Judaism in the Early Modern and Modern Periods

Approaching the question of Purim historically, Haupt notes that the book of Esther was composed during the reign of Judas Maccabeus, and he correlates the festival to the Babylonian New Year. He discusses the origin of the title “purim” from various languages, ultimately deciding on the Old Persian explanation. Moving forward, Haupt brings the festival into the more modern period, showing how the ancient tradition continues to exist. A useful resource for anyone interested in turn-of-the-century thought on the origins of an enigmatic biblical festival, this contribution is both readable to the layperson and scholarly as well.

This volume consists of 14 papers delivered by Assyriologists and biblical specialists at the 2007 Society of Biblical Literature congress in sessions devoted to the scholarly legacy of the late Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Professor of the Hebrew Bible at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.

The humanistic, non-religious approach of this book presents Judaism as the Culture of the Jewish People and God as a literary figure created by the authors of the Bible. This book defines key concepts in the discourse of Judaism as Culture. It offers a concise version of the history of pluralism in Judaism during the biblical era, the Hellenistic period, the influence of the Talmudic "culture of dispute" and the asking of new questions, the influence of the secularization process on Judaism, the assimilation of Jews in foreign cultures, and the formation of Israeli culture.

Leo Wiener presents an overview of the history, culture, and language of the Jews who emigrated from Germany to Slavic countries and continued to speak a dialect of German.

Judaic reasoning is discussed from the standpoint of modern logic. Andrew Schumann defines Judaic logic, traces Aristotelian influence on developing Jewish studies in Judaic reasoning, and shows the non-Aristotelian core of fundamentals of Judaic logic. Further, Schumann proposes some modern approaches to understanding and formalizing Judaic reasoning, including Judaic semantics and (non-Aristotelian) syllogistics.

Erol Haker recounts the history of the Sephardic Jewish Adoto family, which originally hails from the town of Kirklareli. This is one of the few books to describe the Jewish population of Turkish Thrace.

This work is a study of Jewish history writing in the Ottoman Empire through various periods, including the Sabbatian movement, and how these writings have affected our understanding of Ottoman Jewish history today.

This volume contains Rifat Bali’s study of the Jewish place in Istanbul’s nineteenth-century sex trade as well as three contemporary accounts of the practice.

A unique copy of the Seder Hibbur Berakot , this edition includes 22 prayers, characteristic of the Italian Jewish liturgical tradition.

This book completely redefines our understanding of fin de siècle Anglo-Jewish author Amy Levy and her writing. Demonstrating that Levy’s writing is less anti-Judaic and more profoundly influenced by the religious concerns of classical German Reformism, Luke Devine's innovative approach reveals that Levy's writing constitutes a genre whose female subjectivity evinces a concern for justice and authority that prefigures numerous aspects of Second-Wave Jewish feminist theory and its spiritual and theological underpinnings.