Master Catalog of Yiddish Books

Download Master Catalog of Yiddish Books PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (225 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Master Catalog of Yiddish Books by :

Download or read book Master Catalog of Yiddish Books written by and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

On the Landing

Download On the Landing PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 160909249X
Total Pages : 143 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (9 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis On the Landing by : Yenta Mash

Download or read book On the Landing written by Yenta Mash and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-28 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these sixteen stories, available in English for the first time, prize-winning author Yenta Mash traces an arc across continents, across upheavals and regime changes, and across the phases of a woman's life. Mash's protagonists are often in transit, poised "on the landing" on their way to or from somewhere else. In imaginative, poignant, and relentlessly honest prose, translated from the Yiddish by Ellen Cassedy, Mash documents the lost world of Jewish Bessarabia, the texture of daily life behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Moldova, and the challenges of assimilation in Israel. On the Landing opens by inviting us to join a woman making her way through her ruined hometown, recalling the colorful customs of yesteryear—and the night when everything changed. We then travel into the Soviet gulag, accompanying women prisoners into the fearsome forests of Siberia. In postwar Soviet Moldova, we see how the Jewish community rebuilds itself. On the move once more, we join refugees struggling to find their place in Israel. Finally, a late-life romance brings a blossoming of joy. Drawing on a lifetime of repeated uprooting, Mash offers an intimate perch from which to explore little-known corners of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. A master chronicler of exile, she makes a major contribution to the literature of immigration and resilience, adding her voice to those of Jhumpa Lahiri, W. G. Sebald, André Aciman, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Mash's literary oeuvre is a brave achievement, and her work is urgently relevant today as displaced people seek refuge across the globe.

Yiddish in Israel

Download Yiddish in Israel PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253045169
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Yiddish in Israel by : Rachel Rojanski

Download or read book Yiddish in Israel written by Rachel Rojanski and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A pioneering study” of how two languages have coexisted in the Jewish state, with “a wealth of information” on Yiddish newspapers, theater, and more (AJS Review). Yiddish in Israel: A History challenges the commonly held view that Yiddish was suppressed or even banned by Israeli authorities for ideological reasons, offering instead a radical new interpretation of the interaction between Yiddish and Israeli Hebrew cultures. Rachel Rojanski tells the compelling unknown story of how Yiddish, the most widely used Jewish language in the pre-Holocaust world, fared in Zionist Israel, the land of Hebrew. Following Yiddish in Israel from the proclamation of the State until today, Rojanski reveals that although Israeli leadership made promoting Hebrew a high priority, it did not have a definite policy on Yiddish. The language’s varying fortune through the years was shaped by social and political developments, as well as the cultural atmosphere in Israel. Public perception of the language and its culture, the rise of identity politics, and political and financial interests all played a part. Using a wide range of archival sources, newspapers, and Yiddish literature, Rojanski follows the Israeli Yiddish scene through the history of the Yiddish press, Yiddish theater, early Israeli Yiddish literature, and high Yiddish culture. With compassion, she explores the tensions during Israel’s early years between Yiddish writers and activists and Israel’s leaders, most of whom were themselves Eastern European Jews balancing their love of Yiddish with their desire to promote Hebrew. Finally Rojanski follows Yiddish into the twenty-first century, telling the story of the revived interest in Yiddish among Israeli-born children of Holocaust survivors as they return to the language of their parents.

Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories

Download Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 0307795241
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (77 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories by : Sholem Aleichem

Download or read book Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories written by Sholem Aleichem and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2011-08-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the compassionate, irrepressible, Bible-quoting dairyman from Anatevka, who has been immortalized in the writings of Sholem Aleichem and in acclaimed and award-winning theatrical and film adaptations. And no Yiddish writer was more beloved than Tevye’s creator, Sholem Rabinovich (1859–1916), the “Jewish Mark Twain,” who wrote under the pen name of Sholem Aleichem. Beautifully translated by Hillel Halkin, here is Sholem Aleichem’s heartwarming and poignant account of Tevye and his daughters, together with the “Railroad Stories,” twenty-one tales that examine human nature and modernity as they are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.

The Yeshiva

Download The Yeshiva PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MacMillan Publishing Company
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.X/5 (2 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Yeshiva by : Chaim Grade

Download or read book The Yeshiva written by Chaim Grade and published by MacMillan Publishing Company. This book was released on 1976 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Yeshiva: Masters and Disciples is the second and concluding volume of Chaim Grade's masterwork. Continuing the moving story of Tsemakh Atlas, head of the Yeshiva, Grade re-creates the rich world of his native city Vilna in pre-World War II Lithuania. The now-vanished Eastern European Jewish community was inhabited by the pious and the heretical, the righteous and the sinful, the wise and the foolish. Religion was as crucial to living, and as much a part of Grade's people, as their daily bread. How they reacted to it - and, through it, to one another - formed the core of day-to-day life. Each problem, each experience was felt through the teachings of Tsemakh Atlas. Chaim Grade has brought his striking characters to full life, revealing them in all their glory and pain. The Yeshiva is a brilliant work that mourns, and finally locks into memory, a culture sadly lost in reality but eternal in spirit.

Catalog of the Gerald K. Stone Collection of Judaica

Download Catalog of the Gerald K. Stone Collection of Judaica PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
ISBN 13 : 164469476X
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (446 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Catalog of the Gerald K. Stone Collection of Judaica by : Gerald K. Stone

Download or read book Catalog of the Gerald K. Stone Collection of Judaica written by Gerald K. Stone and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gerald K. Stone has collected books about Canadian Jewry since the early 1980s. This volume is a descriptive catalog of his Judaica collection, comprising nearly 6,000 paper or electronic documentary resources in English, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Logically organized, indexed, and selectively annotated, the catalog is broad in scope, covering Jewish Canadian history, biography, religion, literature, the Holocaust, antisemitism, Israel and the Middle East, and more. An introduction by Richard Menkis discusses the significance of the Catalog and collecting for the study of the Jewish experience in Canada. An informative bibliographical resource, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Canadian and North American Jewish studies.

The Book Smugglers

Download The Book Smugglers PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University Press of New England
ISBN 13 : 1512601268
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (126 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Book Smugglers by : David E. Fishman

Download or read book The Book Smugglers written by David E. Fishman and published by University Press of New England. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts-first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets-by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion-including the readiness to risk one's life-to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author's interviews with several of the story's participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi "expert" on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city's great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed "the Paper Brigade," and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group's worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto's secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet "liberation" of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved-only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR. Thoroughly researched by the foremost scholar of the Vilna Ghetto-a writer of exceptional daring, style, and reach-The Book Smugglers is an epic story of human heroism, a little-known tale from the blackest days of the war.

Yiddish Civilisation

Download Yiddish Civilisation PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307430332
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (74 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Yiddish Civilisation by : Paul Kriwaczek

Download or read book Yiddish Civilisation written by Paul Kriwaczek and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Kriwaczek begins this illuminating and immensely pleasurable chronicle of Yiddish civilization during the Roman empire, when Jewish culture first spread to Europe. We see the burgeoning exile population disperse, as its notable diplomats, artists and thinkers make their mark in far-flung cities and found a self-governing Yiddish world. By its late-medieval heyday, this economically successful, intellectually adventurous, and self-aware society stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Kriwaczek traces, too, the slow decline of Yiddish culture in Europe and Russia, and highlights fresh offshoots in the New World.Combining family anecdote, travelogue, original research, and a keen understanding of Yiddish art and literature, Kriwaczek gives us an exceptional portrait of a culture which, though nearly extinguished, has an influential radiance still.

A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas

Download A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780814318492
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (184 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas by : Ruth R. Wisse

Download or read book A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas written by Ruth R. Wisse and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The five short novellas which comprise this anthology were written between 1890 and World War I. All share a common setting--the Eastern European Jewish town or shtetl, and all deal in different ways with a single topic--the Jewish confrontation with modernity. The authors of these novellas are among the greatest masters of Yiddish prose. In their work, today's reader will discover a literary tradition of considerable scope, energy, and variety and will come face to face with an exceptionally memorable cast of characters and with a human community now irrevocably lost. In her general introduction, Professor Wisse traces the development of modern Yiddish literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the many shifts that took place between the Yiddish writers and the world about which they wrote. She also furnishes a brief introduction for each novella, giving the historical and biographical background and offering a critical interpretation of the work.

