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Els Salomon-Prins Bendheim Jerusalem, 2010

An Extraordinary Library

Remembering Mrs. Els Salomon-Prins Bendheim

byTheodor Dunkelgrün

A List of Communities in Ashkenaz Obliterated by Violence During the Black Death

Jewish martyrology from medieval Germany

byAbraham David

A Slaughter of Jews in Ukraine

byJohn-Paul Himka

A List of Communities in Ashkenaz Obliterated by Violence During the Black Death

Jewish martyrology from medieval Germany

byAbraham David

Regaining Jerusalem

byNatalie Zemon Davis

A Slaughter of Jews in Ukraine

byJohn-Paul Himka

Regaining Jerusalem

byNatalie Zemon Davis

The Tab

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Losing and Being lost

A pioneering psychoanalyst herself, Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, died in 1982 in her London home, also her father’s former home. Since his death in 1939, Anna had recurring dreams of what her biographer Elizabeth Young-Bruehl described as "loss and being lost," which she saw as being connected to acting against her father’s wishes. As the historian Josh Levy explains, these dreams and feelings explain why even after ownership of his papers passed to the Library of Congress, she insisted they reside with her until she died. And it is why "she remained in that London home for the rest of her life, her father’s study fastidiously dusted but its treasures unmoved, as if trapped in amber.”

LOC

Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Yiddish Folk Song in Classical Music

Since before the 18th century, Jewish folk melodies have had a rich, unexpected influence on musical composition

byAlex Weiser

On Nov. 30, 1900, an overflow crowd of enthusiastic listeners—Jews and non-Jews alike—filled an auditorium in Moscow to hear a lecture on Yiddish folk music, followed by a concert. The lecture was given by the lawyer, amateur historian, and folklorist Peysekh Marek. The new concert arrangements of Yiddish folk songs and Hasidic nigunim that followed were created and introduced by the composer, music critic, and musicologist Joel Engel. Over the coming years, Engel would release numerous published volumes of folk-song arrangements, which in turn inspired a St. Petersburg-based group of composers including Lazare Saminsky, Aleksandr Krein, Mikhail Gnesin, Joseph Achron, and Solomon Rosowsky to follow a similar path under the auspices of their newly founded Society for Jewish Folk Music....

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Zelig and Rivele Kalmanovitch with their infant son, Sholem, in Soviet Minsk, 1920

Under the Hammer of History

Such is the task of the heavy hammer—it shatters glass and forges steel

byZelig Kalmanovitch

Zionism: The Tablet Guide

The definitive guide to the past, present, and future of modern Judaism’s most fantastical and magnetic idea—and the West’s most explosive political label

byTablet Magazine

Under the Hammer of History

Such is the task of the heavy hammer—it shatters glass and forges steel

byZelig Kalmanovitch

Zionism: The Tablet Guide

The definitive guide to the past, present, and future of modern Judaism’s most fantastical and magnetic idea—and the West’s most explosive political label

byTablet Magazine

Gelt

Yiddish is often touted for its symbiotic relationship with the Left; as the language of the socialists and anarchists. Less celebrated is Yiddish as it sang the praises of the free market and capitalism. But, indeed, it did. As Alyssa Quint explains, some of the oldest documented Yiddish folksongs touch on prosaic topics such as loans, stocks, and markets, alongside the more typical themes of love, life, and death. “The songs express appreciation for financial opportunity as they caution their listeners against secular immorality.”

Jewish Demons

On salamanders, wondrous creatures, and the early modern blending of the scientific and the magical

byMaoz Kahana

Ilan of the Enrobings, fol. 204b, Jacob Ẓemaḥ, in Hayyim Vital, ‘Ozrot Hayyim,’ 17th-century Italian script

Kabbalah Trees

The story of a former converso’s invention of the Lurianic ‘ilan’

byJ.H. Chajes

Newsletter

Those who do not remember the past are ... probably not Jewish

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The Floating Space City of the Jews

In a tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, Jews unhappy with the Temple of Jerusalem imagined a mythological paradise rooted in Zoroastrian mythology instead

byDan Shapira

A depiction of a menorah, surrounded by foliate scrolls inhabited by hybrids, at the end of the Pentateuch. Italy, last quarter of the 13th century.

Safed Kabbalah and Renaissance Italy

How Lurianic mysticism made its way to Europe—and back to the Middle East

byMoshe Idel

The 12 Covenants of Pinchas Hurwitz

byDavid B. Ruderman

Rav Karo and the Holy City of Safed in the Context of Ottoman Law and Sufi Practice

byRoni Weinstein

The Satmar Are Anti-Zionist. Should We Care?

Few Jews today agree with the late Satmar rebbe’s attacks on Zionism. All the more reason to read them.

byShaul Magid

The 12 Covenants of Pinchas Hurwitz

byDavid B. Ruderman

Rav Karo and the Holy City of Safed in the Context of Ottoman Law and Sufi Practice

byRoni Weinstein

The Treblinka Gold Rush

After World War II, Polish peasants hunted for jewels and gold amid the human remains at former Nazi death camps

byJan T. Gross

Her Name Was Luka

A stunning piece of scholarly detective work, aided by a new database, restores the identity of a Dutch Jewish hero of the Sobibor revolt

byAline Pennewaard

The Russo-Ukrainian War Through a Historian’s Eyes

With a new Cold War emerging, can Israel continue to sit on the fence?

byYehuda Bauer

Her Name Was Luka

A stunning piece of scholarly detective work, aided by a new database, restores the identity of a Dutch Jewish hero of the Sobibor revolt

byAline Pennewaard

The Russo-Ukrainian War Through a Historian’s Eyes

With a new Cold War emerging, can Israel continue to sit on the fence?

byYehuda Bauer

Solar power

Abraham bar Hiyya (1070-1136) was a Spanish Jewish mathematician and astronomer famed for his book Hibbur ha-Meshihah ve-ha-Tishboret (Treatise on Measurement and Calculation), translated into Latin by Plato of Tivoli as Liber embadorum in 1145 and recognized as the earliest Arab algebra written in Europe. He also penned Tzurat Ha’Aretz VeTavnit Kadurei HaRekia (“The Form of the Earth and the Pattern of the Heavenly Spheres”). According to Shay Eshel, the treatise presented the geographical sciences of both the Islamic and ancient worlds in Hebrew and included this rendering of the solar system.