Jewish Emancipation In The East
The process of emancipation and modernization came later and more slowly for Jews in the east than to their co-religionists in the west. Eastern Jewish communities faced a significant stumbling block...
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Jewish Immigration to Pre-State Israel
In the history of Jewish Palestine, the year 1881 inaugurated a new era. For many centuries, Jews from all over the diaspora had been “going up” to the Land of Israel, to live and die there, but the...
View ArticleWorld War I and the Jews
The First World War, the most appallingly savage international conflict in all preceding history, had a profound impact on world Jewry. This was due to the existence of a large concentration of Jews...
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The Final Solution
Historians of the Holocaust are divided into two schools: the “intentionalists” insist on the central role of Nazi ideology and believe that there was a carefully prepared plan for the extermination of...
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The Six-Day War
In the spring of 1957, the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip occupied since the Suez Campaign of the previous year. The United Nations sent an international...
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A State is Born
The following article recounts Israel’s state building process. It is reprinted with permission from A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, published Schocken Books. Independence advanced a...
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Soviet Jewry Between the Wars
Russian Jewry had been in a state of continuing crisis since the passage of the May Laws by Czar Alexander III in 1881. WWI was a staggering disaster for Russian Jewry. The Pale of Settlement, the...
View ArticleEuropean Jewry: The Beginnings
The history of the beginnings of a Jewish presence in Europe cannot be thought of as a linear and continuous development. The evidence is fragmentary, random, and often inconsistent. The earliest...
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Jewish Printing
Reprinted with permission from Eli Barnavi’s A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, published by Schocken Books. The appearance of the printing press in Europe [in the mid-1500’s] coincided with a...
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Jewish Music in the Middle Ages
Reprinted with permission from Eli Barnavi’s A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, published by Schocken Books. Were it possible to hear in modern melodies traces of levitical singing in the...
View ArticleJewish Science in the Middle Ages
Medieval science cannot be divided simply according to religious or ethnic categories. The same fields of knowledge, theories, practices and learned controversies were shared by the three monotheistic...
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Christendom
Jews living under Christianity–in places like Rome, Worms, Cracow, or, after, 1248, Spain–were subject to two different ruling powers: the church and the state. The following article describes the...
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Hebrew Manuscripts in the Middle Ages
Reprinted with permission from A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, published by Schocken Books. In the manner of other Mediterranean civilizations, the ancient Hebrews first used scrolls made of...
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Emancipation In Muslim Lands
Reprinted with permission from Eli Barnavi’s A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, published by Schocken Books. The change in the legal status of Jews in Muslim countries was part of a general...
View ArticleThe Sephardic Exodus to the Ottoman Empire
Emergence of the Ottoman Empire The Ottomans began to emerge as a great political and military power from the early 14th century. Uthman, founder of a dynasty, came from a small Turkish principality,...
View ArticleJewish Historiography
In the sixteenth century, the influence of the Renaissance brought about a significant change: curiosity and an interest in novelties [among Jewish and non-Jewish scholars alike] was now no longer...
View ArticleKabbalah: Origins of a Spiritual Adventure
Reprinted with permission from Eli Barnavi’s A Historical Atlas of the Jewish People, published by Schocken Books. The Kabbalah (Hebrew for “handed down by tradition”) made its appearance in the...
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The Karaites: A Medieval Jewish Sect
As in the west, so in the east, the Jewish community entered the Middle Ages well equipped with spiritual authority and institutional organizations sanctioned by ancient texts and traditions. The...
View ArticleThe Geonim
The Muslim conquests were an important agent of unification for the Jewish communities throughout the diaspora. From the seventh century onwards, the vast majority of Jews were under single rule and...
View ArticleJewish Immigration from Eastern Europe
In 1880, in a Jewish population of approximately 250,000, only one out of six American Jews was of’ East European extraction; 40 years later, in a community which had reached four million, five out of...
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