Jewish History from Biblical to Modern Times

Readings

WEEK #	TOPICS	READINGS	STUDY QUESTIONS
1	The Torah	Alter, Robert. “Genesis,” and “Exodus.” In The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York, NY: Norton, 2004. ISBN: 9780393019551. Recommended Pelikan, Jaroslay. Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures through the Ages. New York, NY: Viking, 2005. ISBN: 9780670033850. Scheindlin, Raymond P. A Short History of the Jewish People: from Legendary Times to Modern Statehood. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1998. ISBN: 9780028625867.	(PDF)
2	The bible as history	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. 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.	(PDF)
3	Life in biblical Israel	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 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.	(PDF)
4	Jewish revolts	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. Berlin, Andrea M., and J. Andrew Overman, eds. The First Jewish Revolt: Archaeology, History, and Ideology. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. ISBN: 9780415257060.	(PDF)
5	Religious change in Roman times	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. 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. Steinberg, Milton. As a Driven Leaf. New York, NY: Behrman House, 1996 [1939]. ISBN: 9780874411034. Klinghoffer, David. Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: the Turning Point in Western History. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2005. ISBN: 9780385510219.	(PDF)
6	The first millenium and Maimonides	Botticini, Maristella, and Zvi Eckstein. “Jewish Occupational Selection: Education, Restrictions or Minorities?” Journal of Economic History 65 (December 2005): 1-26. 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. Maimonides, Moses. A Maimonides Reader. Edited by Isadore Twersky. New York: Behrman House, 1972. ISBN: 9780874412000. Kellner, Menachem. Must a Jew Believe Anything? Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 1999. ISBN: 9781874774495. Nuland, Sherwin B. Maimonides. New York, NY: Schocken, 2005. ISBN: 9780805242003.	(PDF)
7	Exam on readings	(no readings)
8	Medieval Jews	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. Cochran, Gregory, Jason Hardy, and Henry Harpending. “Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.” Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (2005): 659-93.	(PDF)
9	Early Modern Jewry	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. 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.	(PDF)
10	Jews in interwar Europe	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.	(PDF)
11	The Holocaust	Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. New York, NY: Touchstone, 1996. ISBN: 9780684826806. 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. Ringelblum, Emanuel. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto. New York, NY: Ibooks, Inc., 2006. ISBN: 9781596873315. Frank, Anne. The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1995. ISBN: 9780385473781. Klemperer, Victor. I Will Bear Witness. New York: Random House, 1998. ISBN: 9780679456964. Satloff, Robert H. Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands. New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2006. ISBN: 9781586483999.	(PDF)
12	The Mandate and Israel	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. 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. Angrist, Joshua D. “Returns to Schooling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” American Economic Review 85, no. 5 (December 1995): 1065-1087.	(PDF)
13	Jews in the United States Exam on readings	Rubenstein, William D. “Jews in the Economic Elites of Western Nations and Anti-Semitism.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 42 (2000): 5-35. 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. 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. Godley, Andrew. Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880-1914. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001. ISBN: 9780333960455. Ross, Leonard G. The Education of Hyman Kaplan. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1937. Also available from Prion Books, 2000. ISBN: 9781853753824. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York, NY: Vintage, 1994. ISBN: 9780679756453. Dershowitz, Alan M. The Vanishing American Jew. New York, NY: Little Brown, 1997. ISBN: 9780316181334. Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780691119953.	(PDF)
14	Review, summary, and discussion	(no readings)