The articles collected in this volume were originally presented at a summer colloquium in Oxford in 2004. The 'epigone' is generally believed to be an imitator, deprived of an independent, original talent. He necessarily follows in someone else's footsteps, a source of inspiration that can (or indeed must) be identified. The epigone can operate only after a certain span of time, during which he has studied his example and learned how to follow in his master's footsteps. An epigone is always influenced - be it consciously or unconsciously - by another person, or by the surrounding cultural climate. The epigone is, per definition, second rate. Furthermore, it is believed that the epigonic product cannot have an independent value. Its only value lies in demonstrating a condition in culture, a spirit of the area, a trend in the arts, philosophy or any other human occupation. Rather than continuing to view epigonism as a natural, if regrettable, part of the cultural process, an inevitable secondary stage within the development of any corpus, the essays in this volume approach the phenomenon from a perspective that is at once more neutral and more positive. They do so not by rehabilitating the quality of the epigone's output, but by redefining his role within the cultural process per se. In each of these contributions, epigones appear as the true carriers of, in this case Jewish, culture. Rather than mere witnesses or, at best, historical mirrors of primary, canonical, cultural codes and modes, they represent one of the dynamic forces within the development of a culture. For the epigone is not merely imitating, but also disseminating. It is not the isolated peaks of the cultural panorama that the articles in this book seek to map out, but the modest planes that allow us to travel the landscape in the first place.

In 2005 the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana celebrated its 125th year as part of the University Library of the University of Amsterdam. Several events were held to mark this anniversary, including lectures and an exhibition. In this volume the history of the library is examined further with new and incisive articles on the life and work of many of its leading figures and an analysis of part of Leeser Rosenthal's original collection. In addition, new material is presented regarding the fate of the library during the Second World War. A year earlier, in 2004, Adri Offenberg retired as curator of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. Alongside a review of his work at the library, this volume provides a complete bibliography of all his published work until 2006 and what has become known in English as a festschrift: a collection of studies in his honour by Dutch and international colleagues and fellow bibliophiles about items in the library collection, as well as topics relating to Jewish booklore unconnected with the library. This volume is a tribute to Adri Offenberg the curator, but above all to Adri Offenberg the groundbreaking researcher.

He details the contributions and the leadership provided by the Dutch Jews and relates how they lost their "Dutchnessand their Orthodoxy within several generations of their arrival here and were absorbed into broader American Judaism.

Nevertheless, the teaching of Sephardic civilization was incomplete and Eurocentric, with the Jews of Islam, an ongoing entity for over a thousand years, scarcely figuring in any course offerings.

This three-volume encyclopedia, abridged from a 30-volume set in Hebrew and with a foreword by Elie Wiesel, chronicles Jewish life before and during the Holocaust. Arranged alphabetically by town, thousands of entries explore centuries of Jewish life. Some entries, particularly for large cities, provide information on Jewish residents as early as the Middle Ages and discuss the fate of Jews during the Black Death persecutions (1348-1349) and various pogroms from the 17th to 20th centuries. Each entry provides information on the town's Jewish inhabitants on the eve of German occupation, gives the dates of Jewish roundups and mass executions and estimates how many Jews from that community survived the war. Includes more than 600 black-and-white photographs.

Complete biography of Spinoza based on detailed archival research.

"In this first volume, [the author] deals directly with how that tension between accommodation and group survival was played out in the setting of colonial America by cosmopolitan Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. Confronted by a host society reluctant to fully accept Jews as part of civil society, the Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in colonial America were the first to establish a model of how these pulls could be balanced to assure survival"--Series editor forword.

A fascinating analysis of how Jews fit into scholarly debates about Orientalism.

Comprehensive and balanced history of the Reform Movement. The movement for religious reform in modern Judaism represents one of the most significant phenomena in Jewish history during the last two hundred years. It introduced new theological conceptions and innovations in liturgy and religious practice that affected millions of Jews, first in central and Western Europe and later in the United States. Today Reform Judaism is one of the three major branches of Jewish faith. Bringing to life the ideas, issues, and personalities that have helped to shape modern Jewry, Response to Modernity offers a comprehensive and balanced history of the Reform Movement, tracing its changing configuration and self-understanding from the beginnings of modernization in late 18th century Jewish thought and practice through Reform's American renewal in the 1970s.