the new Poland. Despite an increasingly hostile Polish state, Pinsk's Jews managed to maintain their community through the 1920s and 30s—until World War Two brought a grim Soviet interregnum succeeded by the entry of the Nazis on July 4th, 1941.For the first volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 at www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1442.

The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 is the first part of a major scholarly project about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were a majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both traditional rabbinic scholars and famous Hasidic figures, and over time became an international trade emporium, a center of the Jewish Enlightenment, a cradle of Zionism and the Jewish Labor movement, and a place where Orthodoxy struggled vigorously with modernity.The two volumes of Pinsk history were originally part of a literature created by Jews who survived the Holocaust and were determined to keep in memory a vital world that flourished for half a millennium. In this case, the results are extraordinary: no town of Eastern Europe has been described in such fascinating detail, invaluable to Jewish and non-Jewish historians alike.For the second volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1881-1941.

What has the land of Israel meant for the Jewish imagination? This book provides a lively and readable answer, covering Biblical times to the present. Its aim is to pierce the mystery of the images of Israel, to grasp their meaning and function, to trace their origins and history, and to resituate in historical terms the fertile mythology that has peopled and continues to people the Jewish imagination, interposing a screen between a people and their land. Describing the real, however, is not sufficient to disqualify the myths. The authors believe, with the famous French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, that: "Things are not so simple. Myth is not opposed to the real as the false to the true; myth accompanies the real." Today, Israel is an undeniable fact and no longer has to legitimize its existence. It is in the midst of living through the crises of adulthood. The authors simply want to reconstitute and trace the genealogies of these contemporary crises. Only upon a clear understanding of this present and this past can a future be constructed.

This book, which draws on a rich array of primary sources and archival materials, offers the first major appraisal of French responses to the Jewish refugee crisis after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. It explores French policies and attitudes toward Jewish refugees from three interrelated vantage points: government policy, public opinion, and the role of the French Jewish community.The author demonstrates that Jewish refugees in France were not treated in the same manner as other foreigners, in part because of foreign policy considerations and in part because Jewish refugees had a distinctive socioeconomic profile. By examining the socioeconomic and political factors that informed French refugee policy in the 1930's, the author presents overwhelming evidence that Vichy's anti-Jewish measures were not merely the work of a few antisemitic zealots in the administration, nor did they stem solely from the desire of Marshal Pétain's government to find scapegoats for the military defeat of 1940. Rather, they enjoyed widespread popular support, not only from far-right organizations but also from a host of middle-class professional associations and their members (doctors, lawyers, merchants, and artisans) who perceived Jews as a competitive threat.The author also sheds new light on Jewish political behavior in the 1930s. She demonstrates that the French Jewish community was sharply divided over the proper approach to the refugee crisis. While some Jewish leaders pressed for a hard-line policy, others worked assiduously to provide the refugees relief and to persuade the government to pursue a more liberal refugee policy. Thus the author refutes claims that the native French Jewish elite was overwhelmingly unsympathetic to the refugees because of fear that an influx of refugees would provoke an antisemitic backlash.While this book reveals the extent to which anti-refugee attitudes and policies in the 1930's paved the way for Vichy's anti-Jewish policies, it also highlights significant discontinuities between the refugee policies of the Third Republic and those of the Vichy regime.

This is a pioneering study of the nineteenth century Hasidic movement as shown through the life of one of the most controversial and influential Hasidic leaders, Rabbi Israel Friedman of Ruzhin (1796-1850). The dramatic episodes of his life—including his involvement in the murder of Jewish informers, his imprisonment in Russia, his subsequent escape to Austria where he successfully reestablished his court—are echoed by the contradictory and highly critical opinions of his personal character and his role as leader of one of the largest and most opulent Hasidic courts of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century Hasidism has been a comparatively neglected topic in Jewish historiography largely because of the traditional view that the movement was in a degenerate state during this period. The natural interest that scholars found in the eighteenth-century origins of the movement, alongside their personal dislike of the nineteenth-century Hasidic courts and their machinations, led them to concentrate on the earliest years and the more recent phases of Hasidism. The book is in four parts. Part I draws on surprisingly rich non-Hasidic sources as well as on Hasidic materials to recreate the early life of Rabbi Israel from his childhood to his leadership of a Hasidic community. Part II concentrates on his activities as a famous spiritual leader, his adventures in Russia, and his final years in Austria. In Part III, the author analyzes major aspects of Rabbi Israel's career and thought as a Hasidic leader and public figure, with emphasis on his approach to materialism, wealth, and luxury. Part IV describes in detail the royal Hasidic court of Rabbi Israel and his sons—its formation, buildings, economics, social structure, functionaries, and administrative organization.

Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English. Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria's mythic and speculative ideas or on the ritual and contemplative practices he taught. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon in an actual social world. Thus the book focuses on Luria the person and on his relationship to his disciples. What attracted Luria's students to him? How did they react to his inspired and charismatic behavior? And what roles did Luria and his students see themselves playing in their collective quest for repair of the cosmos and messianic redemption?

Harnessing the Holocaust presents the compelling story of how the Nazi genocide of the Jews became an almost daily source of controversy in French politics. Joan Wolf argues that from the Six-Day War through the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997-98, the Holocaust developed from a Jewish trauma into a metaphor for oppression and a symbol of victimization on a wide scale. Using scholarship from a range of disciplines, Harnessing the Holocaust argues that the roots of Holocaust politics reside in the unresolved dilemmas of Jewish emancipation and the tensions inherent in the revolutionary notion of universalism. Ultimately, the book suggests, the Holocaust became a screen for debates about what it means to be French.

