Jewish Communities in Exotic Places examines seventeen Jewish groups that are referred to in Hebrew as edot ha-mizrach, Eastern or Oriental Jewish communities. These groups, situated in remote places on the Asian and African Jewish geographical periphery, became isolated from the major centers of Jewish civilization over the centuries and embraced some interesting practices and aspects of the dominant cultures in which they were situated.

According to Wikipedia, ""The Guide for the Perplexed is one of the major works of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or "the Rambam". It was written in the 12th century in the form of a three-volume letter to his student, Rabbi Joseph ben Judah of Ceuta, the son of Rabbi Judah, and is the main source of the Rambam's philosophical views, as opposed to his opinions on Jewish law... Moses Maimonides (March 30, 1135 Cordoba, Spain ? December 13, 1204 Fostat, Egypt), was a rabb...

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...

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.

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 Ben...

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...

The present publication is the first that has attempted to portray the separate and progressive history of the Jews in the different countries which they have made their homes, since their expulsion from the land which they had been identified for something like thirty centuries. In these pages the author has endeavoured to compile a narrative of a great part of what has occurred to the Jews of Asia in the last eighteen and a half centuries.

Leah Trachtman-Palchan was an ordinary woman who lived an extraordinary life. This was a life of migration, dissent, exile and survival. Born in the final years of Tsarist Russia, her family was forced to leave their small town following the repeated pogroms of the Civil War era. A two year voyage followed, bringing them all to British Mandate Palestine in 1921. Here what seems like a typical Jewish story of migration from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century took an unexpected tu...

In Imagining the Kibbutz, Ranen Omer-Sherman explores the literary and cinematic representations of the socialist experiment that became history’s most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Inspired in part by the kibbutz movement’s recent commemoration of its centennial, this study responds to a significant gap in scholarship. Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative ...