Ruderman, David B
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Publication Tragedy and Transcendence: The Meaning of 1492 for Jewish History(1992) Ruderman, David BThis year we commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of a tragic expulsion. Our history is replete with tragic moments, but this moment is of enormous significance for Jewish as well as for Christian and Moslem history. For Jews, 1492 constituted the abrupt end of an extraordinary cultural experience, a formative and repercussive period in the life of our people affecting every area of its civilization: Halakha, philosophy, kabbalah, poetry, ethical literature, messianism, political thought, and more.2 A world of enormous vitality and effervescence, a world, both in its high and low points, that can teach us a great deal about the nature of our faith and community, about our interaction with others, in short, about ourselves.Publication The Blessing of Gerson D. Cohen(2016-01-01) Ruderman, David B"The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History" was surely not Gerson Cohen's most important piece of scholarly writing. Unlike many of his classic academic essays which are still assigned in university course in medieval Jewish history—his insightful overview of the gaonic age; his creative reconstruction of the story of the four captives; or his typological study of the varieties of Jewish messianism, to name only a few—it was meant to be no more than a public address, in this case offered to the graduating class of the Hebrew Teachers College in Brookline, Massachusetts in June 1966.1Publication Review of Robert Bonfil, The Rabbinate in Renaissance Italy(1980) Ruderman, David BAt least since the publication of Shlomo Simonsohn's comprehensive study of Mantuan Jewry, Italian Jewish history has emerged as a significant scholarly field for a growing number of researchers in Israel and abroad. Their numerous publications have considerably supplemented and refined the earlier attempts by Cecil Roth, Moses Avigdor Shulvass, Israel Zinberg and Attlilio Milano to chart the course of Italian Jewish history in the Renaissance period and before. They have also revealed all too glaringly the inadequacies of the edifice the earlier researchers had constructed. When Shulvass and Roth, in particular, wrote their popular surveys of Jewish life in the Renaissance, neither had sufficiently utilized the voluminous archival and manuscript resources now more readily available some twenty years later; nor did either of their works deeply penetrate the larger Christian cultural and social context of Jewish life on Italian soil.Publication Medieval and Modern Jewish History(1995) Ruderman, David BThere has been a virtual explosion of scholarly writing on Jewish history in the medieval and modern periods during the last thirty years. One rough measure of this development is to compare the present entries on Jewish history in this Guide with the previous edition published in 1961. Of the hundred and twenty items on Jewish history listed in the earlier Guide, less than half actually pertain to the medieval and modern periods. This compares with some 325 items allotted to this section of the present Guide dealing exclusively with postancient Jewish history. But the sheer number of cited works is only the beginning of the story. Among the entries in the 1961 edition, the number of individual authors is relatively small; Salo W. Baron is listed several times, as are Cecil Roth, Jacob Marcus, and Guido Kisch. This obviously reflects the relatively small number of professional historians in the field as of 1961 and an even smaller number holding full-time positions in North American universities.Publication Three Anglo-Jewish Portraits and Their Legacy for Today: Moses Marcus, the Convert; Abraham Tang, the Radical Maskil; David Levi, the Defender of Judaism(2007-01-01) Ruderman, David BMy fascination with Anglo-Jewish history emerged by chance, but has been profound enough for me to write two books on the subject. My appreciation of the richness, diversity and significance of the history of Jewish cultural history on English soil continues to grow and deepen. There is a long tradition of Jewish historical writing, exemplified by the work of the Jewish Historical Society of England. But modern historians have barely begun to take pre-twentieth century Anglo-Jewish history seriously. The drama of modernity seems still to be regarded as a German story, beginning with Mendelssohn and continuing into Eastern Europe. Historians such as Todd Engelman and David Katz have made major contributions to our subject, but in so doing have sometimes revealed their own biases.Publication Review of Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, Jerusalem(1984) Ruderman, David BPublication The Transformations of Judaism(2015-07-01) Ruderman, David BThis chapter addresses the primary transformations in Jewish civilization in the early