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21H.914

Jewish History from Biblical to Modern Times

Undergraduate · Historical course

Fall 2007

This course explores how our views of Jewish history have been formed and how this history can explain the survival of the Jews as an ethnic/religious group into the present day. Special attention is given to the partial and fragmentary nature of our information about the past, and the difficulties inherent in decoding statements about the past that were written with a religious agenda in mind. It also considers complex events in Jewish history -- from early history as portrayed in the Bible to recent history, including the Holocaust.

Readings

  • Alter, Robert. “Genesis,” and “Exodus.” In The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary . New York, NY: Norton, 2004. ISBN: 9780393019551.
    Listed reading
  • Pelikan, Jaroslay. Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures through the Ages . New York, NY: Viking, 2005. ISBN: 9780670033850.
    Recommended
  • Scheindlin, Raymond P. A Short History of the Jewish People: from Legendary Times to Modern Statehood . New York, NY: Macmillan, 1998. ISBN: 9780028625867.
    Recommended
  • Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. Prologue, Introduction, and part one in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts . New York, NY: Free Press, 2002, pp. 1-145. ISBN: 9780684869131.
    Recommended
  • Stager, Lawrence E. “The Patrimonial Kingdom of Solomon.” In Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past: Canaan, Ancient Israel, and Their Neighbors from the Late Bronze Age through Roman Palaestina . Edited by William G. Dever and Seymour Gitin. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003, pp. 63-74. ISBN: 9781575060811.
    Recommended
  • Finkelstein, Israel, and Neil Asher Silberman. David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition . New York, NY: Free Press, 2007. ISBN: 9780743243636.
    Recommended
  • King, Philip J., and Lawrence E. Stager. Life in Biblical Israel . Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002, chapters 1-3, pp. 1-200. ISBN: 9780664221485.
    Recommended
  • Buy at MIT Press Temin, Peter. “Mediterranean Trade in Biblical Times.” Chapter 6 in Eli F. Heckscher, International Trade, and Economic History . Edited by Ronald Findlay, Rolf Henriksson, Håkan Lindgren, and Mats Lundahl. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006, pp. 141-156. ISBN: 9780262062510. ↗
    Recommended
  • Goodman, Martin. Introduction and part one in The Ruling Class of Judaea: The Origins of the Jewish Revolt against Rome, AD 66-70 . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 1-133. ISBN: 9780521334013.
    Recommended
  • Millar, Fergus. “The Background to the Maccabean Revolution: Reflections on Martin Hengel’s ‘Judaism and Hellenism.’” Journal of Jewish Studies 29 (1978): 1-21.
    Recommended
  • Berlin, Andrea M., and J. Andrew Overman, eds. The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology . New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 9780415257060.
    Recommended
  • Hopkins, Keith. A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire . London, UK: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999, chapters 2 and 8, pp. 46-75 and 287-332. ISBN: 9780297819820.
    Recommended
  • Goodman, Martin. “Trajan and the Origins of Roman Hostility to the Jews.” Past and Present 182 (February 2004): 3-31.
    Recommended
  • Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah . Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1987. ISBN: 9780664219116.
    Recommended
  • Steinberg, Milton. As a Driven Leaf . New York, NY: Behrman House, 1996 [1939]. ISBN: 9780874411034.
    Recommended
  • Klinghoffer, David. Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: the Turning Point in Western History . New York, NY: Doubleday, 2005. ISBN: 9780385510219.
    Recommended
  • Botticini, Maristella, and Zvi Eckstein. “Jewish Occupational Selection: Education, Restrictions or Minorities?” Journal of Economic History 65 (December 2005): 1-26.
    Recommended
  • Arbel, Ilil. Maimonides: A Spiritual Biography . New York, NY: Crossroads Publishing, 2001. ISBN: 9780824523596.
    Recommended
  • Goitein, S. D. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974. ISBN: 9780691052120.
    Recommended
  • Maimonides, Moses. A Maimonides Reader . Edited by Isadore Twersky. New York: Behrman House, 1972. ISBN: 9780874412000.
    Recommended
  • Kellner, Menachem. Must a Jew Believe Anything? Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1999. ISBN: 9781874774495.
    Recommended
  • Nuland, Sherwin B. Maimonides . New York, NY: Schocken, 2005. ISBN: 9780805242003.
    Recommended
  • Cohen, Mark R. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780691033785.
