New Books in Jewish Studies

The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and used their blood in the celebration of Passover.Nowhere in Europe was the blood libel more tenacious, credible, and long lived than in the Russian Empire, particularly during the late Imperial period, which saw large scale pogroms and harsh restrictions visited upon the empire's Jewish population. The Russian Revolution of 1917 attracted many Jews to its cause, thanks in large measure to Bolshevik condemnations of antisemitism and persecution of the Jewish minority. These numbers grew in the wake of the brutal Civil War that followed from 1918 - 1922 when the White Army revived the pogrom with particular vigor.What happened after the Bolshevik victory is the subject of Elissa Bemporad's new book, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford UP, 2019), which won the National Jewish Book Award (Modern Jewish Thought and Experience). Bemporad probes the underbelly of the "Soviet myth"— that the USSR had eradicated the pogroms, banished the notion of a blood libel to the scrapheap of other opiates for the people, and vanquished antisemitism as part of the regime's broad anti-religious campaign — and discovers that both pogroms and the blood libel had a robust afterlife in the USSR.As she traces changing attitudes towards Jews in the USSR, Bemporad also examines the uneasy and often ambivalent but mutually dependent, and ever-shifting relationship between the regime and the Jewish population as the Soviet century unfolds. Legacy of Blood looks at the re-emergence of overt antisemitism in the occupied territories of the USSR during World War II and the troubled return of the Jews to mainstream society after the war. The result is a meticulously researched, thought-provoking, and eminently readable book that adds much to both Jewish and Russian historical scholarship.Elissa Bemporad is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center and the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History, Queens College of CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union, vol I (NYU Press).Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Based on an understanding of scholasticism as a cross-cultural phenomenon, undertaken by rabbinic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian scholars in late antiquity, this book examines the development of Palestinian rabbinic compilations from social-historical and literary-historical perspectives. Rabbinic Scholarship in the Context of Late Antique Scholasticism: The Development of the Talmud Yerushalmi (Bloomsbury, 2024) focuses on the compilation of the Talmud Yerushalmi in the context of late antique scholarly practice aimed at preserving past knowledge for future generations.This book provides insight into how rabbinic scholarship in the Land of Israel participated in the wider intellectual practices of Roman-Byzantine times. Beginning with the social, educational, and legal contexts that generated rabbinic knowledge. Catherine Hezser goes on to investigate the oral and written transmission of rabbinic traditions to eventually examine the compilation of the Talmud Yerushalmi with a comparative and redaction-historical approach.Integrating Palestinian rabbinic education and scholarship into the context of late antique Graeco-Roman and Byzantine Christian scholarly practices, Catherine Hezser demonstrates how rabbinic compilatory techniques resembled but also differed from.those of Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian scholars. The book highlights how rabbinic compilations are idiosyncratic and create a distinct rabbinic identity. Overall, Hezser argues that rabbinic scholarship was an integral part of late antique intellectual life in the Near Middle East and should be recognized as an Eastern equivalent to Western, paideia-based forms of scholarship in the Roman-Byzantine period and beyond.Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at SOAS University of London, UK.Michael Motia teaches in Religious Studies and Classics at UMass Boston. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Rhodes blood libel of 1840, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, was initiated by the island’s governor in collusion with Levantine merchants, who charged the local Jewish community with murdering a Christian boy for ritual purposes. An episode in the shared histories of Ottomans and Jews, it was forgotten by the former and, even if remembered, misunderstood by the latter. The 1840 Rhodes Blood Libel: Ottoman Jews at the Dawn of the Tanzimat Era (Berghahn Books, 2024) aims to restore the place of this event in Sephardi and Ottoman history.Based on newly discovered Ottoman and Jewish sources it argues that the acquittal of Rhodian Jews is adequately understood only in the context of the Tanzimat and the Sublime Porte’s foreign relations. Contrary to the common view that Ottoman Jews did not experience the impact of the Tanzimat reforms until the mid-1850s, this study shows that their effects were felt as early as 1840. Furthermore, this book offers a window onto life and intercommunal relations in the Eastern Mediterranean during the late Ottoman era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel offers an innovative and refreshing approach to the Hebrew Bible. By fusing extraordinary findings by modern scholars on the ancient Near East with the original Hebrew text and a brand new English translation by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel clarifies and explains the Biblical narrative, laws, events and prophecies in context with the milieu in which it took place.This is an interview with Jeremiah Unterman, academic editor of The Koren Tanakh of the Land of Israel.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Avi Shlaim is a celebrated "New Historian” whose earlier work established him as an influential historian of Middle Eastern politics and especially of Israel's relations with the Arab world. Most recently he has turned to his own Iraqi/Israeli/British past in Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew–which he refers to as an "impersonal autobiography."He speaks today to John and his Brandeis colleague Yuval Evri, the Marash and Ocuin Chair in Ottoman, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish Studies. Yuval’s 2020 The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew explores how fluidity in such categories as the "Arab-Jew" becomes a source of resistance to exclusive claims of ownership of land, texts, traditions, or languages.The three quickly agree that the crucial category for understanding Avi's latest work is that of the Arab Jew: "I am a problem for Zionists, an ontological impossibility....[as] a living breathing standing Arab Jew. A problem for them but not for me." Coexistence for him is not remote, but something that the Iraqi Jewish community experienced and touched on a daily basis.In describing the factors that sped migration from Iraq to Israel in its early years, Shlaim lays bare some evidence for Mossad involvement in three for the Baghdad bombs that hastened the flight from Baghdad. That bombing forms part of the “Cruel Zionism” that Avi sees having gravely damaged the possibilities of Middle Eastern religious coexistence.He also discusses the 1954 Lavon affair, and more generally reflects on the way that Zionism ("an Ashkenazi thing") conscripted Arab Jews into its political formation (This is a topic also discussed extensively in RTB"s conversation with Natasha Roth-Richardson and Lori Allen, in Violent Majorities). True, there is a much-discussed 1941 Baghdadi pogrom, The Farhud. It stands alone in the area and by Shlaim's account was largely a product of British colonialism in Iraq, with its divisive elevation of Christians and Jews over Muslims.Yuval asks Avi to discuss the power (or permission) to narrate stories told from below. Avi's tales of his own mother's resourcefulness and his father’s struggles betoken the range of poignant response to what for so many Arab Jews was not aliyah (ascent) but a yerida, a descent into marginality, unemployment, and cultural exclusion.To Avi, a single state of Israel/Palestine seems the best hope to ward off the worst that may come from the accelerated ethnic cleansing of both Gaza and the West Bank, which may lead to a second Nakba.Mentioned in the podcast Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (1988) Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (1988) The New Historians of Israel/Palestine. Joel Beinin, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (1998) Alliance Israelite Universelle Salo Baron anatomizes the "lachrymose version of Jewish history"; e.g. in his 1928 “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revise the Traditional View?” Noam Chomsky called settler colonialism the most extreme and vicious form of imperialism. Recallable Books Avi credits the influential work of Ella Shohat on the idea of the Arab Jew and "cruel Zionism." One pathbreaking article was her 1988 "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims." but he recommends On the Arab Jew. In her work the hyphen unites rather than divides Arab and Jew. Yehoudah Shinhav, The Arab Jews (2006). Sami Michael Shimon Ballas, Outcast (1991). Michael Kazin, A Walker in the City (1951) and the rest of his New York trilogy. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

