An absorbing look at the daily lives of rural Jews in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany. Includes over 75 black and white illustrations, a guide for researchers, maps, and a bibliography.

This book documents a little-known aspect of the Jewish experience in America. It is a fascinating account of how a group of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany came to dominate cattle dealing in south central New York and maintain a Jewish identity even while residing in small towns and villages that are overwhelmingly Christian. The book pays particular attention to the unique role played by women in managing the transition to the United States, in helping their husbands accumulate capital, and in recreating a German Jewish community. Yet Levine goes further than her analysis of German Jewish refugees. She also argues that it is possible to explain the situations of other immigrant and ethnic groups using the structure/network/identity framework that arises from this research. According to Levine, situating the lives of immigrants and refugees within the larger context of economic and social change, but without losing sight of the significance of social networks and everyday life, shows how social structure, class, ethnicity, and gender interact to account for immigrant adaptation and mobility.

Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.

A revealing account of Polish cooperation with Nazis in WWII—a “grim, compelling [and] significant scholarly study” (Kirkus Reviews). Between 1942 and 1943, thousands of Jews escaped the fate of German death camps in Poland. As they sought refuge in the Polish countryside, the Nazi death machine organized what they called Judenjagd, meaning hunt for the Jews. As a result of the Judenjagd, few of those who escaped the death camps would survive to see liberation. As Jan Grabowski’s penetrating microhistory reveals, the majority of the Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal by their Polish neighbors. Hunt for the Jews tells the story of the Judenjagd in Dabrowa, Tarnowska, a rural county in southeastern Poland. Drawing on materials from Polish, Jewish, and German sources created during and after the war, Grabowski documents the involvement of the local Polish population in the process of detecting and killing the Jews who sought their aid. Through detailed reconstruction of events, “Grabowski offers incredible insight into how Poles in rural Poland reacted to and, not infrequently, were complicit with, the German practice of genocide. Grabowski also, implicitly, challenges us to confront our own myths and to rethink how we narrate British (and American) history of responding to the Holocaust” (European History Quarterly).

A study of Jewish life in Germany from 1618 until 1945, this work investigates the details of daily living, the homes and neighbourhoods in which Jews lived, their families and friendships, religious practices and feelings, as well as their educations and occupations.

This history of post-Emancipation German Jewry and of the Holocaust aftermath has received considerable scholarly attention. The study of Jewish life in Germany in the 1930s and the migration impelled by the Nazi period has, on the other hand, been comparatively neglected. The work of Werner J. Cahnman (1902-1980) goes a long way toward filling this gap.Cahnman's examination of "the Jewish people that dwells among the nations" is focused on Germany because it was the country "where in modern times the symbiosis . . . has been most intimate and it also has been the country where the conflict degenerated into the monstrosity of the Holocaust." This representative anthology of his essays shares a common theme, although the examples differ in thought, method and style. Whether he explores the stratification of pre-Emancipation German Jewry, the rise of the Jewish national movement in Austria, or such an esoteric topic as the influence of the kabbalistic tradition on German idealist philosophy; whether he muses on the writing of Jewish history or reports on his firsthand experience in Dachau, Cahnman's work reflects central concerns of his personal and scholarly existence as a German Jew. Because he usually combined extensive empirical data with his own background and personal experience, he is able to craft a penetrating analysis of the recent history of Jewish life in Central Europe. Werner Cahnman believed that the "writing of history is vital for the continued cultural identity of the human kind."