A colorful memoir of Jewish life in China during the first half of the twentieth century.Dolly Beil spent the first part of her life in the Chinese cities of Tsingtao (Qingdao), Mukden (Shenyang), Harbin, and Tientsin (Tianjin). Her father, owner of a jewellery store and a businessman, descended from the prominent family of Solomon Guterman, who owned an estate in Irkutsk, Russia. Her mother was one of three daughters of Grigory Lazarovich Gershevich, who ...

A riveting scientific detective story crossed with a provocative and controversial re-examination of the meaning of race, ethnicity, and religion.Could our sense of who we are really turn on a sliver of DNA? In our multiethnic world, questions of individual identity are becoming increasingly unclear. Now in Abraham's Children bestselling author Jon Entine vividly brings to life the profound human implications of the Age of Genetics while illuminating one of...

How the fate of the Jews has been shaped by the development of capitalismThe unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so imp...

"Framed as a dialog between the king of the Khazars, a Central Asian kingdom, and a Rabbi, the Khazari is an exposition of late medieval Jewish philosophy. Legend has it that the king of the Khazars held a symposium to decide whether his people should convert to Judaism, Christianity or Islam. This book is a fictional account of the Jewish side of this debate. Judah Ha-Levi, the author, was born about 1080 C.E. in Muslim-controlled area of southern Spain."

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 1896, 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. He had entered the synagogue's genizah—its repository for damaged and destroye...

A comprehensive and accessible account of the life and thought of Judaism's most celebrated philosopherMaimonides was the greatest Jewish philosopher and legal scholar of the medieval period, a towering figure who has had a profound and lasting influence on Jewish law, philosophy, and religious consciousness. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to his life and work, revealing how his philosophical sensibility and outlook informed his inte...

Herod the Great, king of ancient Judea, was a brutal, ruthless, vindictive and dangerously high-strung tyrant. He had many of his subjects killed on suspicion of plotting against him and was accused of slaughtering children in Bethlehem when informed that a new king of the Jews had been born there. Among the victims of the murderous paranoia that ultimately drove him to the brink of insanity were his three oldest sons and the wife he loved most. But there was a crucial aspect to Herod’s ch...

This is the story of a survivor, what he saw and felt during his Calvary from Antwerp to the Malin distribution camp in France and from there to the extermination camp of Buchenwald.To say that this book contains the scenes of a twentieth-century Inferno may sound commonplace. Yet, every page of this book reminds one of Dante's Inferno, with one exception: The Inferno, the author writes about consumed the lives not of the sinful whom divine justice cast into the immortality of suff...

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spino...

Culled from The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, a monumental, groundbreaking reference work published in late 2010, Early Judaism: A Comprehensive Overview contains fifteen first-rate essays from a diverse group of internationally renowned scholars. This volume provides the most comprehensive and authoritative overview available of Judaism in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.Contributors:John M. G. BarclayMiriam Pucci Be...

A beautiful memorial to the brave women who defied Hitler by preserving a part of their hertiage and a part of themselves in this handwritten collection of recipes, proving that the Nazis could not break the spirit of the Jewish people.

How have the Jews survived? For millennia, they have defied odds by overcoming the travails of exile, persecution, and recurring plans for their annihilation. Many have attempted to explain this singular success as a result of divine intervention. In this engaging book, David N. Myers charts the long journey of the Jews through history. At the same time, it points to two unlikely-and decidedly this-worldly--factors to explain the survival of the Jews: antisemitism and assimilation. Usually...