One Hundred Great Jewish Books

Download One Hundred Great Jewish Books PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Bluebridge
ISBN 13 : 9781933346311
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (463 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis One Hundred Great Jewish Books by : Lawrence A. Hoffman

Download or read book One Hundred Great Jewish Books written by Lawrence A. Hoffman and published by Bluebridge. This book was released on 2011 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over many centuries, Judaism has consistently demonstrated a particular fondness for books and literacy, and this guide allows readers to listen in on the Jewish conversation across many centuries?from the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic masterpieces to the pressing subjects of the early 21st century. It introduces great works of biography, spirituality, theology, poetry, fiction, history, and political theory. With a special focus on modern American Jewish life and the two core events of contemporary Jewish history?the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel?this overview guides readers to books espousing virtually all types of historic and modern Judaic expression. Each of the chronologically arranged entries examines one title within its historical context, provides information about the author, and gives a clear and focused summary of its content.

My Mother's Sabbath Days

Download My Mother's Sabbath Days PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Jason Aronson, Incorporated
ISBN 13 : 1461629667
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (616 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis My Mother's Sabbath Days by : Chaim Grade

Download or read book My Mother's Sabbath Days written by Chaim Grade and published by Jason Aronson, Incorporated. This book was released on 1997-05-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tender and moving memoir by the great Yiddish writer Chaim Grade takes us to the very source of his widely praised novels and poems—the city of Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," during the years before World War II. Centered on the figure of Grade's mother, Vella—simple, pious, hard-working—this is a richly detailed account of the ghetto of his youth, of the lives of the rabbis, the wives, the tradesmen, the peddlers, and the scholars. We see Vella, desperate after losing her husband, become a fruit-peddler, struggling to survive poverty and to remain true to her faith in the face of human pettiness and cruelty. We follow Grade as he walks in the footsteps of his scholar father, a champion of enlightenment; we see him entering marriage, and his mother finding some peace of mind in a marriage of her own—all of this in a world recalled with extraordinary physical and emotional intensity. Then, World War II. The partition of Poland between the Soviet Union and Germany is followed by the new German invasion of June 1941. Grade—believing, as do so many others, that the Nazis pose a danger chiefly to able-bodied men like himself—flees into Russia. In his travels on foot and by train he meets a fascinating, kaleidoscopic array of characters: the disillusioned Communist Lev Kogan; the durachok, or simpleton, a young prisoner who, mistaken for a German spy, is shot when he jumps from a train; the once-prosperous lawyer, Orenstein, who virtually becomes a beggar, dies and is buried by strangers in a remote Central Asian village. With the war's end, Grade returns to Vilna—to find the ghetto in ruins, to learn that his wife and his mother have gone to their deaths—and he is left with nothing but memories. But it is here, amid the devastation of a people, that he finds the compulsion and the passion to commit to paper the world that has been lost.

No masters but God

Download No masters but God PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 1526149028
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (261 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis No masters but God by : Hayyim Rothman

Download or read book No masters but God written by Hayyim Rothman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forgotten legacy of religious Jewish anarchism, and the adventures and ideas of its key figures, finally comes to light in this book. Set in the decades surrounding both world wars, No masters but God identifies a loosely connected group of rabbis and traditionalist thinkers who explicitly appealed to anarchist ideas in articulating the meaning of the Torah, traditional practice, Jewish life and the mission of modern Jewry. Full of archival discoveries and first translations from Yiddish and Hebrew, it explores anarcho-Judaism in its variety through the works of Yaakov Meir Zalkind, Yitshak Nahman Steinberg, Yehudah Leyb Don-Yahiya, Avraham Yehudah Heyn, Natan Hofshi, Shmuel Alexandrov, Yehudah Ashlag and Aaron Shmuel Tamaret. With this ground-breaking account, Hayyim Rothman traces a complicated story about the modern entanglement of religion and anarchism, pacifism and Zionism, prophetic anti-authoritarianism and mystical antinomianism.

Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy, and Burn All Jewish Books

Download Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy, and Burn All Jewish Books PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Paulist Press
ISBN 13 : 9780809139729
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (397 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy, and Burn All Jewish Books by : Johann Reuchlin

Download or read book Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy, and Burn All Jewish Books written by Johann Reuchlin and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While he was condemned himself for his stand, the book opened the eyes of scholars and political leaders to the need to understand and appreciate the wealth of religious truth and insight in the Talmud and other works. Reuchlin did not stop anti-Semitism in the Reformation by either Catholics or Protestants, but he stemmed the advance of those vowed to wipe Judaism out in Europe and began the long, slow movement in the West to appreciate and learn what Judaism really was."--BOOK JACKET.

The Cross

Download The Cross PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1480440809
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (84 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Cross by : Lamed Shapiro

Download or read book The Cross written by Lamed Shapiro and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “skilled translators of this admirably edited volume” offer English-speaking readers the chance to savor this Yiddish author’s “tale-telling power” (Harold Bloom). Lamed Shapiro (1878–1948) was the author of groundbreaking and controversial short stories, novellas, and essays. Himself a tragic figure, Shapiro led a life marked by frequent ocean crossings, alcoholism, and failed ventures, yet his writings are models of precision, psychological insight, and daring. Shapiro focuses intently on the nature of violence: the mob violence of pogroms committed against Jews; the traumatic aftereffects of rape, murder, and powerlessness; the murderous event that transforms the innocent child into witness and the rabbi’s son into agitator. Within a society on the move, Shapiro’s refugees from the shtetl and the traditional way of life are in desperate search of food, shelter, love, and things of beauty. Remarkably, and against all odds, they sometimes find what they are looking for. More often than not, the climax of their lives is an experience of ineffable terror. This collection also reveals Lamed Shapiro as an American master. His writings depict the Old World struggling with the New, extremes of human behavior combined with the pursuit of normal happiness. Through the perceptions of a remarkable gallery of men, women, children—of even animals and plants—Shapiro successfully reclaimed the lost world of the shtetl as he negotiated East Broadway and the Bronx, Union Square, and vaudeville. Both in his life and in his unforgettable writings, Lamed Shapiro personifies the struggle of a modern Jewish artist in search of an always elusive home.

Master of Dreams

Download Master of Dreams PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Harper Perennial
ISBN 13 : 9780060739331
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (393 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Master of Dreams by : Dvorah M. Telushkin

Download or read book Master of Dreams written by Dvorah M. Telushkin and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 2004-06-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1975, twenty-one-year-old Dvorah Telushkin wrote a letter to the great Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, offering to drive him to and from a creative writing class in return for permission to attend the course. The literary master, then seventy-one, accepted the offer, which led to a twelve-year-long apprenticeship for Telushkin. Throughout Dvorah Telushkin's tenure with Singer, she kept detailed diaries chronicling both their literary efforts and the evolution of their personal relationship. Indeed, Telushkin was the one person to whom Singer tried to teach his craft as a writer. She writes about the great moments in Singer's public life, his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, his fiery encounter with the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, his surprising meeting with Barbra Streisand, who adapted and starred in the movie version of Singer's short story "Yentl." But the private Singer is revealed as well, the "merry pessimist" haunted by despair and torn between the old-world ethic of his Hasidic forebears in Europe and the moral abandon of modern secular man.

Bad Rabbi

Download Bad Rabbi PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503603970
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Bad Rabbi by : Eddy Portnoy

Download or read book Bad Rabbi written by Eddy Portnoy and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

Prince of the Press

Download Prince of the Press PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300234902
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Prince of the Press by : Joshua Teplitsky

Download or read book Prince of the Press written by Joshua Teplitsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Oppenheim (1664-1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. The story of his life and library brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky's book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.--Publisher's website.