Follows the Redlichs as they return to Germany in 1947 after 10 years in exile from National Socialism on a Kenyan farm. Walter is so desperate to practice law again that he uproots his complaining wife, Jettel, his clever, nurturing daughter, Regina, and baby Max to Frankfurt, where gentiles either make snide anti-Semitic comments or claim that they saved Jews and used to have many Jewish friends. Zweig has a deft hand with telling anecdotes.

When the Nazis came to power and created a racial state in the 1930s, an urgent priority was to identify Jews who had converted to Christianity over the preceding centuries. With the help of church officials, a vast system of conversion and intermarriage records was created in Berlin, the country’s premier Jewish city. Deborah Hertz’s discovery of these records, the Judenkartei, was the first step on a long research journey that has led to this compelling book. Hertz begins the book in 1645, when the records begin, and traces generations of German Jewish families for the next two centuries. The book analyzes the statistics and explores letters, diaries, and other materials to understand in a far more nuanced way than ever before why Jews did or did not convert to Protestantism. Focusing on the stories of individual Jews in Berlin, particularly the charismatic salon woman Rahel Levin Varnhagen and her husband, Karl, a writer and diplomat, Hertz humanizes the stories, sets them in the context of Berlin’s evolving society, and connects them to the broad sweep of European history.

This seventh volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism provides an authoritative and detailed overview of early modern Jewish history, from 1500 to 1815. The essays, written by an international team of scholars, situate the Jewish experience in relation to the multiple political, intellectual and cultural currents of the period. They also explore and problematize the 'modernization' of world Jewry over this period from a global perspective, covering Jews in the Islamic world and in the Americas, as well as in Europe, with many chapters straddling the conventional lines of division between Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Mizrahi history. The most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative work in this field currently available, this volume will serve as an essential reference tool and ideal point of entry for advanced students and scholars of early modern Jewish history.

Printing the Talmud: Complete Editions, Tractates and Other Works, and the Associated Presses from the Mid-17th Century through the 18th Century is a profusely illustrated major work describing the complete editions of the Talmud printed from about 1650 to slightly after 1800. Apart from the intrinsic value of those editions, their publication was often contentious due to disputes, often bitter, between rival publishers, embroiling rabbis and communities throughout Europe. The cities and editions encompassed include Amsterdam, Frankfort am Main, Frankfurt on the Oder, Prague, and Sulzbach. This edition of Printing the Talmud addresses these editions as an opening to discuss the history of the subject presses, their other titles and their general context in Jewish history.

Intertwining history and art over five centuries, this detailed overview of Jewish culture and events focuses on how printed writings and artworks have reflected the perceptions of Jews by themselves and others. Filled with nearly 400 illustrations of woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, serigraphs and other visual works, it details the representation of Jews and Jewish life chronologically while giving individual attention to the regions and countries in which Jews have lived in significant numbers. From editions of the Haggadah to portraits to anti-Semitic cartoons, diaries to newspapers to novels, it analyzes a vast array of works that both molded and revealed Jewish popular opinion.

The Lion and the Star not only offers an informed glimpse into the intricacies of daily German life but also confirms the continuing danger of making sweeping generalizations about German Jews and non-Jews. In the aftermath of World War II, many viewed the Third Reich as an aberration in German history and laid blame with Hitler and his followers. Since the 1960s, historians have widened their focus, implicating “ordinary” Germans in the demise of German Jewry. Jonathan Friedman addresses this issue by investigation everyday relations between German Jews and their Gentile neighbors. Friedman examines three German communities of different sizes—Frankfurt am Main, Giessen, and Geisenheim. Symbolized by the Hessian heraldic lion, these communities represent a cross-section of both Gentile and Jewish society in Germany during the Weimar and Nazi years. Researching in the United States, Germany, England, and Israel, he gleaned information from interviews, memoirs, diaries, letters, newspapers, church and synagogue records, censuses, government documents, and reports from Nazi and resistance organizations. Friedman’s comparative analysis offers a balanced response to recent scholarly works condemning the entire German people for their complicity in the Holocaust.

The first study on the subject, this is a bibliographical work on individual tractates published in the first half of the eighteenth-century, and the circumstances of their publication. Included are numerous reproductions of title and representative pages.