Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire unveils the hidden world of the Ma’aminim—followers of the 17th-century Jewish messianic figure, Sabbatai Tzvi. After Tzvi’s dramatic conversion to Islam in 1666, many of his followers returned to mainstream Judaism. However, a dedicated group followed in his footsteps, converted to Islam, and established a new path, blending Sabbatian, Jewish, and Islamic elements within a distinct Ottoman-Sephardi cultural framework. For centuries, the Ma’aminim maintained secrecy, forming distinct communities (known as the Dönme) and playing a multifaceted role in Jewish and Ottoman histories. This book sheds new light on their social life and esoteric traditions through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of previously mostly unexamined mystical manuscripts in Ladino, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish. It explores their sacred songs, radical theology, rituals, folklore, and musical practices as reflections of communal reality and developments. By placing the Ma’aminim within a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective, Sabbatian Songs of Faith offers fresh insights into religious transformation, intercommunal exchanges, and the interplay between faith, ritual, and popular culture in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

Polin , established in 1986 by the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, has acquired a well-deserved reputation for publishing authoritative material on all aspects of Polish Jewry. Contributions are drawn from many disciplines—history, politics, religious studies, literature, linguistics, sociology, art, and architecture—and from a wide variety of viewpoints. Polin is published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. It is sponsored by the Institute of Polish–Jewish Studies, which is an associated institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London, and by the American Association for Polish–Jewish Studies, which is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University.

Rav Kook’s theological positions have moulded the attitudes and beliefs of generations of religious Zionists. Newly published writings reveal his innovative approaches to such key topics as non-Jewish religions, morality, heresy, and animal sacrifice. Lucidly presented here, these ideas will foment much discussion and shape new ideological directions among Rav Kook’s followers. Rav Kook (1865–1935), the first chief rabbi of pre-state Israel, was a revered thinker whose ideas were in the vanguard of religious Zionist ideology. His theological positions have continued to mould the attitudes and beliefs of successive generations. Newly published writings, however, reveal ideas that have not yet entered mainstream consciousness. Marc Shapiro has grappled with the complexity of the language of these difficult Hebrew texts and identified themes he sees as of critical importance for modern Jewish Orthodoxy. His study will be welcomed as an attempt to make these teachings more broadly accessible despite the complexity of Kook’s exposition. A key development in Kook’s thinking is that he points to the religious significance of non-Jewish religions, and even raises the possibility that non-Jews may also have experienced their own religious revelations. This is a major departure from the traditional rabbinic approach. Another innovative concept is "valorization of the masses," a view that recognizes that basic morality has been preserved in a purer form among the uneducated pious masses than among learned scholars. He similarly reconsiders the nature of heresy and dogma and develops the idea of the "unintentional heretic," a category that could be said to include many in the modern world who are no longer tied to traditional religious understandings. Perhaps most controversially for Orthodox Jewish circles, he also presents an innovative understanding of the animal sacrifice of Temple ritual that allows for its abolition in messianic times. Taken together, these ideas will reverberate, foment much discussion, and shape new ideological directions in the world of religious Zionism.

The Other War articulates the anatomy of World War II. For that purpose, it takes an unusual perspective: instead of following the conventional horizontal historical axis, from Nazi Germany eastwards and westwards, it directs the view from the global south to the north. Both axes, the continental and the colonial, were, of course, not disconnected; to expose their intersections, this book lays the focus on Jewish Palestine. The focus on Palestine, as part of a broad British defense parameter protecting the Indian subcontinent, reveals the entanglement of two conflicts: the European war, that escalated into a world war, and the Jewish-Arab-British war over Palestine. In their discreet competition, each of these conflicts remained, for its rival, a foreign war.

This is a groundbreaking book in the field of inner biblical allusion. Using methodologies from the field of literary studies the book examines the Song Ha'azinu (Deut 32) and the Book of Isaiah and uncovers the fascinating connections between the two. The recognition of this relationship sheds new light on the subject of inner biblical allusion, the Song Ha'azinu and the Book of Isaiah.

This book examines the overt and covert engagement with the immigrant experience in American cinema in the decade preceding World War II. It presents the story of a gallery of creators, mostly Jewish, who had emigrated to the United States, some by force and others by choice. An examination of the films they created reveals their attitudes towards their countries of origin, the nation that gave them a new home, and the Jewish identity they were forced to rediscover. This Jewish identity was at times a burden, sometimes a painful reminder of their past, and at other times a source of great inspiration and hope.

