Search results for ""Author Moshe Rosman""

Moshe Rosman's revolutionary approach has become a cornerstone of Polish Jewish historiography. Challenging conventions, he asserts that the 'marriage of convenience' between the Jews and the Polish--Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dynamic relationship that, though punctuated by crisis and persecution, developed into a saga of overall achievement and stability. With that fundamental message this book forges a thematic survey of Jewish history in early modern Poland. These essays, written by Rosman over the course of a distinguished career, have all been updated and enhanced with new detail and nuanced arguments, taking account not only of new archival material and research but also of the ongoing evolution of the author’s own knowledge and perspectives. Some appear here in English for the first time. The volume's structure highlights key topics for understanding the Polish Jewish past: relations between Jews and other Poles; Jewish communal life; Polish Jewish women; and hasidism. One section analyses how this past has been presented in both scholarly and popular modes. The essays are crafted to place them in dialogue with each other. Analytical introductions weigh their significance in the light of modern and postmodern Jewish and Polish historiography. An extensive general introduction sets the context of the history portrayed here, while a thoughtful conclusion elucidates the larger motifs that emerge.

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The Ba'al Shem Tov is an elusive subject for historians because documentary evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal. Until now, much of what was known about him was based on stories compiled more than a generation after his death, many of which serve more to mythologize him than to describe him. The portrait Moshe Rosman provides is drawn from life instead of from myth. Based on innovative critical analysis of familiar and previously unexplored archival sources, and concentrating on accounts that can be attributed to the Besht or to contemporary eyewitnesses, this book goes further than any previous work in uncovering the historical Ba'al Shem Tov. Additionally, documents in Polish and Hebrew discovered by Professor Rosman during his research for the book enable him to give the first detailed description of the cultural, social, economic, and political context of the Besht's life. Founder of Hasidism supplies the history behind the legend. It presents the best, most convincing description that can be drawn from the existing documentary evidence, changing our understanding of the Besht and with it the master-narrative of hasidism.A substantial new introduction considers what has changed in the study of Hasidism since the influential first edition was published, these changes being in part due to the effect of the book. New approaches, new sources, and new interpretations have been introduced, and these are reviewed and critically assessed. Criticisms of the original edition are answered and key issues reconsidered, including the authenticity of the various versions of the Holy Epistle; the ways in which Jacob Joseph of Polonne's books can be utilized as historical sources; and the relationship to history of the stories about the Ba'al Shem Tov in the hagiographical collection Shivhei Ha-Besht.

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National Jewish Book Awards Winner of the Anthologies and Collections Award, 2009.Europe has changed greatly in the last century. Political, social, and ideological transformations have not only redrawn the map of the continent but have rewoven the fabric of its culture. These changes have nourished widespread reassessment in European historical research: in terms of its presuppositions, its methodologies, its directions, its emphases, and its scope. The political boundaries between nations and states, along with the very concepts of 'nation' and 'boundary', have changed significantly, and the self-consciousness of ethnic minorities has likewise evolved in new directions. All these developments have affected how the Jews of Europe perceive themselves, and they help to shape the prism through which historians view the Jewish past. This volume looks at the Jewish past in the spirit of this reassessment. Part I reconsiders the basic parameters of the subject as well as some of its fundamental concepts, suggesting new assumptions and perspectives from which to conduct future studies of European Jewish history. Topics covered here include periodization and the definition of geographical borders, antisemitism, gender and the history of Jewish women, and notions of assimilation. Part II is devoted to articulating the meaning of 'modernity' in the history of European Jewry and demarcating key stages in its crystallization. Contributors here reflect on the defining characteristics of a distinct early modern period in European Jewish history, the Reformation and the Jews, and the fundamental features of the Jewish experience in modern times. Parts III and IV present two scholarly conversations as case studies for the application of the critical and programmatic categories considered thus far: the complex web of relationships between Jews, Christians, and Jewish converts to Christianity (Conversos, New Christians, Marranos) in fifteenth-century Spain; and the impact of American Jewry on Jewish life in Europe in the twentieth century, at a time when the dominant trend was one of migration from Europe to the Americas. This timely volume suggests a new framework for the study of Jewish history and helps to contextualize it within the mainstream of historical scholarship.CONTRIBUTORS: Ram Ben-Shalom, Miriam Bodian, Jeremy Cohen, Judah M. Cohen, David Engel, Gershon David Hundert, Paula Hyman, Maud Mandel, David Nirenberg, Moshe Rosman, David B. Ruderman, Daniel Soyer

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Ada Rapoport-Albert has been a key player in the profound transformation of the history of hasidism that has taken shape since the 1970s. She has never lacked the courage to question conventional wisdom, but neither has she overturned it lightly. The essays in this volume show the erudition and creativity of her contribution to rewriting the master-narrative of hasidic history. Thanks to her we now know that eighteenth-century hasidism evolved in a context of intense spirituality rather than political, social, economic, or religious crisis. It did not represent the movement’s ‘classic period’ and was not a project of democratization, ameliorating the hierarchical structuring of religion and spirituality. Eighteenth-century hasidism is more accurately described as the formative and creative prelude to the mature movement of the nineteenth century: initially neither institutionalized nor centralized, it developed through a process of differentiation from traditional ascetic-mystical hasidism. Its elite leaders only became conscious of a distinctive group identity after the Ba’al Shem Tov’s death, and they subsequently spent the period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century experimenting with various forms of doctrine, literature, organization, leadership, and transfer of authority. Somewhat surprisingly there was no attempt to introduce any revision of women’s status and role; in the examination of this area of hasidism Rapoport-Albert’s contribution has been singularly revealing. Her work has emphasized that, contrary to hasidism’s thrust towards spiritualization of the physical, the movement persisted in identifying women with an irredeemable materiality: women could never escape their inherent sexuality and attain the spiritual heights. Gender hierarchy therefore persisted and, formally speaking, for the first 150 years or so of hasidism’s existence women were not counted as members of the group. Twentieth-century Habad hasidim responded to modernist feminism by re-evaluating the role of women, but just as Habad appropriated modern rhetorical strategies to defend tradition, so it adopted certain feminist postulates in order to create a counter-feminism that would empower women without destabilizing traditional gender roles. The essays in this volume are a fitting statement of Professor Rapoport-Albert’s importance to the study of hasidism, to Jewish studies as a whole, and to the academic scrutiny of religion. Written over a period of forty years, they have been updated for this volume with regard to significant detail and to take account of important works of scholarship written after they were originally published.

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The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 is the first part of a major scholarly project about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were a majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both traditional rabbinic scholars and famous Hasidic figures, and over time became an international trade emporium, a center of the Jewish Enlightenment, a cradle of Zionism and the Jewish Labor movement, and a place where Orthodoxy struggled vigorously with modernity. The two volumes of Pinsk history were originally part of a literature created by Jews who survived the Holocaust and were determined to keep in memory a vital world that flourished for half a millennium. In this case, the results are extraordinary: no town of Eastern Europe has been described in such fascinating detail, invaluable to Jewish and non-Jewish historians alike. For the second volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1881-1941.

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