Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. This volume is a record of the proceedings of an international conference, organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies at Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), and Mantua’s State Archives. It consists of contributions on Moscato and the intellectual world in Mantua during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. This volume is a record of the proceedings of an international conference organized in Mantua and consists of contributions on Moscato and his intellectual world.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

Demonstrates the impact of print culture on the spread of Jewish mysticism, focusing on Kabbalistic study guides by R. Yissakhar Baer of seventeenth-century Prague. How did Jewish mysticism go from arcane knowledge to popular spirituality? Kabbalah in Print examines the cultural impact of printing on the popularization, circulation, and transmission of Kabbalah in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Zohar, in particular, generated a large secondary literature of study guides and reference works that aimed to ease the linguistic and conceptual challenges of the text. The arrival of printed classics of Kabbalah was soon followed by the appearance of new literary genres—anthologies, digests, lexicons, and other learning aids—that mediated mystical primary sources to a community of readers not versed in this lore. A detailed investigation of the four works by R. Yissakhar Baer (ca.1580–ca.1629) of Prague sheds light on the literary strategies, pedagogic concerns, and religious motivations of secondary elites, a new cadre of authors empowered by the opportunities that printing opened up. Andrea Gondos highlights shifting intellectual and cultural boundaries in the early modern period, when the transmission of Kabbalah became a meeting point connecting various strata of Jewish society as well as Jewish and Christian intellectuals. Andrea Gondos is Emmy Noether Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Jewish Studies at Free University Berlin, Germany. She is the coeditor (with Daniel Maoz) of From Antiquity to the Postmodern World: Contemporary Jewish Studies in Canada.

"Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world, and it has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied over the course of more than three millennia. A History of Judaism provides the first truly comprehensive look in one volume at how this great religion came to be, how it has evolved from one age to the next, and how its various strains, sects, and traditions have related to each other. In this magisterial and elegantly written book, Martin Goodman takes readers from Judaism's origins in the polytheistic world of the second and first millennia BCE to the temple cult at the time of Jesus. He tells the stories of the rabbis, mystics, and messiahs of the medieval and early modern periods and guides us through the many varieties of Judaism today. Goodman's compelling narrative spans the globe, from the Middle East, Europe, and America to North Africa, China, and India. He explains the institutions and ideas on which all forms of Judaism are based, and masterfully weaves together the different threads of doctrinal and philosophical debate that run throughout its history."--

Printed editions of midrashim, rabbinic expositions of the Bible, flooded the market for Hebrew books in the sixteenth century. First published by Iberian immigrants to the Ottoman Empire, they were later reprinted in large numbers at the famous Hebrew presses of Venice. This study seeks to shed light on who read these new books and how they did so by turning to the many commentaries on midrash written during the sixteenth century. These innovative works reveal how their authors studied rabbinic Bible interpretation and how they anticipated their readers would do so. Benjamin WIlliams focuses particularly on the work of Abraham ben Asher of Safed, the Or ha-Sekhel (Venice, 1567), an elucidation of midrash Genesis Rabba which contains both the author's own interpretations and also the commentary he mistakenly attributed to the most celebrated medieval commentator Rashi. Williams examines what is known of Abraham ben Asher's life, his place among the Jewish scholars of Safed, and the publication of his book in Venice. By analysing selected passages of his commentary, this study assesses how he shed light on rabbinic interpretation of Genesis and guided readers to correct interpretations of the words of the sages. A consideration of why Abraham ben Asher published a commentary attributed to Rashi shows that he sought to lend authority to his programme of studying midrash by including interpretations ascribed to the most famous commentator alongside his own. By analysing the production and reception of the Or ha-Sekhel, therefore, this work illuminates the popularity of midrash in the early modern period and the origins of a practice which is now well-established-the study of rabbinic Bible interpretation with the guidance of commentaries.

As scepticism has rarely been studied in the context of the Arabic culture and its Judeo-Arabic sub-culture, it is small wonder that sceptical motifs of Judah Halevi’s classic theological The Kuzari (written ca. 1140) received very little scholarly attention so far. Thus, the present study seeks to shed light on Halevi’s wrestling with the dogmatic-rationalistic trends of his period from an angle of this much less studied perspective. As a by-product, this study is a contribution to the mainly uncultivated field of traces of scepticism in the Arabic culture.