Antonio's Devils deals both historically and theoretically with the origins of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature by tracing the progress of a few remarkable writers who, for various reasons and in various ways, cited Scripture for their own purpose, as Antonio's "devil," Shylock, does in The Merchant of Venice.By examining the work of key figures in the early history of Jewish literature through the prism of their allusions to classical Jewish texts, the book focuses attention on the magnificent and highly complex strategies the maskilim employed to achieve their polemical and ideological goals. Dauber uses this methodology to examine foundational texts by some of the Jewish Enlightenment's most interesting and important authors, reaching new and often surprising conclusions.

A Place in History is a cultural study of Tel Aviv, Israel's population center, established in 1909. It describes how a largely European Jewish immigrant society attempted to forge a home in the Mediterranean, and explores the role of memory and diaspora in the creation of a new national culture. Each chapter is devoted to a particular place in the city that has been central to its history, and includes literary, artistic, journalistic, and photographic material relating to that site.This is the first book-length study of Tel Aviv in English. It will appeal to readers interested in urban cultures, the contemporary Middle East, modern Jewish history, and Israeli literature. It also contributes to the ongoing public debate about memory, memorials and urban identity.

A Place in History is a cultural study of Tel Aviv, Israel's population center, established in 1909. It describes how a largely European Jewish immigrant society attempted to forge a home in the Mediterranean, and explores the role of memory and diaspora in the creation of a new national culture. Each chapter is devoted to a particular place in the city that has been central to its history, and includes literary, artistic, journalistic, and photographic material relating to that site.This is the first book-length study of Tel Aviv in English. It will appeal to readers interested in urban cultures, the contemporary Middle East, modern Jewish history, and Israeli literature. It also contributes to the ongoing public debate about memory, memorials and urban identity.

The Medici State and the Ghetto of Florence is a work about Italian Jews, Christians, and the institutions and policies that organized their relationship. It sets the 1570 decision of the Medici government to ghettoize the Jews of Tuscany in the context of early modern statecraft and in the climate of the Catholic (or Counter-) Reformation. While readers have had access to studies of the ghettos of Rome and Venice, this is the first study of the Jews of Tuscany available in English, and the first and only study of the Florentine ghetto based on sustained archival research. The story of the forced ghettoization of Tuscan Jews allows the author to explore the "spatialization of power," the construction of Jewish community, and the reorganization of gender roles, leading to three broad arguments of great significance to readers interested in Italian history, Jewish history, urban history, and the history of women.

With extraordinary chutzpa and deep philosophical seriousness, Solomon ben Joshua of Lithuania renamed himself after his medieval intellectual hero, Moses Maimonides. Maimon was perhaps the most brilliant and certainly the most controversial figure of the late-eighteenth century Jewish Enlightenment. He scandalized rabbinic authorities, embarrassed Moses Mendelssohn, provoked Kant, charmed Goethe, and inspired Fichte, among others. This is the first study of Maimon to integrate his idiosyncratic philosophical idealism with his popular autobiography, and with his early unpublished exegetical, mystical, and Maimonidean work in Hebrew. In doing so, it illuminates the intellectual and spiritual possibilities open to a European Jew at the turn of the eighteenth century.

This is a work of unprecedented scope, tracing the origins of Jewish autobiographical writing from the early modern period to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a multitude of Hebrew and Yiddish texts, very few of which have been translated into English, and on contemporary autobiographical theory, this book provides a literary/historical explanatory paradigm for the emergence of the Jewish autobiographical voice. The book also provides the English reader with an introduction to the works of central figures in the history of Hebrew and Yiddish literature, and it includes discussion of material that has never been submitted to literary critical analysis in English.

Starting around 1840, French Jews began to reach out in new ways to Jews elsewhere, especially in North Africa and the Middle East. In describing these activities, they spoke of feelings of solidarité and a mission to bring civilisation to Jews everywhere, a language more meaningful in the French public arena than in Jewish tradition. Far from a remnant of ancient feelings, Jewish solidarity is a modern phenomenon with roots in its inventors' integration into French political culture. Why did acculturation inspire elite French Jews to affirm their Jewishness through international aid? What did their actions mean in the French public sphere, and how did they transform Jewish identity?In a book that speaks to French historians and Jewish historians alike, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity explores the historical roots of Jewish international aid and the language of "solidarity" that accompanied it. In using this language, French Jews redefined Jewish identity in lasting ways. At the same time, they helped shape state secularism and the "civilizing mission" in French foreign and colonial policy.

Jewish Dogs is not a study of "anti-Semitism" or "anti-Judaism." Instead, this book argues that to anchor claims of supersession, Catholics have viewed Jews as metaphoric—and sometimes not so metaphoric—dogs. The dog has for millennia been the focus of impurity, and Catholicism fosters doctrines of physical purity that go hand in hand with those of ritual purity. The purity is that of the "one loaf" spoken of by Paul in Corinthians that is, at once, the Eucharist and the collective Christian Corpus, the body of the faithful. Paul views this "loaf" as physically corruptible, and as John Chrysostom said at the close of the fourth century, the greatest threat to the loaf's purity are the Jews. They are the dogs who wish to steal the bread that belongs exclusively to the children. Eventually, Jews were said to attack the "loaf" through ritual murder and attempts to defile the Host itself; the victim of ritual murder is identified with the Host, as is common in Catholic martyrdom. Pope Pius IX still spoke of Jewish dogs barking throughout the streets of Rome in 1871. Other Catholic clergy were dismayed. This book is thus as much a study of Catholic doctrinal history as it is a study of Jews.