The Oxford History of the Biblical World

The Oxford History of the Biblical World
edited by Michael D. Coogan

In this impressive volume, leading scholars offer compelling glimpses into the biblical world, the world in which prophets, poets, sages, and historians created one of our most important texts--the Bible.
For more than a century, archaeologists have been unearthing the tombs, temples, texts, and artifacts of the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world. Using new approaches, contemporary scholars have begun to synthesize this material with the biblical traditions. The Oxford History of the Biblical World incorporates the best of this scholarship, and in chronologically ordered chapters presents the reader with a readable and integrated study of the history, art, architecture, languages, literatures, and religion of biblical Israel and early Judaism and Christianity in their larger cultural contexts. The authors also examine such issues as the roles of women, the tensions between urban and rural settings, royal and kinship social structures, and official and popular religions of the region.

Understanding the biblical world is a vital part of understanding the Bible. Broad, authoritative, and engaging, The Oxford History of the Biblical World will illuminate for any reader the ancient world from which the Bible emerged.

The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality

The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality 
by James Barr

In this book, Professor Barr presents a reading of the story of the Garden of Eden, not as a tale of the origins of sin and death, but as a tale of a chance of immortality, briefly accessible to humanity but quickly lost. Old Testament scholars have long been aware that the traditional reading of the story of Adam and Eve as the 'Fall of Man', though hallowed by St Paul's use of it, cannot stand up to close examination of the text. However, they have not succeeded in formulating an alternative interpretation which rivals the force of this traditional reading or is relevant to such a wide range of biblical and theological issues. Professor Barr's new interpretation has such force, and with its challenges to many conventional views it is likely to cause a considerable stir among traditionalists and to excite those dissatisfied with aspects of traditional thought. Central to the book is its stress on the role and prevalence of the idea of immortality, commonly thought to be a later Greek and un-biblical import into Christian thinking. Reflection on immortality also leads to a reconsideration of ideas about death in the Hebrew Bible; about Sheol. the Hebrew underworld; and about the soul. Professor Barr brings out the importance of time for the Hebrew Bible and the concept of length of days, showing that the threat is not so much death as such, but the manner and time of death. His study of chronology leads to a reconsideration of the story of Noah's ark, and the book ends by seeing resurrection and immortality as complementary, rather than conflicting, ideas.

Kristallnacht

Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction
by Martin Gilbert

 In the early hours of November 10, 1938, Nazi storm troopers and Hitler Youth rampaged through Jewish neighborhoods across Germany, leaving behind them a horrifying trail of terror and destruction. More than a thousand synagogues and many thousands of Jewish shops were destroyed, while thirty thousand Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass—was a decisive stage in the systematic eradication of a people who traced their origins in Germany to Roman times and was a sinister forewarning of the Holocaust.

 With rare insight and acumen, Martin Gilbert examines this night and day of terror, presenting readers with a meticulously researched, masterfully written, and eye-opening study of one of the darkest chapters in human history.

The Modern Middle East

The Modern Middle East: A History
by James L. Gelvin

In the wake of 11 September 2001, there has been much talk about the inevitable clash between "East" and "West." This book presents an alternative approach to understanding the genealogy of contemporary events. By taking students and the general reader on a guided tour of the past five hundred years of Middle Eastern history, this book examines how the very forces associated with global "modernity" have shaped social, economic, cultural, and political life in the region. Beginning with the first glimmerings of the current international state and economic systems in the sixteenth century, The Modern Middle East: A History explores the impact of imperial and imperialist legacies, the great nineteenth-century transformation, cultural continuities and upheavals, international diplomacy, economic booms and busts, the emergence of authoritarian regimes, and the current challenges to those regimes on everyday life in an area of vital concern to us all.

Engagingly written, drawing from the author's own research and other studies, and stocked with maps and photographs, original documents and an abundance of supplementary materials, The Modern Middle East: A History will provide both novices and specialists with fresh insights into the events that have shaped history and the debates about them that have absorbed historians.

The Modern Middle East: A Reader

The Modern Middle East: A Reader
Edited by Albert Habib Hourani, Philip Shukry Khoury, Mary Christina Wilson

This valuable collection of essays brings leading Middle Eastern scholars together in one volume and provides an unparalleled view of the modern Middle East. Covering two centuries of change, from 1789 to the present, the selection is carefully designed for students and is the only available text of its kind. It will also appeal to anyone with a general interest in the Middle East.
The book is divided into four sections: Reforming Elites and Changing Relations with Europe, 1789-1918; Transformations in Society and Economy, 1789-1918; The Construction of Nationalist Ideologies and Politics up to the 1950s; and The Middle East since the Second World War.