modern era considering primarily the distinct histories of five large sub-communities—those of Italy, the western Sephardim (descendants of Jewish settlers from the Iberian peninsula who had primarily settled in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno beginning at the end of the sixteenth century), Germany and Central Europe, Poland-Lithuania, and the Ottoman Empire. It traces considers five markers in tracing the major political, social, and cultural transformations of early modern Jewry: mobility, migration, and social mixing; communal cohesion and laicization, a knowledge explosion, primarily the impact of print; the crisis of authority, primarily the impact of the messianic movement associated with Shabbetai Zevi; and mingled identities among Jews, Christians, and in some cases Muslims. These five major transformations allow one to describe a common early modern Jewish culture, one characterized by cultural exchange and interactions between diverse sub-communities.Publication Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio's Appearance in Italy as Seen through the Eyes of an Italian Jew(1975) Ruderman, David BThe literary evidence describing the revelation of the strange Christian prophet Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio in the communities of Italy and France at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century has been treated with considerable interest by a number of scholars. W.B. McDaniel was the first to publish the existing evidence on this unusual figure, together with the text of a hermetic plague tract attributed to him with an English translation. These sources portray a divinely inspired prophet, together with his wife, five children, and his disciples, making his way as a mendicant through Italy and France. Mercurio sees as his task the reprobation of all the sins of the Catholic Church and Christian peoples. He is empowered with the magical gift of the Supreme Being to prepare an antidote against the horrendous plague.1 He not only gains the loyalty of the uneducated masses who marvel at his wondrous abilities but is surrounded by a select retinue of outstanding scholars who are equally impressed by his prophecy. The latter include Carlo Sosenna, a lecturer at the University of Ferrara and author of a scholastic commentary to one of Mercurio's sonnets; Ludovico Lazzarelly, an avid hermetic who describes Mercurio's appearance in Rome in 1484; and Trithemius, another hermetic and mystic who relates Mercurio's appearance at Lyons at the end of the fifteenth century.2Publication Philosophy, Kabbalah and Science in the Culture of the Italian Ghetto: On the Debate between Samson Morpurgo and Aviad Sar Shalom Basilae(1993) Ruderman, David BTwo common assumptions about Jewish culture in the period of the Italian ghettos have been disavowed by contemporary scholarship. First, that in contrast to the earlier period of the Renaissance, Jewish culture had become and arid intellectual desert, relatively devoid of contact with the outstide world, sterile and uncreative, isolated and absorbed in pietistic and messianic delirium; and second, that the primary agent of this cultural retreat, that throwback to medievalism and obscurantism, was the kabbalah. To the contrary, we have come to learn that despite the patent diminution of social and cultural contacts between Jews and Christians engendered by the ghetto walls, Jewish culture remained vibrant, creative, and open to new expressions of literary and artistic accomplishment. Indeed, the ghetto, with all its negative connotations, was the virtual birthplace of bold innovations in Hebrew poetry and drama, in music, in medical and scientific writing, as well as in the traditional domains of rabbinics, moralistic literature, and liturgy.1 And kabbalah, paradoxically, as Robert Bonfil had recently argued, was the critical mediator between the medieval and modern worlds, the primary agent of many of these innovations, particularly in the religious sphere, and even of modernity itself.2Publication The 12 Covenants of Pinchas Hurwitz: How an 18th-Century Eastern European Kabbalist Jew Produced One of the First Hebrew Bestsellers(2016-10-13) Ruderman, David BThe Book of the Covenant (Sefer ha-Brit) was one of the most popular Hebrew books read by modern Jews, as reflected in 40 editions spanning two centuries, including three Yiddish and six Latino translations. Part scientific encyclopedia, part manual of mystical ascent, and part plea to Jews to embrace a universal ethics, the work was widely influential in an era of radical change and internal debate for Jews as well as for others. The amazing popularity of the author, the Eastern European Jew Pinchas Hurwitz (1765-1821), stemmed from his kabbalistic pedigree. He offered his readers an exciting compendium of scientific knowledge they could read in their holy language under the pretext that its acquisition fulfilled their highest spiritual goals.