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Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of the communities of eastern Europe. Their approach largely combined the ideas of traditional Ashkenazi culture with the heritage of medieval and early modern medicine. Holy rabbis and faith healers, as well as Jewish barbers, innkeepers, and pedlars, all dispensed cures, purveyed folk remedies for different ailments, and gave hope to the sick and their families based on kabbalah, numerology, prayer, and magical Hebrew formulas. Nevertheless, as new sources of knowledge penetrated the traditional world, modern medical ideas gained widespread support. Jews became court physicians to the nobility, and when the universities were opened up to them many also qualified as doctors. At every stage, medicine proved an important field for cross-cultural contacts. Jewish historians and scholars of folk medicine alike will discover here fascinating sources never previously explored — manuscripts, printed publications, and memoirs in Yiddish and Hebrew but also in Polish, English, German, Russian, and Ukrainian. The author's careful study of these documents has teased out therapeutic advice, recipes, magical incantations, kabbalistic methods, and practical techniques, together with the ethical considerations that such approaches entailed. The research fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in eastern Europe, shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture, and on how the need to treat sickness brought Jews and their neighbours together.

The Secular Rabbi is an intellectual biography of Philip Rahv, co-founder of Partisan Review. It focuses on the ambivalent ties that Rahv, a Russian immigrant, retained to his Jewish cultural background. Drawing on letters Rahv wrote to her mother from 1928 to 1931, Doris Kadish delves into Rahv’s complex and enigmatic character, his experience teaching Hebrew in Savannah, GA and Portland, OR; his attitudes toward class, race, and gender. Kadish positions herself in relation to Rahv in attempting to understand her own Jewish identity and perspective as a 21st century woman. The book draws on historical accounts, genealogical records, memoirs by Rahv’s friends and associates, interviews, and secondary scholarship devoted to the New York intellectuals, the history of Partisan Review, and Jewish studies. Key components of Rahv’s Jewishness—appearance, voice, name, attitudes toward Yiddish and Zionism—are explored, as is his deep-seated faith in Marxism. Textual analyses of Rahv’s works are interwoven with analyses of writers whose works appeared in Partisan Review: Delmore Schwartz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Rahv’s relations with writers who figured prominently in his life—most notably T.S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe—are explored. Events relating to anti-Stalinism, responses to the Holocaust, and alleged ties with the CIA, are discussed. Kadish sheds light on modernism, proletarian literature, and Jewish writing as well as movements that defined American political history in the 20th century: immigration, socialism, Communism, fascism, the cold war, feminism, and the New Left.

Orthodox Jewish women are increasingly seeking new ways to express themselves religiously, and important changes have occurred in consequence in their self-definition and the part they play in the religious life of their communities. Drawing on surveys and interviews across different Orthodox groups in London, as well as on the author's own experience of active participation over many years, this is a study that analyses its findings in the context of related developments in Israel and the USA. Sympathetic attention is given to women's creativity and sophistication as they struggle to develop new modes of expression that will let their voices be heard; at the same time, the inevitable points of conflict with the male-dominated religious establishment are examined and explained. There is a focus, too, on the impact of innovations in ritual: these include not only the creation of women-only spaces and women's participation in public practices traditionally reserved for men, but also new personal practices often acquired on study visits to Israel which are replacing traditions learned from family members. The book is a study of how new norms of lived religion have emerged in London, influenced by both the rise of feminism and the backlash against it, and also by women's new understanding of their religious roles.

Following tremendous advances in recent years in the study of religious belief, this volume adopts a fresh understanding of Jewish religious life in Poland. Approaches deriving from the anthropology, history, phenomenology, psychology, and sociology of religion have replaced the methodologies of social or political history that were applied in the past, offering fascinating new perspectives. The well-established interest in Hasidism continues, albeit from new angles, but topics that have barely been considered before are well represented here too. Women’s religious practice gains new prominence, and a focus on elites has given way to a consideration of the beliefs and practices of ordinary people. Reappraisals of religious responses to secularization and modernity, both liberal and Orthodox, offer more nuanced insights into this key issue. Other research areas represented here include the material history of Jewish religious life in eastern Europe and the shift of emphasis from theology to praxis in the search for the defining quality of religious experience. The contemporary reassessments in this volume, with their awareness of emerging techniques that have the potential to extract fresh insights from source materials both old and new, show how our understanding of what it means to be Jewish is continuing to expand.

Continuing the contribution to medieval Jewish intellectual history, this book's author focuses here on the radical pietist movement of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz and its main literary work, Sefer Ḥasidim, and on the writings and personality of the Provençal commentator Ravad of Posquières. In both areas the author challenges mainstream views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. Some of the essays are revised and updated versions of work previously published, and some are entirely new, but in all of them the author challenges reigning views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. The section on Sefer Ḥasidim brings together over half a century of the author's writings on German Pietism, many of which originally appeared in obscure publications, and adds two new essays. The first of these is a methodological study of how to read this challenging work and an exposition of what constitutes a valid historical inference, while the second reviews the validity of the sociological and anthropological inferences presented in contemporary historiography. In discussing Ravad's oeuvre, the author questions the widespread notion that Ravad's chief accomplishment was his commentary on Maimonides' Mishneh Torah; his Talmud commentary, he claims, was of far greater importance and was his true masterpiece. He also adds a new study that focuses on the acrimony between Ravad, as the low-born genius of Posquières, and R. Zeraḥyah ha-Levi of Lunel, who belonged to the Jewish aristocracy of Languedoc, and considers the implications of that relationship.

Maimonides ends each book of his legal code, the Mishneh torah, with a moral or philosophical reflection, in which he lifts his eyes, as it were, from purely halakhic concerns and surveys broader horizons. This book analyse these concluding paragraphs, examining their verbal and thematic echoes, their adaptation of rabbinic sources, and the way in which they coordinate with the Mishneh torah's underlying structures, in order to understand how they might influence our interpretation of the code as a whole — and indeed our view of Maimonides himself and his philosophy. Taking this unusual cross-section of the work, the book concludes that the Mishneh torah presents not only a system of law, but also a system of universal values. It shows how Maimonides fashions Jewish law and ritual as a programme for attaining ethical and intellectual ends that are accessible to all human beings, who are created equally in the image of God. Many reject the presentation of Maimonides as a universalist. The Mishneh torah especially is widely seen as a particularist sanctuary. This book shows how profoundly that view must be revised.

Through a detailed analysis of ghost tales in the Ashkenazi pietistic work Sefer ḥasidim, this book documents a major transformation in Jewish attitudes and practices regarding the dead and the afterlife that took place between the rabbinic period and medieval times. The book reveals that a huge influx of Germano-Christian beliefs, customs, and fears relating to the dead and the afterlife seeped into medieval Ashkenazi society among both elite and popular groups. In matters of sin, penance, and posthumous punishment, the infiltration of Christian notions was so strong as to effect a radical departure in Pietist thinking from rabbinic thought and to spur outright contradiction of talmudic principles regarding the realm of the hereafter. Although it is primarily a study of the culture of a medieval Jewish enclave, this book demonstrates how seminal beliefs of medieval Christendom and monastic ideals could take root in a society with contrary religious values — even in the realm of doctrinal belief.

Sephardi identity has meant different things at different times, but has always entailed a connection with Spain, from which the Jews were expelled in 1492. While Sephardi Jews have lived in numerous cities and towns throughout history, certain cities had a greater impact on the shaping of their culture. This book focuses on those that may be considered most important, from Cordoba in the tenth century to Toledo, Venice, Safed, Istanbul, Salonica, and Amsterdam at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Each served as a venue in which a particular dimension of Sephardi Jewry either took shape or was expressed in especially intense form. Significantly, these cities were mostly heterogeneous in their population and culture — half of them under Christian rule and half under Muslim rule — and this too shaped the Sephardi worldview and attitude. While Sephardim cultivated a distinctive identity, they felt at home in the cultures of their adopted lands. The book demonstrates that Sephardi history and culture have always been multifaceted. The book's interdisciplinary approach captures the many contexts in which the life of the Jews from Iberia unfolded, without either romanticizing the past or diluting its reality.

Truth informs much of the self-understanding of religious believers. Accordingly, understanding what we mean by 'truth' is a key challenge to interreligious collaboration. This book considers what is meant by truth in classical and contemporary Jewish thought, and it explores how making the notion of truth more nuanced can enable interfaith dialogue. The chapters take a range of approaches: some focus on philosophy proper, others on the intersection with the history of ideas, while others engage with the history of Jewish mysticism and thought. Together they open up the notion of truth in Jewish religious discourse and suggest ways in which upholding a notion of one's religion as true may be reconciled with an appreciation of other faiths. By combining philosophical and theological thinking with concrete case studies, and discussion of precedents and textual resources within Judaism, the volume proposes new interpretations of the concept of truth, going beyond traditional exclusivist uses of the term. A key aim is to help Jews seeking dialogue with other religions to do so while remaining true to their own faith tradition: in pursuit of this, the volume concludes with suggestions of how the ideas presented can be applied in practice.

The enigmatic kabbalist Samuel Falk, known as the Ba'al Shem of London, has piqued the curiosity of scholars for generations. Eighteenth-century London was fascinated by Jews, and as a miracle-worker and adventurer, well connected and well read, Falk had much to offer. Interest in the man was further aroused by rumours of his dealings with European aristocrats and other famous characters, as well as with scholars, Freemasons, and Shabbateans, but evidence was scanty. This book now brings together all the known source material on the man, and detailed annotations of his diary and that of his assistant provide rich insights into his activities over several years. We learn of his meetings and his travels; his finances; his disputes, his dreams, and his remedies; and lists of his books. We see London's social life and commerce, its landed gentry and its prisons, and what people ate, wore, and possessed. The burgeoning Jewish community of London and its religious practices, as well as its communal divisiveness, is depicted especially colourfully. The scholarly introductions and the informative appendices help contextualize the diaries and offer an intriguing glimpse of Jewish involvement in little-known aspects of London life at the threshold of the modern era.