Includes Roger Owen's case study that argues that much of what happened in Egypt in the 19th century is well accounted for in the theories of Marx, Hobson, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Baran. But there are three areas where the theories do not provide and adequate framework: the role of the metropolitan states in relation to their capitalists, the nature of the Egyptian state and the changes in the Egyptian social structure with imperial penetration produced.

Masada

Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealots' Last Stand
by Yigal Yadin

Respected historian and archaeologist Yigael Yadin is an expert on the well-known ancient Masada fortress, and here he presents the incredible story of the 960 Jewish men, women, and children who refused to be taken alive by Flavius Silva and his Roman Tenth Legion. This covers the siege of Masada, the mass suicide of the 960 rebels (when victory was clearly impossible they decided that "a death of glory was preferable to a life of infamy" (as prisoners)), and the 1963-1965 excavations at Masada that yielded a huge amount of artifacts that reveal even more about the rebels, who were led by Eleazar ben Yair. This is a compelling story made even better by the more than 200 photos showing all kinds of artifacts, including spearpoints, coins, pottery, jewelry, surviving Old Testament scrolls, skeletons, even clothing items that have survived to this day! There's also a generous amount of maps that are very helpful. This siege is one of the most interesting in military history, and this story is a lasting testament to the strong character of the Jewish people.

Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln

The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln
Translated by Marvin Lowenthal

Glückel of Hameln (also spelled Gluckel or Glikl of Hamelin; also known as Glikl bas Judah Leib) (1646, Hamburg – September 19, 1724, Metz) was a Jewish businesswoman and diarist, whose account of life provides scholars with an intimate picture of German Jewish communal life in the late-17th-early eighteenth century Jewish ghetto. It was a time of transition from the authority and autonomy of the Medieval kehilla, toward a more modern ethos in which membership in the community was voluntary and Jewish identity far more personal and existential; a time historian Jacob Katz has defined as 'tradition and crisis',in his 1961 book by that name. Written in Yiddish, her diaries were originally intended for her descendants. The first part is actually a living will urging them to live ethical lives. It was only much later that historians discovered the diaries and began to appreciate her account of life at that time.

Glückel grew up in the city of Hamburg. When she was twelve years old, her parents betrothed her to Hayyim of Hamelin, whom she married 1660. After the marriage, the couple lived in his parents’ home in Hamelin. A year after their marriage, the couple moved in with Glückel’s parents in Hamburg, where Hayyim became an affluent businessman. Already involved in his business during his lifetime, when he died in 1689, she took over the business, conducting trade with markets as far as Amsterdam, Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna, Metz and Paris.

In 1700 she remarried, to a banker from Metz in Lorraine, and relocated there. Two years later, her husband Cerf Levy failed financially, losing not only his own fortune but hers as well. He died in 1712, leaving her a widow for a second time. [Liptzin, 1972, 14]

In her diaries, begun after her first husband's death in 1689, she describes key events in both Jewish and world history, such as the messianic fervor surrounding Sabbatai Zevi or the impact of the Swedish wars waged by King Charles XII. At the same time, she also describes day-to-day life among the Jewish inhabitants of the Rhine valley. Other scholars point to the fact that they constitute an early document in Yiddish, predating the rise of modern Yiddish literature, while still others note that they were written by a woman, a rarity for Jewish texts from that period.

Black Folk Here and There, Vol. 2

Black Folk Here and There : An Essay in History and Anthropology, Volume II
by St. Clair Drake

To the Jews of pre-Christian Palestine, Black people were sometimes friends and sometimes enemies, but never objects of racially based derision or contempt. The ancient Greeks categorized people not as Black or white, but as ''civilized'' or ''uncivilized.'' In the Muslim world, many slaves were Blacks, but so were many soldiers, several prominent rulers, and an occasional saint. Armed with such facts gathered during a lifetime of research, St. Clair Drake in his final work, Black Folk Here and There, submits to the test of history a wide range of theories that attempt to explain what happens when Black people and white people interact and why color prejudice may arise.
In this volume, Drake challenges theories claiming that negative attitudes toward blackness and Black people, which emerged from centuries of racial slavery, have always prevailed. Drake finds telling evidence of color prejudice and equally telling evidence of its absence or irrelevance.

Renegade History of the United States

A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

In this groundbreaking book, noted historian Thaddeus Russell tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.

In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires—insiders versus outsiders, good citizens versus bad. The more these accidental revolutionaries existed, resisted, and persevered, the more receptive society became to change.

Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history’s iconoclasts who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined—saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain. He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, including “Diamond Jessie” Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion, and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.

Among Russell’s most controversial points is his argument that the enemies of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history books— he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.

This is not history that can be found in textbooks— it is a highly original and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written before.

