Cecil Roth, Historian of Italian Jewry: A Reassessment

I have a confession to make. I have long been a fan of Cecil Roth (1899-1970) and his histories of Italian Jewry. My copy of Roth\u27s The Jews in the Renaissance, published in 1959, was one of the first books in Jewish history I acquired as a youth, years before I became interested in the profession of history. This relatively worn copy still adorns my shelf and dates quite accurately my fascination with this engaging popularizer of the Jewish historical experience from my high school years

Review of Adam Sutcliffe, \u3cem\u3eJudaism and Enlightenment\u3c/em\u3e

Adam Sutcliffe\u27s book represents an important new synthesis, offering novel and insightful readings of both familiar and less-known thinkers. Since no one before him has attempted to examine so broadly European intellectual life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from the perspective of attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, Sutcliffe\u27s monograph represents a major contribution to Jewish and Enlightenment studies alike. What is especially remarkable is the range of erudition and mastery of sources on the part of a youthful author of a first book. Based on his doctoral dissertation written at University College London, the work shows immense learning, elegant prose, and a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the Enlightenment project as well as the place of Judaism in the consciousness of its primary and less primary exponents

Jewish Medicine and Science

It is difficult to speak about Jewish involvement in the medicine and science during the Renaissance and beyond without reference to Jewish traditions of medical and scientific activity in the ancient and medieval periods. Perceiving themselves as proud heirs of such medieval luminaries as the physician Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the astrologer Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164), and the astronomer Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides; 1288-1344), as well as the biblical Abraham, Solomon, and the ancient rabbis, Jewish thinkers living in early modern Europe continued to believe that the study of nature was a supreme religious ideal and that the roots of magic and medicine, astrology and astronomy, were ultimately located in ancient Jewish sources

Three Reviewers and the Academic Style of the \u3cem\u3eJewish Quarterly Review\u3c/em\u3e at Midcentury

A hundred years is a remarkable lifetime for any journal, especially a scholarly one in English focusing exclusively on Jewish civilization. During this impressive time span a dramatic and radical shift in the character and place of academic Jewish studies in the United States and throughout the world took place. JQR is surely a primary historical source for charting the history of higher Jewish learning in North America and its ultimate entrance and integration into the university

Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews: The Many Faces of Alexander McCaul (1799-1863)

We live in a time of prolific scholarly output on the history of Jews and Judaism where most inhibitions about what are appropriate subjects for study and what are not have disappeared. This is especially apparent with regard to the study of converts who opted to leave the Jewish faith and community both in the pre-modern and modern eras. Labelled disparagingly in the Jewish tradition as meshumadim (apostates), many earlier Jewish scholars treated them in a negative light or generally ignored them as not properly belonging any longer to the community and its historical legacy. When they were mentioned in historical accounts, they were often seen as self-hating Jews who had become adversaries of their former co-religionists or simply as dishonorable individuals who were notorious in attempting to escape the burden of their Jewish particularity. This situation has radically changed in recent years with an outpouring of new studies on converts in a variety of times and places, culminating perhaps in the most recent synthesis of Todd Endelman, one of the pioneers in the study of converts in the modern era.

Review of John M. Efron, \u3cem\u3eMedicine and the German Jews: A History\u3c/em\u3e

John Efron\u27s new book pursues two scholarly trajectories simultaneously. On the one hand, it offers a history of Jewish physicians and medical practice in Germany from the Middle Ages until the Holocaust period. On the other hand, it examines the uses of medicine and medical discourse to bolster or undermine political, racial, and national agendas, both Jewish and antisemitic, in the modern era. Although Efron seeks to link these two subjects as one, they do not mesh as organically as he intends. Moreover, while the second trajectory is generally well-conceived and well-argued, making a genuine contribution to modern Jewish cultural history, the first is more sketchy and uneven, and is clearly less accomplished

Review of Robert Bonfil, \u3cem\u3eThe Rabbinate in Renaissance Italy\u3c/em\u3e

At least since the publication of Shlomo Simonsohn\u27s comprehensive study of Mantuan Jewry, Italian Jewish history has emerged as a significant scholarly field for a growing number of researchers in Israel and abroad. Their numerous publications have considerably supplemented and refined the earlier attempts by Cecil Roth, Moses Avigdor Shulvass, Israel Zinberg and Attlilio Milano to chart the course of Italian Jewish history in the Renaissance period and before. They have also revealed all too glaringly the inadequacies of the edifice the earlier researchers had constructed. When Shulvass and Roth, in particular, wrote their popular surveys of Jewish life in the Renaissance, neither had sufficiently utilized the voluminous archival and manuscript resources now more readily available some twenty years later; nor did either of their works deeply penetrate the larger Christian cultural and social context of Jewish life on Italian soil

Was There an English Parallel to the German \u3cem\u3eHaskalah\u3c/em\u3e?

Judging from recent work by Jewish historians of both Germany and England, the unequivocal response to the heuristic question posed in the title of my essay should be emphatically negative. If indeed the Haskalah was a socio-cultural movement powerful enough to effect a major shift in consciousness 1 or a new ideology to shape a new community … a public social world informed with a new ideal of man ,2 it could only have emerged within the particular political and cultural ambience of Germany. Despite Cecil Roth\u27s relatively feeble attempt more than three decades ago to describe what he ambiguously called an English Haskalah ,3 such a notion has been generally dismissed. Michael Graetz, for example, echoes the strongly held views of Todd Endelman when he claims that a true Haskalah must be more than a fleeting flare-up of ideas supported by a few isolated individuals .

The Academic Study of Judaism: A Challenge to the Reform Rabbi

Any discussion of the Reform rabbinate and the academic study of Judaism presupposes some distinct notion of the primary function of a rabbi, as well as a clear definition of what Torah means in the context of our contemporary community and the new settings in which Jewish learning are presently located. Admittedly, both definitions that I offer are subjective and incomplete and arise from my own unique situation of being both an academic scholar and a Reform rabbi, as well as the son of a Reform rabbi

Looking Backward and Forward: Rethinking Modernity in the Light of Early Modernity

Given its composite nature, The Cambridge History of Early Modern Judaism cannot easily stake out a single authoritative position on what early modern Jewish culture and society means in its totality. Taking as a whole the variegated perspectives presented elsewhere in this volume, and despite the strong hands of the editors in organizing a coherent exposition of the period, it is virtually impossible to expect one unified viewpoint to emerge. Without some notion of what the whole representes, however, one is hard pressed to suggest in what ways this epoch is continuous or discontinuous with the period that follows it — that is, the modern period itself