The existence of a temple of YHWH in Upper Egypt means one of two things for our understanding of what Jews were like at this embryonic moment in their collective existence. Either they were pre-bibli...
The exodus from the flood valley of the Nile, the end of foreign enslavement, was presented by the Bible writers as the condition of becoming fully Israelite.
Judaic monotheism had deeply penetrated Arabia for almost a century before Muhammad declared his revelation in 610 in one of the towns – Makka, or Mecca – in which those Himyarite emigrants had settle...
It is already apparent that the ‘minimalist’ view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.
Be angry only for a grave cause that rightly calls for indignation,’ Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah. What
Jesus was constitutively, not incidentally--a Jew; the Old and the New Testament were organically connected. Jewish history was the father of Christian history.
Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to...
The digital communications technology that was once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination, in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irr...
In Jewish memory it is as though Osea had written just yesterday. A worried father is a worried father. He can’t help letting the boy know how he feels, right away, at the top of the letter: ‘Well-bei...
When imperial powers fray at the edges, ethnic groups perceived to be the beneficiaries of their trust suddenly start to look like aliens not natives, however long they may have been settled.
Hanukkah, officially instituted by the Hasmoneans, was, like Tabernacles, eight days, and it was also the eight-day period corresponding to the pagan winter solstice festivities celebrating the return...
. .for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.
The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architect...
The retaining membrane that held Dutch culture together for more than a century was a marvel of elasticity. Responding to appropriate external stimuli, it could expand or contract as the conditions of...
The impression given by the Bible is of a cyclical swing between the cult of many gods and the cult of a single exclusive YHWH. But there may have been a prolonged period in which YHWH was worshipped...
The year 388 saw an epidemic of mob attacks against synagogues all over the eastern empire including Alexandria, but especially fierce in Syria. At Callinicum on the Euphrates, the synagogue was burne...
The first century of the plague had seen the country turned upside down. In the twilight years of Edward III it seemed that nothing could damage the greatness of the Plantagenet royal estate. But the...
Funds from a Swiss-German bank were made available for him through Jewish and Gentile entrepreneur-partners to build model (in the other sense) dwellings for impoverished Jews, without any obligation,...
Obstinate
Birth.5