When the Great War began, the Russian Empire was home to more than five million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of war from 1914 to 1918 launched the forces that scattered and destroyed Eastern European Jewry and transformed it in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. Yet little has been written about the experience of Russia's Jews during this time. A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I (Oxford UP, 2024) uncovers this untold history by revealing the stories of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front. It presents a history of rupture and dispersion at a human level, with accounts of individuals who struggled to survive and the activists who worked to aid them.The stories in this book are drawn from hundreds of documents held in previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal accounts of refugees, relief workers, writers, artists, and political leaders. This is a history of the first state violence and military aggression directed at Jewish civilians anywhere in modern Europe. It is a history of refugees, so numerous and scattered across Russia that they represented the fate of the Jewish nation itself. And it is a history of how Russia's Jews formed the largest and most influential humanitarian campaign in their history, and of their leaders and institutions that endured long past the years of war and revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Recognizing the absence of a God named Yahweh outside of ancient Israel, this study addresses the related questions of Yahweh's origins and the biblical claim that there were Yahweh-worshipers other than the Israelite people. Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, with an exhaustive survey of ancient Near Eastern literature and inscriptions discovered by archaeology, and using anthropology to reconstruct religious practices and beliefs of ancient Edom and Midian, this study proposes an answer. Yahweh-worshiping Midianites of the Early Iron Age brought their deity along with metallurgy into ancient Palestine and the Israelite people. Join us as we talk with Robert Miller about his latest book, Yahweh: Origin of a Desert God (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021).Robert Miller, II, O.F.S., Ph.D., is Ordinary Professor of Old Testament and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies at The Catholic University of America.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption(IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

In his recent monograph, David DeJong traces the history of Deuteronomy's concept of a prophet like Moses from the seventh century BCE to the first century CE, demonstrating the ways in which Jewish and Christian texts were influenced by and responded to Deuteronomy's Mosaic norm for prophetic claims.Join us as we speak with David DeJong about "a prophet like Moses."David DeJong (PhD, Notre Dame) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Hope College; his research and teaching focus on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and its interpretation in ancient Judaism and early Christianity.Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020), and a recent 2 volume commentary on Numbers. He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

This was an interview that I felt only scratched the surface not only of the book, Lebanon’s Jewish Community: Fragments of Lives Arrested (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) but of Professor Salameh's knowledge and understanding of the region. Our discussion spanned the ancient roots of the people of Lebanon through his personal story growing up in the multicultural city of Beirut through the current state of affairs in Lebanon. Growing up as a Maronite his first exposure to Jews in Lebanon was an absentee neighbor who would come to air out and check on the house maybe once a month. He did not know what to make of her - but then when he was studying for his Baccalaureate she sent a message that she was carrying out a nine day novena to the Virgin Mary on his behalf. This cross-culture was the basis for the thriving Jewish community in Lebanon. Unfortunately we did not touch upon the interviews that he conducted as there was just so much to say. I want to share here one that puts things in context - he writes about Alain who lives today in Northern Israel, a mere two-hour car ride from his native Beirut but worlds away from the port city. Franck himself talks about the last time he was in Lebanon, in 2016, and how he felt he could never go back. Another moving interview is that of Fady Galen who talks about wearing tefillin (phylacteries) in his Catholic school. Through the good and bad it was so wonderful to speak about the possibilities and the fanatics. As Franck said, he is human and therefore the passion will show in his scholarly work and his writing - it definitely showed in our discussion.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Based on original sources, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge UP, 2016) explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union. Gentiles' willingness to assist Jews was greater in lands that had been under Soviet administration during the inter-war period, while gentiles' willingness to harm Jews occurred more in lands that had been under Romanian administration during the same period. While acknowledging the disasters of Communist rule in the 1920s and 1930s, this work shows the effectiveness of Soviet nationalities policy in the official suppression of antisemitism. This book offers a corrective to the widespread consensus that homogenizes gentile responses throughout Eastern Europe, instead demonstrating that what states did in the interwar period mattered; relations between social groups were not fixed and destined to repeat themselves, but rather fluid and susceptible to change over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies