Jewish Religion History

Many years ago, in a lecture on the creation of the Mishnah, the Orthodox Jewish historian, Rabbi Berel Wein discussed the rise of early Christianity as a historical and theological backdrop. He mentioned that this era is of particular importance to Jews because of the complicated and tragic relationship between Jews and Christians over the centuries. He referred to Joseph Klausner, the famed Jewish professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who in the earlier part of the 20th century, had authored several works on early Christianity from a Jewish standpoint.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880–1940) was a man of huge paradoxes and contradictions and has been the most misunderstood of all Zionist politicians—a first-rate novelist, a celebrated Russian journalist, and the founder of the branch of Zionism now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. This biography, the first in English in nearly two decades, undertakes to answer central questions about Jabotinsky as a writer, a political thinker, and a leader. Hillel Halkin sets aside the stereotypes to which Jabotinsky has been reduced by his would-be followers and detractors alike.

Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889), a Jewish convert to Christianity, was a Biblical scholar and author. The Alfred Edersheim Box Set includes his three most popular works "The Temple - Its Ministry and Service", "Prophecy and History in Relation to the Messiah", and "Sketches of Jewish Social Life". In these books on the life and times of Jesus, the author discusses the temple, the priesthood and the Jewish festivals, and examines the customs and traditions of everyday Jewish life in first century Palestine.

The stunning story of the breathtaking journey of nine extraordinary men from Budapest to the New World, what they experienced along their dangerous route, and how they changed America and the world. In a style both personal and historically groundbreaking, acclaimed author Kati Marton (born in Budapest) tells the tale of their youth in Budapest's Golden Age of the early 20th century, their flight, and their lives of extraordinary accomplishment, danger, glamour, and poignancy.

As the main spoken language of the Jews for more than a thousand years, Yiddish has had plenty to lament, plenty to conceal. Its phrases and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled the Jews of Europe to survive persecution: they never stopped kvetching about God, gentiles, children, and everything else.

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish-language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it.

Poland, 1940. Moshe and his family flee their hometown of Warsaw in a desperate bid for survival as Nazi forces advance on the city. Hiding under false identities, they hope to wait out the end of the war, which must surely be near. But nowhere is truly safe for Poland’s Jews, and soon Moshe and his brother find themselves en route to Auschwitz, from where no one returns. Separated from the rest of their family, they hold on to each other with everything they have.

Walking through Jesus' life from birth to death, Rabbi Evan Moffic serves as a tour guide to give Christians a new way to look at familiar teachings and practices that are rooted in the Jewish faith and can illuminate our lives today. Among the critically acclaimed highlights of this book, Rabbi Moffic gives fresh insight on how Jesus' contemporaries understood him; explores how Jesus' Jewishness shaped him.

They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into imposing enterprises and amassed spectacular fortunes. But despite possessing breathtaking wealth that rivaled the Astors and Rockefellers, they were barred by the gentile establishment from the lofty realm of "the 400," a register of New York's most elite, because of their religion and humble backgrounds.

Two thousand years ago, 967 Jewish men, women, and children reportedly took their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman army. This dramatic event, which took place on top of Masada, a barren and windswept mountain overlooking the Dead Sea, spawned a powerful story of Jewish resistance that came to symbolize the embattled modern State of Israel. Jodi Magness, an archaeologist who has excavated at Masada, explains what happened there, how we know it, and how recent developments might change understandings of the story.

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman, so she went underground.

Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews” are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. In this provocative book, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

Although she grew up following some holiday rituals, Abigail Pogrebin realized how little she knew about their foundational purpose and contemporary relevance; she wanted to understand what had kept these holidays alive and vibrant, some for thousands of years. Her curiosity led her to embark on an entire year of research, observation, and writing about the milestones on the religious calendar. Whether in search of a roadmap for Jewish life or a challenging probe into the architecture of Jewish tradition, listeners will be captivated, educated, and inspired by My Jewish Year.

In The Misunderstood Jew, scholar Amy-Jill Levine helps Christians and Jews understand the "Jewishness" of Jesus so that their appreciation of him deepens and a greater interfaith dialogue can take place. Levine's humor and informed truth - telling provokes honest conversation and debate about how Christians and Jews should understand Jesus, the New Testament, and each other.

L'histoire juive longe l'histoire universelle sur toute son étendue, et la pénètre par mille trames." James Darmesteter est l'un des plus grands historiens du judaïsme. Dans ce texte, il aborde l'aspect universel de l'histoire juive et nous montre à quel point le peuple juif, par sa culture, par sa religion et par ses idées a participé activement à la marche de l'humanité.

Estelle’s memoir, published sixty-four years after her liberation from the Nazis, is a narrative of fear and hope and resiliency. While it is a harrowing tale of destruction and loss, it is also a story of the goodness that still exists in a dark world, of survival and renewal.

From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the 20th century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels, plays, poems, and memoirs of Jewish writers provided intimate access to new worlds of experience.

The book discusses the Jews, in terms of defining the word Jews and the derivation of the word "Jews", and the verses in which the word "Jews" appears. The book mentions the Jews' lack of entitlement to Palestine, but rather they are following the path of the advocates of Zionism. The Jew is also called the Hebrew, and the Israelite is called "the Children of Israel". The writer mentioned the history of the Jews in Palestine, in terms of the entry of the Jews into Palestine.

Self-hatred. Guilt. Resentment. Paranoia. Hysteria. Overbearing mother-love. In this witty, insightful, and poignant book, Devorah Baum delves into fiction, film, memoir, and psychoanalysis to present a dazzlingly original exploration of a series of feelings famously associated with modern Jews.

Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in an old Egyptian synagogue - the amazing story of one of the most important discoveries in modern religious scholarship. In 1897, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered.