New Issue of the Jewish Quarterly Review: Spring 2020

JQR 110.2 is now available, online* and in print. 

In this issue:

Nathan Thiel enters the debate on the identity of Josephus’s “Galileans,” arguing that the historian saw some inhabitants of the region as an ethnos of their own.

Eve Krakowski reconstructs a form of menstrual purity practice in the medieval Middle East—quasibiblical, nonrabbinic, yet decidedly not Karaite—through a look at Maimonides’ aggressive campaign for menstrual purity reform in 1176.

David H. Price delves into the Jewish voices that the early modern historian Jacques Basnage incorporated as trusted sources into his famous History of the Jews, taking special care to include accounts of Christian persecution even while excising the sources’ theological perspectives.

Wojciech Tworek explores the enigmatic Hasidic educator Shimon Engel Horovits of Żelechów (1877–1943?), focusing on his vision of the yeshivah as an alternative solution to the crisis that befell Hasidic communities between the world wars.

Samuel Hayim Brody intervenes in a historiographical disparity in which modernity has been treated as a rupture in the sphere of politics and religion for Jews, but not in the sphere of the economy. He argues that closer attention to the concept of capitalism reveals an equivalent economic rupture after all.

In a review essay, Flora Cassen highlights two new books by Julie Mell and Francesca Trivellato that alter a widely accepted narrative about the Jewish contribution to the economic history of the West.

Check back here for more content related to these essays in the next few months. 

*The most recent four years of JQR are distributed online to subscribers by Project Muse.

Until June 30, 2020, this content is available for free without a subscription, in support of researchers impacted by the Covid-19 crisis.

As always, see jqr.pennpress.org to subscribe and get access to all 110 years of JQR content.