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The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of
a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of
this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing
the reality of life in this important, and in many ways
representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905
Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to
the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this
dynamic center of Jewish life were intertwined. Pinsk's role in the
bloody aftermath of World War One is still the subject of scholarly
debates: the murder of 35 Jewish men from Pinsk, many from its
educated elite, provoked the American and British leaders to send
emissaries to Pinsk. Shohet argues that the executions were a
deliberate ploy by the Polish military and government to intimidate
the Jewish population of the new Poland. Despite an increasingly
hostile Polish state, Pinsk's Jews managed to maintain their
community through the 1920s and 30s—until World War Two brought a
grim Soviet interregnum succeeded by the entry of the Nazis on July
4th, 1941. For the first volume of this two-volume collection, see
The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880.
Did Dante Alighieri, author of ""The Divine Comedy"" as a young man
in Florence sleep with Beatrice Portinari before and after her
marriage? Did the poet travel after her death through Hell to find
her again? The clues to this academic detective story, writes Mark
Jay Mirsky, lie not only in Dante's earlier poetry, ""The New
Life"", or in ""The Divine Comedy"", but in the ""Zohar of Moses de
Leon"", a Jewish text written some years before and based on
Neoplatonic ideas similar to those that inspired Dante.
""Purgatorio"" and ""Paradiso"", the second and third volumes of
the ""Commedia"", are inaccessible to most reader unfamiliar with
the boldness of Dante's use of the philosophical debate in the
Middle Ages. Does Dante's ""Commedia"" hint at his hope of intimacy
with Beatrice in the Highest Heaven? Mirsky distinctively traces
the influence on Dante of Provencal poets, mediaeval theologians,
Dante's personal life, and the sources of his classical education
to propose a radical reading of Dante. The text compounds the
riddles of dream, poetry, philosophy and Dante's concealed
autobiography in his work. It treats the ""Commedia"" in the spirit
of its title, as a hopeful and comic version of the other world.
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