This multi-volume work is a reprint of Israel Davidson's classic opus, with a new introduction by piyyut scholar Michael Rand.

In the 1730s two expeditions set out from Paris on extraordinary journeys; the first was destined for the equatorial region of Peru, the second headed north towards the Arctic Circle. Although the eighteenth century witnessed numerous such adventures, these expeditions were different. Rather than seeking new lands to conquer or mineral wealth to exploit, their primary objectives were scientific: to determine the Earth's precise shape by measuring the variation of a degree of latitude at points separated as nearly as possible by a whole quadrant of the globe between Equator and North Pole. Although such information had consequences for navigation and cartography, the motivation was not simply utilitarian. Rather it was one theme among many in an intellectual revolution in which advances in mathematics paralleled philosophical strife, and reputations of the living and the dead stood to be elevated or destroyed. In particular the two expeditions hoped to prove the correctness of Isaac Newton's prediction that the Earth is not a perfect sphere, but flattened at the poles. In this study, the 'Figure of the Earth' controversy is for the first time comprehensively explored in all its several dimensions. It shows how a largely neglected episode of European science, that produced no spectacular process or artefact - beyond a relatively minor improvement in maps - nevertheless represents an almost unique combination of theoretical prediction and empirical method. It also details the suffering of the two teams of scientists in very different extremes of climate, whose sacrifices for the sake of knowledge rather than colonial gain, caught the imagination of the literary world of the time.

This volume contains contributions, in English and Hebrew, on the following topics: Biblical criticism, Medieval Biblical lexicography, Classical and Post-Classical piyyut, Medieval Hebrew poetry and science, Judeo-Arabic poetry and epistolography, Classical Arabic poetry and prose, and the history of Jewish Studies in America.

This work is Volume 2 of an extensive two-volume monograph on the interplay of science and literature in Europe from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It comprises a series of some twenty biographies raisonnees of literary figures known to have had fascination for, at times an obsession with, science. The linguistic base is broad, primarily French, German and English, but with excursions into Italian, Spanish and Russian. Alongside outstanding individuals, the work chronicles the intellectual movements Naturphilosophie, Naturalism, Positivism, etc., which literature gave rise to through its interaction with science.

This work is Volume 1 of an extensive two-volume monograph on the interplay of science and literature in Europe from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It comprises a series of some twenty biographies raisonnees of literary figures known to have had fascination for, at times an obsession with, science. The linguistic base is broad, primarily French, German and English, but with excursions into Italian, Spanish and Russian. Alongside outstanding individuals, the work chronicles the intellectual movements Naturphilosophie, Naturalism, Positivism, etc., which literature gave rise to through its interaction with science.

This work contains a Hebrew and an English section. The former is an edition of the Mahberot Eitan ha-Ezrahi, a maqama collection composed after the pattern of al-Harizi's Tahkemoni. The edition opens with an introduction, translated at the beginning of the English section. The rest of the English section is devoted to an analysis of that branch of the Hebrew maqama tradition that is rooted in the Maqamat of al-Hariri, starting from a review of the evidence for the presence of the Maqamat in the world of Hebrew letters, through the Tahkemoni, and concluding with the Mahbarot of Immanuel ha-Romi.

Byron Winterleaf, a 23-year old white guy, is on the verge of losing his job as a translator at a Xhosa-themed restaurant. And during heavy rains his back garden in Observatory, Cape Town, is flooded, killing the marijuana plants that he'd been hoping to harvest for profit. But the flood also brings something else to the surface – it’s a bone, that much is clear, but whose? Susan Ridge, head of Restoring Dignity to Forgotten Minorities (RDFM) is adamant that it is the bone of a Khoi victim of the 1713 smallpox epidemic. She convinces Byron that his house should be converted into a museum, to honour these forgotten people. But it soon becomes apparent that Ridge’s intentions are anything but honourable – she is simply playing on a collective sense of guilt, in order to make a personal profit. Byron finds himself caught up in the middle of a cultural scam. However, this time it’s not only his job at a restaurant that he stands to lose – his house, the only sure thing in his life, becomes a battleground, and if he’s unable to take control of the situation he stands to lose everything ...