    Recommended
  • Glick, Leonard B. Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe . Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. ISBN: 9780585270739.
    Recommended
  • Cochran, Gregory, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending. “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.” Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (2005): 659-93.
    Recommended
  • Elon, Amos. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 . New York, NY: Picador, 2003, introduction and chapters 1-8. ISBN: 9780312422813.
    Recommended
  • Peretz, I. L. “The Shtraymel” [1894], and “If Not Higher” [1900]. In Classic Yiddish Stories . Edited by Ken Frieden. Translated by Ken Frieden, Ted Gorelick, and Michael Wex. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004, pp. 137-46 and 158-62. ISBN: 9780815607601.
    Recommended
  • Davis, Natalie Z. “Arguing with God: Glikl bas Judah Leib.” In Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 1-62. ISBN: 9780674955202.
    Recommended
  • Stille, Alexander. Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism . New York, NY: Summit Books, 1991, pp. 11-222, parts 1-3. ISBN: 9780671671525.
    Recommended
  • Heller, Celia S. On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars . Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1993. ISBN: 9780814324943.
    Recommended
  • Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity . New York, NY: Touchstone, 1996. ISBN: 9780684826806.
    Recommended
  • Dawidowicz, Lucy S. “Thinking About the Six Million: Facts, Figures, Perspectives.” In The Holocaust and the Historians . Edited by Lucy S. Dawidowicz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. ISBN: 9780674405677.
    Recommended
  • Wiesel, Eli. Night . New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2006. ISBN: 9780374500016.
    Recommended
  • Ringelblum, Emanuel. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto . New York, NY: Ibooks, Inc., 2006. ISBN: 9781596873315.
    Recommended
  • Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition . New York: Doubleday, 1995. ISBN: 9780385473781.
    Recommended
  • Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness . New York: Random House, 1998. ISBN: 9780679456964.
    Recommended
  • Satloff, Robert H. Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands . New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2006. ISBN: 9781586483999.
    Recommended
  • Metzer, Jacob. The Divided Economy of Mandatory Palestine . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1998], chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 4, pp. 1-27 and 84-103. ISBN: 9780521894388.
    Recommended
  • Gorenberg, Gershom. The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 . New York, NY: Times Books, 2006, chapters 1-2, pp. 7-71. ISBN: 9780805075649.
    Recommended
  • Stein, Leslie. The Hope Fulfilled: The Rise of Modern Israel . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. ISBN: 9780275978150.
    Recommended
  • Angrist, Joshua D. “Returns to Schooling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” American Economic Review 85, no. 5 (December 1995): 1065-1087.
    Recommended
  • Rubenstein, William D. “Jews in the Economic Elites of Western Nations and Anti-Semitism.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 42 (2000): 5-35.
    Recommended
  • Supple, Barry E. “A Business Elite: German-Jewish Financiers in Nineteenth-Century New York.” Business History Review 31 (Summer 1957): 143-78. Reprinted in The American Jewish Experience . 2nd ed. Edited by Jonathan D. Sarna. New York, NY: Holmes and Meier, 1997 [1986]. ISBN: 9780841913769.
    Recommended
  • Temin, Peter. “An Elite Minority: Jews among the Richest 400 Americans.” In Human Capital in Economic Growth . Edited by David Eltis, Frank Lewis, and Kenneth Sokoloff. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
    Recommended
  • Diner, Hasia R. The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780520227736.
    Recommended
  • Godley, Andrew. Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880-1914 . New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001. ISBN: 9780333960455.
    Recommended
  • Ross, Leonard G. The Education of Hyman Kaplan . New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1937. Also available from Prion Books, 2000. ISBN: 9781853753824.
    Recommended
  • Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint . New York, NY: Vintage, 1994. ISBN: 9780679756453.
    Recommended
  • Dershowitz, Alan M. The Vanishing American Jew . New York, NY: Little Brown, 1997. ISBN: 9780316181334.
    Recommended
  • Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century . Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780691119953.
    Recommended
Sources