The birth of modern Jewish studies can be traced to the nineteenth-century emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a movement to promote a scholarly approach to the study of Judaism and Jewish culture. Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship offers a collection of essays examining how Wissenschaft extended beyond its original German intellectual contexts and was transformed into a diverse, global field. From the early expansion of the new scholarly approaches into Jewish publications across Europe to their translation and reinterpretation in the twentieth century, the studies included here collectively trace a path through largely neglected subject matter, newly recognized as deserving attention. Beginning with an introduction that surveys the field's German origins, fortunes, and contexts, the volume goes on to document dimensions of the growth of Wissenschaft des Judentums elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world. Some of the contributions turn to literary and semantic issues, while others reveal the penetration of Jewish studies into new national contexts that include Hungary, Italy, and even India. Individual essays explore how the United States, along with Israel, emerged as a main center for Jewish historical scholarship and how critical Jewish scholarship began to accommodate Zionist ideology originating in Eastern Europe and eventually Marxist ideology, primarily in the Soviet Union. Finally, the focus of the volume moves on to the land of Israel, focusing on the reception of Orientalism and Jewish scholarly contacts with Yemenite and native Muslim intellectuals. Taken together, the contributors to the volume offer new material and fresh approaches that rethink the relationship of Jewish studies to the larger enterprise of critical scholarship while highlighting its relevance to the history of humanistic inquiry worldwide.

Warsaw was once home to the largest and most diverse Jewish community in the world. It was a center of rich varieties of Orthodox Judaism, Jewish Socialism, Diaspora Nationalism, Zionism, and Polonization. This volume is the first to reflect on the entire history of the Warsaw Jewish community, from its inception in the late 18th century to its emergence as a Jewish metropolis within a few generations, to its destruction during the German occupation and tentative re-emergence in the postwar period. The highly original contributions collected here investigate Warsaw Jewry's religious and cultural life, press and publications, political life, and relations with the surrounding Polish society. This monumental volume is dedicated to Professor Antony Polonsky, chief historian of the new Warsaw Museum for the History of Polish Jews, on the occasion of his 75th birthday.

This volume approaches the topic of mobility in Southeast Europe by offering the first detailed historical study of the land route connecting Istanbul with Belgrade. After this route that diagonally crosses Southeast Europe had been established in Roman times, it was as important for the Byzantines as the Ottomans to rule their Balkan territories. In the nineteenth century, the road was upgraded to a railroad and, most recently, to a motorway. The contributions in this volume focus on the period from the Middle Ages to the present day. They explore the various transformations of the route as well as its transformative role for the cities and regions along its course. This not only concerns the political function of the route to project the power of the successive empires. Also the historical actors such as merchants, travelling diplomats, Turkish guest workers or Middle Eastern refugees together with the various social, economic and cultural effects of their mobility are in the focus of attention. The overall aim is to gain a deeper understanding of Southeast Europe by foregrounding historical continuities and disruptions from a long-term perspective and by bringing into dialogue different national and regional approaches.

No matter what we would make of Jesus, says Schalom Ben-Chorin, he was first a Jewish man in a Jewish land. Brother Jesus leads us through the twists and turns of history to reveal the figure who extends a "brotherly hand" to the author as a fellow Jew. Ben-Chorin's reach is astounding as he moves easily between literature, law, etymology, psychology, and theology to recover "Jesus' picture from the Christian overpainting." A commanding scholar of the historical Jesus who also devoted his life to widening Jewish-Christian dialogue, Ben-Chorin ranges across such events as the wedding at Cana, the Last Supper, and the crucifixion to reveal, in contemporary Christianity, traces of the Jewish codes and customs in which Jesus was immersed. Not only do we see how and why these events also resonate with Jews, but we are brought closer to Christianity in its primitive state: radical, directionless, even pagan. Early in his book, Ben-Chorin writes, "the belief of Jesus unifies us, but the belief in Jesus divides us." It is the kind of paradox from which arise endless questions or, as Ben-Chorin would have it, endless opportunities for Jews and Christians to come together for meaningful, mutual discovery.

The Statue of Liberty holds a special place in the hearts of Americans, the people of France, and freedom lovers throughout the world. But up until now, the full story behind its origins has not been told.

Author Richard N. Rhoades peels back the mystery surrounding the icon, explaining how French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi looked to a Roman goddess to serve as the model for the statue. On Oct. 28, 1886, at the unveiling ceremony, President Grover Cleveland praised Bartholdi's goddess statue as "greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song."

But Rhoades goes beyond the historical data and examines the statue's pagan origins by analyzing Scripture. He establishes that the most revealing chroniclers of the Statue of Liberty were the Hebrew prophets who predicted the building and setting of an image of the Great Goddess of the ancient world on her own pedestal in a latter day country codenamed "the land of Shinar."

Discover the real origins of the Statue of Liberty, its adoption by the American people as a national icon and its historical and biblical signifi cance in "Lady Liberty: The Ancient Goddess of America."

