Sefer Yosippon was evidently written in southern Italy. One manuscript has an internal colophon dated 953, the date claimed by its modern editor David Flusser. The book contains five themes: an initial chapter based on Genesis chapter 10 contemporizing the…
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…
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…
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…
Robert Eisler (1882-1949)
Robert Eisler, born in Vienna, was a Jewish scholar of ancient history, cosmology, myth, and economics. Trained at Vienna and Rome, Eisler served as head of the League of Nations’ Committee of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris between 1925-1931, and taught…
Micha Josef Berdyczewski (bin Gorion) (1865-1921)
Hebrew novelist, essayist, scholar, and thinker Micha Josef Berdyczewski was a life-long admirer of Josephus. An autobiographical short story, Be-Derech Rehokah (On a Long and Winding Road), describes Micha Josef’s first encounter with Sefer Yosippon (Book of Yosippon) as a…