From its modest beginnings in 1818 Berlin, Wissenschaft des Judentums has burgeoned into a scholarly discipline pursued by a vast cadre of scholars. Now constituting a global community, these scholars continue to draw their inspiration from the determined pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums in nineteenth and twentieth Germany. Beyond setting the highest standards of philological and historiographical research, German Wissenschaft des Judentums had a seminal role in creating modern Jewish discourse in which cultural memory supplemented traditional Jewish learning. The secular character of modern Jewish Studies, initially pursued largely in German and subsequently in other vernacular languages (e.g. French, Dutch, Italian, modern Hebrew, Russian), greatly facilitated an exchange with non-Jewish scholars, and thereby encouraging mutual understanding and respect. The present volume is based on papers delivered at a conference, sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem, by scholars from North American, Europe, and Israel. The papers and attendant deliberations explored ramified historical and methodological issues. Taken as a whole, the volume represents a tribute to the two hundred year legacy of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its singular contribution to not only modern Jewish self-understand but also to the unfolding of humanistic cultural discourse.

The migration experiences, career paths, and scholarship of historians born in Germany who started emigrating to North America in the 1950s have had a unique impact on the transatlantic practice of Central European History. German Migrant Historians in North America analyzes the experiences of this postwar group of scholars, and asks what informed their education and career choices, and what motivated them to emigrate to North America. The contributors reflect on how these migration experiences informed their own research and teaching, and particularly discuss the more general development of the transatlantic exchange between German and American historians in the scholarship on Modern Central European History.

The Reader's Guide to Judaism is a survey of English-language translations of the most important primary texts in the Jewish tradition. The field is assessed in some 470 essays discussing individuals (Martin Buber, Gluckel of Hameln), literature (Genesis, Ladino Literature), thought and beliefs (Holiness, Bioethics), practice (Dietary Laws, Passover), history (Venice, Baghdadi Jews of India), and arts and material culture (Synagogue Architecture, Costume). The emphasis is on Judaism, rather than on Jewish studies more broadly.

Examines four trials held in Israel in which government authorities sought to advance a political agenda through criminal prosecution. Far from being "show trials", these hearings greatly transformed popular consciousness in Israel and were instrumental in the democratization of Israeli society. Pp. 17-82 deal with the Kasztner trial (1954-58) and pp. 83-165 with the Eichmann trial (1960-62). The Kasztner trial, and particularly the final judgment of Justice Shimon Agranat of the Israeli Supreme Court, shattered the simplistic juxtaposition prevalent in Israeli consciousness of heroic resistance and the path of betrayal, in this case negotiation with the enemy. The Eichmann trial shattered this conception even more and for the first time gave voice to the victims of the Holocaust rather than to the resistants. Dwells on the criticism voiced by Hannah Arendt and Natan Alterman, who challenged the conceptions of the Kasztner and Eichmann trials respectively - Arendt in support of the resistance-betrayal dichotomy and Alterman against it. The other two trials discussed are those of the Israeli soldiers who perpetrated the Kufr Qassem massacre (1956) and of Yigal Amir who assassinated PM Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

"German Jews were fully assimilated and secularized in the nineteenth century - or so it is commonly assumed. Nils Roemer challenges this assumption, finding that religious sentiments, concepts, and rhetoric found expression through a newly emerging theological historicism at the center of modern German Jewish culture."--Jacket

V.1 The eastern traditions of linguistics -- V.2 Classical and medieval linguistics.