Lion Feuchtwanger was a prolific and internationally famous German-Jewish writer. His exhaustively researched historical novels (or plays) often dealt with themes from Jewish history. In Munich, he had an orthodox Jewish education, mastering Hebrew at an early age. Later studies…
Masada as Pilgrimage Site
The publication of Simchoni’s updated Hebrew translation of Josephus’s Jewish War in l923 and of the poem ‘Masada’ by Isaac Lamdan in l927, enhanced the impact of the Masada resistance and the defenders’ suicides as a model of heroism. The…
Josephus on Trial
Mock trials of Josephus, in which he faced accusations of treason, were held regularly between the 1920s and the 1970s in both schools and youth movements within the Zionist education system. The historian was prosecuted and defended, investigated and judged,…
Itzḥak Katzenelson (1886-1944)
Katzenelson was a distinguished teacher, Hebrew and Yiddish poet, and dramatist, born in Karelitz, near Minsk, Belarus. During the Second World War, he was trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the uprising he escaped but was arrested by the Germans…
Itzḥak Rudashevski (1927-1943)
Itzhak Rudashevski was born in Vilna into a middle-class Jewish family. When the Nazis entered Vilna (June 1941) he started to write a diary in Yiddish which was continued until 6 April 1943. Rudashevski and his family were killed in…
Alfred Edersheim (1825-1889)
Alfred Edersheim was a Christian scholar, preacher, and novelist. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family, he converted to Presbyterianism later in life. He lived in Scotland and England, and authored a number of books, especially on Jewish and Christian…
Jacob Hamburger (1826-1911)
Born in Loslau, Silesia (Poland), Jacob Hamburger was a scholar and a rabbi, who served in Neustadt and later in Mecklenburg-Strelitz. He was the author of the Real-Encyklopädie für Bibel und Talmud (later the Real-Encyklopädie des Judentums 1874-1903). In a…
Moritz Horschetzky (1788-1859)
A Jewish doctor, amateur historian, and philologist from the Bohemian town Nový Bydžov (Neubidschow). He married into the most important family in Nagy Kanisza / Groß Kanischa (Hungary), the Lackenbachers; subsequently he played an active role in this community, served…
Peter Beer (1758-1838)
Peter Beer was a teacher, textbook writer, and historian from the Bohemian town Nový Bydžov (Neubidschow). Beer belonged to the first cohort of Habsburg Jews to enroll in a teachers’ seminar in the 1780s and thereafter held teaching positions in…
Kalman Schulman (1819-1899)
Kalman Schulman who lived and worked in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, was an important agent of culture in his time and a prominent member of the Jewish Enlightenment movement in Eastern Europe, but was later almost totally forgotten and neglected. The…
Simon Dubnow (1860-1941)
Simon Dubnow (Semen Markovich Dubnov) – who was born in Mstislavl, Belorussia, and died in Riga, Latvia – was a Russian-Jewish self-educated historian, journalist, and political thinker. Dubnow was the author of groundbreaking histories of the Jews in Russia and…
Mark Nemzer (1833-1912)
Mark Osipovich Nemzer was a graduate and instructor of the Vilna (Vilnius) Rabbinical seminary, government rabbi of Vilna, and teacher at the women’s gymnasium in Vilna. In 1880, Nemzer published a textbook on Jewish history in Russian, called ‘History of…
Menahem Amelander (1698-bef.1749)
In 1743 the well-known Amsterdam Jewish printer Naphtali Herz Rofe and his son-in-law Kosman ben Joseph Baruch published two related titles: first, a new Yiddish edition of the medieval history book Sefer Yosippon; second, a completely new title, also in…
Jacques Basnage (1653-1723)
One of the most prolific authors in the Huguenot diaspora following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was Jacques Basnage de Beauval (1653-1723). While serving as a pastor to the Walloon Reformed Churches in Rotterdam and The…
Josephus and Jewish Orthodoxy
The approach to Josephus in modern Jewish orthodoxy has not been monolithic, and there were two main strands. Early commentators had frequently cited the Book of Yosippon, which they identified with the works of Josephus, and thus, from the viewpoint…