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During the fourteenth century, there was a general demoralization in the Jewish community in Spain. Many Jews were on the brink of conversion. Rabbi Crescas met the Christian challenge by writing this pithy book refuting the principles of the Christian religion. He argued that the basic Christian doctrines, namely, original sin, salvation, trinity, incarnation, virgin birth, transubstantiation, baptism, the messiah, a new covenant, and demons, contradict human reason, thereby calling into question Christianity’s claim to be a true religion. The Refutation is an important document of the medieval Jewish-Christian debate and is also especially important for the history of Jewish philosophy in general.

A landmark new translation of the most significant text in medieval Jewish thought. Written in Arabic and completed around 1190, the Guide to the Perplexed is among the most powerful and influential living texts in Jewish philosophy, a masterwork navigating the straits between religion and science, logic and revelation. The author, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides or as Rambam, was a Sephardi Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician. He wrote his Guide in the form of a letter to a disciple. But the perplexity it aimed to cure might strike anyone who sought to square logic, mathematics, and the sciences with biblical and rabbinic traditions. In this new translation by philosopher Lenn E. Goodman and historian Phillip I. Lieberman, Maimonides' warm, conversational voice and clear explanatory language come through as never before in English. Maimonides knew well the challenges facing serious inquirers at the confluence of the two great streams of thought and learning that Arabic writers labeled 'aql and naql, reason and tradition. The aim of the Guide, he wrote, is to probe the mysteries of physics and metaphysics. But mysteries, to Maimonides, were not conundrums to be celebrated for their obscurity. They were problems to be solved. Maimonides' methods and insights resonate throughout the work of later Jewish thinkers, rationalists, and mystics, and in the work of philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton. The Guide continues to inspire inquiry, discovery, and vigorous debate among philosophers, theologians, and lay readers today. Goodman and Lieberman's extensive and detailed commentary provides readers with historical context and philosophical enlightenment, giving generous access to the nuances, complexities, and profundities of what is widely agreed to be the most significant textual monument of medieval Jewish thought, a work that still offers a key to those who hope to harmonize religious commitments and scientific understanding.

During the fourteenth century, there was a general demoralization in the Jewish community in Spain. Many Jews were on the brink of conversion. Rabbi Crescas met the Christian challenge by writing this pithy book refuting the principles of the Christian religion. He argued that the basic Christian doctrines, namely, original sin, salvation, trinity, incarnation, virgin birth, transubstantiation, baptism, the messiah, a new covenant, and demons, contradict human reason, thereby calling into question Christianity's claim to be a true religion. The Refutation is an important document of the medieval Jewish-Christian debate and is also especially important for the history of Jewish philosophy in general.

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Ba?ya ibn Paquda's Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha. Overturning perceptions of Ba?ya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of \"inner commandments\" developed by Ba?ya. Interiority and Law reveals that Ba?ya's main effort revolved around establishing a new legal formation—namely, the \"duties of the hearts\"—which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Ba?ya's radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Ba?ya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam. Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Ba?ya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law.

Early Modern Jewry boldly offers a new history of the early modern Jewish experience. From Krakow and Venice to Amsterdam and Smyrna, David Ruderman examines the historical and cultural factors unique to Jewish communities throughout Europe, and how these distinctions played out amidst the rest of society. Looking at how Jewish settlements in the early modern period were linked to one another in fascinating ways, he shows how Jews were communicating with each other and were more aware of their economic, social, and religious connections than ever before.

In 1612, the Jewish polymath David Gans (1541–1613) published a prospectus for his astronomical-cosmological work Magen David in the Prague printing press of Moses ben Joseph Betsalel Katz. The prospectus is preserved as a slightly damaged unicum in the Bodleian Library of Oxford (Opp. 4° 417 [4]). Gans died almost exactly one year after the prospectus was published, before the entire work was printed. A comparison of the list of chapters in the prospectus with the surviving earlier version of the work (MS Hamburg, Cod. hebr. 273) and with the later printed version (Jessnitz 1743 as Neḥmad ve-naʿim) allows us to reconstruct with some exactitude how Gans proceeded with his work on the book in the years before and after the prospectus was published. It appears that during the last year of his life Gans expanded his Magen David with additional chapters. Some of this material is incongruous with the original focus of the work and it likely originated in another of Gans’s works, Migdal David on mathematics and geometry, which Gans must have feared would otherwise not be published. The analysis of the position of Magen David among Gans’s other known writings, including those that have not survived, suggests that Magen David, together with the historical Ṣemaḥ David (Prague 1592) and Migdal David (now lost), formed the trio of works that Gans valued most highly. This is why he gave them titles that contained an allusion to his own name. The title Neḥmad ve-naʿim, under which Magen David was later printed, is thus most likely not authentic. The text of the prospectus contains an extensive commendation from Yom-Ṭov Lipmann Heller, approbations of three Prague rabbis, and a preface by Gans, which allows us to clarify his attitude towards theoretical astronomy. The publication of a modern complete edition of the prospectus should therefore be a useful contribution to the study of Jewish science at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Dialectic of Separation analyzes the complex relationship between Judaism and philosophy in the thought of the nineteenth-century German–Jewish orientalist and philosopher Salomon Munk. Drawing on both published and on unpublished sources, appearing here for the first time, it offers the first-ever comprehensive reconstruction of Salomon Munk’s life and work. Munk, who emigrated from his native Glogau to Paris to pursue his studies, was to exert a major influence on the development of Islamic and Jewish studies in both France and Germany, giving a vital impetus to the debate over the nature of Jewish philosophy at a time when medieval Jewish philosophers (such as Maimonides) and their Arabic and Islamic sources were completely neglected in philosophical historiography.

This is the first scholarly English translation with annotations of the Ze`enah U-Re`enah, a Jewish classic first published in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the most widely read work of Yiddish literature for centuries. It was the first significant anthological commentary to the Torah, Haftarot and five Megillot. This work provides an accessible introduction to the Jewish tradition of Biblical interpretation.