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

The Cultural Significance of the Ghetto in Jewish History

Surely one way of understanding the title of our distinguished conference, From Ghetto to Emancipation, is the conventional way.2 One might assume that the direction of our deliberations should lead from an inherently bad condition, designated by the term ghetto, to a good one, leading to a desirable state of freedom. This trajectory follows that of most standard accounts of the Jewish experience: Jews who had lived a ghettotized existence were finally emancipated in the modern era, and despite the negative consequences of their liberation and integration within Western secular cultures—virulent anti-Semitism and genocide—their emancipated state was surely a boon in comparison with the hermetically sealed and alienated existence of their preliberated state. And indeed, for most modern Jews, the term ghetto is laden with similar negative connotations. Such expressions as the age of the ghetto, ghetto mentality, ghetto Jew, out of the ghetto, all imply a highly negative existence, a throwback to an era when Jews were legally and socially restricted and when their culture revealed narrow and pedestrian features, clearly the result of their sequestration. The term ghetto has now assumed an even more general designation for neighborhoods densely inhabited by members of minority groups, such as African-Americans or Native Americans, who are forced to live in miserable and deprived conditions because of socioeconomic restraints as well as legal ones.

Review of Paul Lawrence Rose, \u3cem\u3eBodin and the Great God of Nature: The Moral and Religious Universe of a Judaiser\u3c/em\u3e

Judaism\u27s influence on Jean Bodin has long been appreciated by students of the French thinker\u27s extraordinary career and multifaceted writing but never full understood. Paul Lawrence Rose examines the matter again, elevating it as a critical linchpin in comprehending Bodin\u27s intellectual universe. For Rose, Bodin\u27s categories [of thought] and religious vision stemmed …from the Jewish tradition represented by the works of Philo and Maimonides. To demonstrate his thesis, Rose chooses to deemphasize the study of Bodin\u27s thought in relation to that of his contemporaries and proposes instead a methodology based on (1) the completeness or integrality of Bodin\u27s thought and writings and (2) the integration of Bodin\u27s ideas and personality. By the first method, Rose hopes to decode Bodin\u27s remarkable treatise on comparative religion, The Heptaplomeres, by using Bodin\u27s other writings \u27as a control upon the ambiguities of the the Heptaplomeres, establishing the extent of agreement among the various speakers of the treatise, and subsequently Bodin\u27s own views on the subject. By the second method, Rose attempts to reconstruct the details of Bodin\u27s supposed three-staged conversion to a prophetic religion in order to illuminate more clearly the interplay of religion, politics, and personality characterizing both Bodin\u27s thought and behavior

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