This work offers a fresh reading of Paul's appropriation of Abraham in Gal 3:6-29 against the background of Jewish data, especially drawn from the writings of Philo of Alexandria. Philo's negotiation on Abraham as the model proselyte and the founder of the Jewish nation based on his trust in God's promise relative to the Law of Moses provides a Jewish context for a corresponding debate reflected in Galatians, and suggests that there were Jewish antecedents that came close to Paul's reasoning in his own time. This volume incorporates a number of new arguments in the context of scholarly discussion of both Galatian 3 and some of the Philonic texts, and demonstrates how the works of Philo can be applied responsibly in New Testament scholarship.

Bring Jewish values to life with an engaging blend of mitzvot middot and timeless Jewish wisdom.

Kitab al-mustalhaq is an addendum to the treatises on Hebrew morphology by HayyuG, the most classic of the Andalusi works written during the caliphate of Cordoba and the benchmark for studies of the Hebrew language throughout the Arabic-speaking world during the medieval period. Kitab al-mustalhaq was composed in Zaragoza by Ibn Ganah after the civil war was unleashed in Cordoba in 1013. This new edition includes an historical introduction, taking account of the major contributions from the twentieth century to the present day, a description of the methodology and contents of this treatise, a description of the manuscripts, and a glossary of terminology. This new edition shows how Ibn Ganah updated his book until the end of his life.

Two major interpretations of Mendelssohn's achievements have attained prominence in recent works. One interpretation, defended most recently by David Sorkin and Edward Breuer, casts Mendelssohn as a Jewish traditionalist who uses the language of enlightened German philosophy to bolster his pre-modern religious beliefs. The other interpretation, defended by Allan Arkush, casts Mendelssohn as a radical Deist who defends Judaism exoterically in order to avoid arousing opposition from his co-religionists while facilitating their social integration into enlightened European society. In Faith and Freedom, Michah Gottlieb stakes out a middle position. He argues that Mendelssohn defends pre-modern Jewish religious concepts sincerely, but in so doing, unconsciously gives them a humanistic valence appropriate to life in a diverse, enlightened society. Gottlieb sees the Pantheism Controversy as part of a broader assessment of Mendelssohn's theological-political philosophy, framed in terms of Mendelssohn's relation to his two greatest Jewish philosophical predecessors, Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) and Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). While Mendelssohn's relation to Maimonides and Spinoza has been discussed sporadically, Faith and Freedom is the first book-length treatment of this subject. The connection is particularly instructive as both Maimonides and Spinoza wrote major theological-political treatises and exercised profound influences on Mendelssohn. Not surprisingly, Mendelssohn is deeply ambivalent about both of these figures. He reveres Maimonides for what he sees as his synthesis of Judaism with secular knowledge, while seeming deeply disturbed by Maimonides's elitism, his equivocation regarding many of the tenets of theism, his espousing religious coercion, and his intolerant view of Gentiles. As for Spinoza, Mendelssohn respects him as a model for how a Jew can fruitfully contribute to science and philosophy and be a model of ethical rectitude. But Mendelssohn objects to Spinoza's atheism, advocacy of state religion, debunking of Jewish chosenness, and rejection of Jewish law. For Mendelssohn, reason best preserves human dignity and freedom by upholding the individual's right to arrive at truth on their own and determine their own beliefs independently of all authority. As such, reason demands that the state respect diversity of thought and religious expression. Mendelssohn interprets faith in the Jewish sense as trust in God's providential goodness, arguing that reason affirms this as well. But he recognizes the difficulty of establishing metaphysical truth rationally and so in his final works adumbrates a form of religious pragmatism. The faith-reason debate rages again today. Gottlieb explores Mendelssohn's theological-political thought with an eye to axiological and political dimensions of the debate.

In The Qumran Manuscripts of Lamentations: A Text-Critical Study, the first large-scale investigation of the topic, Gideon Kotze establishes how the four Lamentations manuscripts from Qumran present the content of the biblical book. Kotze takes as his point of departure the contributions of the Dead Sea scrolls to the discipline of Old Testament textual criticism and treats the Qumran manuscripts of Lamentations, the Masoretic text and the ancient translations as witnesses to the content of the book and not only as witnesses to earlier forms of its Hebrew text. By focusing the analysis on variant readings and textual difficulties, the study arrives at a better understanding of these manuscripts as representatives of both the text and the content of Lamentations.

Jewish thought is, in many ways, a paradox. Is it theology or is it philosophy? Does it use universal methods to articulate Judaism's particularity or does it justify Judaism's particularity with appeals to illuminating the universal? These two sets of claims are difficult if not impossible to reconcile, and their tension reverberates throughout the length and breadth of Jewish philosophical writing, from Saadya Gaon in the ninth century to Emmanuel Levinas in the twentieth. Rather than assume, as most scholars of Jewish philosophy do, that the terms "philosophy" and "Judaism" simply belong together, Hughes explores the juxtaposition and the creative tension that ensues from their cohabitation, examining adroitly the historical, cultural, intellectual, and religious filiations between Judaism and philosophy. Breaking with received opinion, this book seeks to challenge the exclusionary, particularist, and essentialist nature that is inherent to the practice of something problematically referred to as "Jewish philosophy." Hughes begins with the premise that Jewish philosophy is impossible and begins the process of offering a sophisticated and constructive rethinking of the discipline that avoids the traditional extremes of universalism and particularism.