A collection of essays exploring the history of an antisemitic accusation that haunted Jewish people in Europe and Russia, and how it spread.This innovative reassessment of ritual murder accusations brings together scholars working in history, folklore, ethnography, and literature. Favoring dynamic explanations of the mechanisms, evolution, popular appeal, and responses to the blood libel, the essays rigorously engage with the larger social and cultural worlds that ...

In 1900 over five million Jews lived in the Russian empire; today, there are four times as many Russian-speaking Jews residing outside the former Soviet Union than there are in that region. The New Jewish Diaspora is the first English-language study of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. This migration has made deep marks on the social, cultural, and political terrain of many countries, in particular the United States, Israel, and Germany. The contributors examine the varied way...

How interwar Poland and its Jewish youth were instrumental in shaping the ideology of right-wing ZionismBy the late 1930s, as many as fifty thousand Polish Jews belonged to Betar, a youth movement known for its support of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of right-wing Zionism. Poland was not only home to Jabotinsky’s largest following. The country also served as an inspiration and incubator for the development of right-wing Zionist ideas. Jabotinsky’s Children

Before time as we know it began, gods and goddesses lived in the city of Asgard. Odin All Father crossed the Rainbow Bridge to walk among men in Midgard. Thor defended Asgard with his mighty hammer. Mischievous Loki was constantly getting into trouble with the other gods, and dragons and giants walked free. This collection of Norse sagas retold by author Padraic Colum gives us a sense of that magical time when the world was filled with powers and wonders we can hardly imagine.

A vivid and eminently readable story of Jewish history covering 4,000 years, and including extensive illustrations and historical photographsHoward Fast, the bestselling author of Spartacus, tells the sweeping story of the Jewish people and Judaism over four millennia, from their nomadic beginnings and the rise of Moses, to the kings David and Solomon, through the Diaspora and the unthinkable horror of the Holocaust, culminating in the founding of the stat...

“This is by far the clearest book ever written about the Holocaust, and also the best at explaining its origins and grotesque mentality, as well as its chaotic development.”―Antony Beevor, bestselling author of StalingradLaurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Now, he combines their never-before-seen eyewitness testimony with the latest academic research to create a uniquely accessible and aut...

'Emigration to and from the German-Russian Volga Colonies' covers the emigration of the "Catherine the Great" Germans into the Volga River area in the mid to late 1700's, the movement of the Volga German-Russians further east of the Volga River into Russia's Steppes, the western exodus of the Volga German-Russians to the United States, Canada, Germany, Brazil and Argentina in the late 1800's and early 1900's, the Stalin ordered deportation of all Volga German-Russians to...

The "remarkable" story of the grass-roots movement that freed millions of Jews from the Soviet Union ( The Plain Dealer).At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the USSR. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to leave. When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone is the astonishing and inspiring story of their rescue.Journalist Gal Beckerman draws on newly released Soviet gov...

The remarkable story of Josef Hartinger, the German prosecutor who risked everything to bring to justice the first killers of the Holocaust and whose efforts would play a key role in the Nuremberg tribunal.Before Germany was engulfed by Nazi dictatorship, it was a constitutional republic. And just before Dachau Concentration Camp became a site of Nazi genocide, it was a state detention center for political prisoners, subject to police authority and due process. The camp began its i...

The distinguished historian of the Jewish people, Howard M. Sachar, gives us a comprehensive and enthralling chronicle of the achievements and traumas of the Jews over the last four hundred years.Tracking their fate from Western Europe’s age of mercantilism in the seventeenth century to the post-Soviet and post-imperialist Islamic upheavals of the twenty-first century, Sachar applies his renowned narrative skill to the central role of the Jews in many of the most i...

Survivals in Belief Among the Celtsby George HendersonAn extensive review of evidence of pre-Christian beliefs in Celtic culture."This long out-of-print book [...] reviews the extensive literature on survivals of pre-Christian beliefs in the Celtic area. It covers customs from Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Brittany, and relates them to other traditional cultures world-wide. This is a work of scholarship, and cites from authoritative literature...

At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as...