Pandemic and Plague: Echoes from the Jewish Past

In our own attempt to make sense of the radically altered world we now inhabit and to provide intellectual stimulation to our readers, the editors of JQR asked four prominent scholars to reflect on what historical and literary resonances the COVID-19 pandemic prompted in them. The forum below offers concise responses that move in time from the Black Death in the fourteenth century to Israel in the twentieth.

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Jewish Quarterly Review

JQR Contributor Conversation: Hadar Feldman Samet on Sabbatian Hymns

Hadar Feldman Samet’s essay Ottoman Songs in Sabbatian Manuscripts: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Inner Writings of the “Ma’aminim” (JQR 109.4) explores a little-known set of liturgical songs produced and used by members of the religious group devoted to Shabbetai Tsvi, a seventeenth-century messiah who was embraced by Jewish masses all over the world but then rejected by most after his conversion to Islam.

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Jewish Quarterly Review

Medieval Frenemies: Jewish and Christian Martyrs Had a Lot in Common

"Do not be saddened or troubled, good sister. Your brother will die today as a good Jew." These are the words reportedly spoken by a fourteenth-century mendicant friar, just before taking his own life. He had declared his conversion to Judaism, and despite his sister’s tearful entreaties, he chose a public and violent death over forcible return to his order. One Avraham ben Avraham Avinu, whose dramatic and literally iconoclastic antics made him the subject of at least three contemporary reports, did the same.

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Jewish Quarterly Review

The First Modern Syllabus: A. S. Yahuda at the University of Madrid

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Abraham S. Yahuda (1877–1951) was the first Jewish scholar to hold a chair in Jewish studies at a modern Western university—the University of Madrid. Here is the first known syllabus preserved by a modern professorial chair in Jewish studies. Neither of Yahuda’s nearest peers, Harry Wolfson at Harvard University and Salo W. Baron at Columbia University, seem to have safeguarded their original syllabi.
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Jewish Quarterly Review