“Three Views of Samuel and Joseph ibn Naghrela”

“Three Views of Samuel and Joseph ibn Naghrela”
edited by Olivia Remie Constable
from Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources

Account of Abd Allah ibn Buluggin
from The Tibyan

Poem by Abu Ishaq of Elvira
from Qasida

Account of Abraham ibn Daud
from The Book of Tradition

On December 30, 1066 (9 Tevet 4827), a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, which was at that time in Muslim-ruled al-Andalus, assassinated Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred many of the Jewish population of the city.

Joseph ibn Naghrela, or Joseph ha-Nagid (September 15, 1035 - December 30, 1066), was a vizier to the Berber king Badis al-Muzaffar of Granada, during the Moorish rule of Andalusia, and the leader of the Jewish community there.

Joseph was born in Granada, the eldest son of Rabbi Sh'muel ha-Nagid (Samuel ibn Naghrela).

Some information about his childhood and upbringing is preserved in the collection of his father's Hebrew poetry, which Joseph writes that he began copying at the age of eight and a half. For example, he tells how once (aged nine and a half, in the spring of 1045) he accompanied his father to battlefield, only to suffer from severe homesickness, about which he wrote a short poem.

His primary teacher was his father. On the basis of a letter to Rabbi Nissim Gaon attributed to him, in which Joseph refers to himself as R' Nissim's disciple, some claim that he also studied under R' Nissim at Kairwan. Joseph later married R' Nissim's daughter.

“The Battle of Alfuente”

“The Battle of Alfuente”

by Samuel ibn Naghrela

Samuel ibn Naghrela, also known as Samuel HaNagid, (born 993 - died after 1056), was a Talmudic scholar, grammarian, philologist, poet, warrior, and statesman, who lived in Iberia at the time of the Moorish rule.

Born in Mérida, his main poetic works include "Ben Tehillim" (Son of Psalms), "Ben Qoheleth" (Son of Ecclesiastes), and "Ben Mishlei" (Son of Proverbs), each of which imitates the "father work". His choice of poetic themes reflected his myriad occupations and personal world-view, including poems describing the battlefield using the analogy of a game of chess, poems speaking of the great beauty of nature, of which there are numerous, etc. His power in word choice of poetic portrayal of nature rivals that of the other great Jewish poets, namely ibn Saruk. He founded the Yeshiva that produced such brilliant scholars as R' Yitzhaq ibn Ghiath and R' Maimon ben Yosef (father of Maimonides).

He fled Córdoba when the Berbers took the city in 1013. For a while he ran a spice shop in Málaga, but eventually he moved to Granada, where he was first tax collector, then a secretary, and finally an assistant vizier to the Berber king Habbus al-Muzaffar.

When Habbus died in 1038, Samuel HaNagid made sure that his son Badis succeeded him. In return, Badis made Hanagid his vizier and top general, two posts which he held for the next seventeen years.

HaNagid's son Joseph ibn Naghrela inherited those jobs. Some Muslims accused Joseph of using his office to benefit Jewish friends, assassinated him, and launched a massacre of Granada's Jews the next day (December 31, 1066).

Migrations and Cultures

Migrations and Cultures: A World View

by Thomas Sowell

Migrations and Cultures goes beyond the political view of immigration and presents the whole phenomena of migration and immigration and the major role it plays in the general advancement of the human race.

Most commentators look at the issue of immigration from the viewpoint of immediate politics. In doing so, they focus on only a piece of the issue and lose touch with the larger picture. Now Thomas Sowell offers a sweeping historical and global look at a large number of migrations over a long period of time. Migrations and Cultures shows the persistence of cultural traits, in particular racial and ethnic groups, and the role these groups’ relocations play in redistributing skills, knowledge, and other forms of “human capital.” answers the question: What are the effects of disseminating the patterns of the particular set of skills, attitudes, and lifestyles each ethnic group has carried forth—both for the immigrants and for the host countries, in social as well as economic terms?

Thomas Sowell has taught economics at a number of colleges and universities, including Cornell, University of California Los Angeles, and Amherst. He has published both scholarly and popular articles and books on economics, and is currently a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Diary of a Young Girl

Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank's remarkable diary has since become a world classic -- a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit. In 1942, with Nazis occupying Holland, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl and her family fled their home in Amsterdam and went into hiding. For the next two years, until their whereabouts were betrayed to the Gestapo, they and another family lived cloistered in the "Secret Annex" of an old office building. Cut off from the outside world, they faced hunger, boredom, the constant cruelties of living in confined quarters, and the ever-present threat of discovery and death. In her diary Anne Frank recorded vivid impressions of her experiences during this period. By turns thoughtful, moving, and amusing, her account offers a fascinating commentary on human courage and frailty and a compelling self-portrait of a sensitive and spirited young woman whose promise was tragically cut short.