With the social and cultural upheavals of early modern Europe, rabbis were constantly struggling to preserve Jewish tradition. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi (1658—1718), the independent-minded chief rabbi of Amsterdam, came to be regarded as one of the leading halakhic authorities of this tumultuous era. The battles he waged changed Jewish practice in his lifetime and came to define rabbinic norms in the decades that followed, with relevance to the present day. The challenges for a leading rabbi in a time of ferment were many. With advances in communication and the early stirrings of political emancipation in Jewish and secular society, how could one establish halakhic authority? How were rabbis to navigate the new reality in which mystical texts—once the exclusive province of the elite—became accessible to the masses? As geographical boundaries shifted and cultural barriers crumbled, how could one build a bridge between the worlds of Ashkenaz and Sepharad? How were the keepers of tradition meant to respond to the religious laxity that accompanied acculturation? And how could the religious establishment engage sectarians in general, and crypto-Sabbatians in particular? Hakham Tsevi didn’t always win the battles he fought, but his arguments have endured. Products of his fierce independence, some of his responsa have attained near-canonical status., Today’s halakhic discussions of such contemporary issues as brain death and artificial intelligence often begin with the words he committed to posterity. Hundreds of years after his death, Hakham Tsevi and his work remain at the frontier of halakhic discourse.

The book relates the story of the Jewish movement in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s as perceived by its participants. On the basis of interviews with almost 300 activists from over 60 cities, it portrays the movement's evolution in all its facets. It examines the activist's personality and background and the path he or she took prior to becoming active, including the presentation of documents to the authorities, that branded him or her as a social pariah and potential traitor. The book discusses the emergence of a refusenik community that enabled their struggle with the all-powerful regime to leave the country while maintaining a "normal" existence for an unpredictable duration. Two chapters view the variety of instruments to which the activists had recourse as they developed the tactics and strategy of that struggle, while three final chapters review specific topics that were an inseparable part of the movement's story. They cover the confrontation with the KGB – the persistent shadowing, interrogations, arrests, trials and camps; the return to Judaism in the search for roots and identity; and the movement's links with the Jewish and non-Jewish world outside.

This volume of Hispania Judaica Bulletin presents the first collection of studies dedicated to the impact of the Iberian converso crisis on the interpretation of Paul’s life and teachings. We believe this to have been a significant historical phenomenon—one which we may call Converso Paulinisms. By way of introduction, we briefly present the main developments from which this concept derives its rationale and the productive end we hope it can serve. We begin with the lessons we learned from recent developments in Pauline studies and thereadings of Paul by Church authorities, theologians, and contemporary thinkers. Then, we move on to consider their implications in Late Medieval and Early Modern setting of the converso phenomenon.

Rabbi Eleazar be-Rabbi Qilar was the most prominent and prolific poet during the heyday of Hebrew liturgical poetry in Eretz Israel: between the sixth and eight centuries ACE. Some of the thousands of poems he wrote was preserved in the Ashkenaz, France and Italy machzorim, while a small part is recited in synagogues even today. This book compiles all his poems that survived for all prayers, with an attempt reproduce the full compositions.

Can literature be given a concrete home? The story of the establishment of the Gnazim Archive of Modern Hebrew Literature recounts the attempt to institutionalize this body of literature in the context of the founding of the State of Israel—while simultaneously challenging its demands. This book reveals the persistent tension between the “Republic of Letters” and the nation-state, as well as the painful cost of realizing the ideal and embodiment of the metaphor of “a home for literature” within the “national home.” The Stitches of Hebrewness traces the history of the Gnazim Archive both in its own right and as a mirror of the formation of the canon of modern Hebrew literature. Like any mirror, the archive reflects reality as it is—and in reverse: The canon is thus revealed in a new light, with its erasures, rewritings, and repressions. Perhaps more than anything, the book unfolds the story of a culture and society grappling with a moment of crisis between three overlapping yet conflicting temporal frameworks: Jewish time, Hebrew time, and Israeli time.

The Devil's Renaissance describes the early modern period in Europe as a time of terrible bloodshed and persecution of minorities such as the Moriscos, the Gypsies, heretics, the Cagots and the imaginary sect of satanic witches. It was the age of fear of conspiracies and of the devil undermining the Christian commonwealth.