This book investigates the importance of printing in early-modern Central Europe, revealing a complicated web of connections linking printers and scholars, Jews and Christians, from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, focuses on three provinces Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790 - 1840, when the shtetl was "the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews."

Examines the social and political history of the Jews of Miskolc-the third largest Jewish community in Hungary-and presents the wider transformation of Jewish identity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the emergence of a moderate, accommodating form of traditional Judaism that combined elements of tradition and innovation, thereby creating an alternative to Orthodox and Neolog Judaism. This form of traditional Judaism reconciled the demands of religious tradition with the expectations of Magyarization and citizenship, thus allowing traditional Jews to be patriotic Magyars. By focusing on Hungary, this book seeks to correct a trend in modern Jewish historiography that views Habsburg Jewish History as an extension of German Jewish History, most notably with regard to emancipation and enlightenment. Rather than trying to fit Hungarian Jewry into a conventional Germano-centric taxonomy, this work places Hungarian Jews in the distinct contexts of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Danube Basin, positing a more seamless nexus between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This nexus was rooted in a series of political experiments by Habsburg sovereigns and Hungarian noblemen that culminated in civic equality, and in the gradual expansion of traditional Judaism to meet the challenges of the age.

This volume is a compilation of articles written by renowned scholars and promising young researchers, in which the Jewish space is revealed as diverse forms of life and relations that developed in the rich context of urbanism, social life, leisure and economic activities, and coexistence with the non-Jewish world. Having undergone various transformations, the Jewish space has preserved its authenticity and individuality. In the book, the Jewish space is analysed in a wide chronological perspective from the viewpoint of literature, history, architecture and social relations. This volume will be of interest to anyone interested in various forms of entertainment (sports, leisure, cabaret parties), living, participation in social life, reading and writing of Jews in Eastern European towns and shtetls in the 19th and early 20th century.

Studies exploring the history of the German-Jewish male identity from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, across a myriad of societal occupations. Stereotyped as delicate and feeble intellectuals, Jewish men in German-speaking lands in fact developed a rich and complex spectrum of male norms, models, and behaviors. Jewish Masculinities explores conceptions and experiences of masculinity among Jews in Germany from the sixteenth through the late twentieth century as well as emigrants to North America, Palestine, and Israel. The volume examines the different worlds of students, businessmen, mohels, ritual slaughterers, rabbis, performers, and others, shedding new light on the challenge for Jewish men of balancing German citizenship and cultural affiliation with Jewish communal solidarity, religious practice, and identity. “A valuable addition to the growing field of Jewish gender history.” —Derek Penslar, University of Toronto “[This book] assembles innovative, vivid, and inspiring inquiries into the intersection of Jewish history, German history, and gender history. By focusing on the male side of Jewish gender history . . . [this] book establishes a new field, profiting from a broad range of never (or rarely) before used primary sources, such as memoirs, letters, interviews, and obscure tabloids.” —German Studies Review, May 2014 “[A]n excellent introduction to the Zionist remasculinization of the Jewish male.” —H-Judaic, February 2015 “[I]nsightful, innovative and largely entertaining. . . . [T]his volume makes a very valuable and original contribution to German-Jewish history.” —German History “Historians of central Europe will be enriched by the interrogations of “theory” along with excavations of little-known yet critical avenues of Jewish history in this excellent volume.” —Central European History

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism.

Europe is expanding - and therewith remembers its historical basis, which was hidden beneath the shadow of the Cold War for a long time. This return of a common history which is mostly narrated as a history of success today, however contains the perception of transnational traditions at the same time which by contrast should give reason for a critical self-reflection. This volume gives an impulse through a comparative examination of the still highly actual forms of antisemitism in Europe. The focus will be on the developments in the countries from the Baltic States to South Eastern Europe, which usually are little known in Western Europe. At the same time, the specifities of antisemitism in Eastern Europe are incorporated in the theoretical insights of antisemitism research, thus filling a gap that has existed until now.

The heroes of Beyond the Glory are not the famous rabbis, the heads of the yeshivas, or Hasidic righteous, but rather the "second circle" rabbis - the community rabbis in 19th century Eastern Europe, the backbone of the rabbinical world of the time,those who knew the world of their community members closely and were required to answer a wide range of questions, both daily and existential. Who were these rabbis? What were their training processes? How did they win their positions? Did they win "tenure," or was the threat of dismissal constantly hovering above their heads? How were their working conditions and their financial situation? Were they considered as spiritual shepherds and social leaders of the community? What was their relationship with the local rabbinic scholars and the economic elite? How did they navigate between their duties as halachic rulers and their desire to engage in studying and teaching? This book attempts to answer these questions, and many others, based on examining the world of over a thousand community rabbis.