A Seventeenth-Century Autobiography: A Picture of Jewish Life in Bohemia and Moravia. From a Manuscript in the Jewish Theological Seminary

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi. He grew up between 1908–1917 in Warsaw and from 1917–1921 in Bilgoray (Biłgoraj), which shaped his knowledge of small-town Jewish life. The younger brother of Yiddish writers Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, Singer began reading secular literature at 10, and after years of religious study, he eventually followed his brother into Warsaw’s bohemian literary Yiddish community, translating several modern writers into Yiddish. Singer’s first novel, Der Sotn in Goray [Satan in Goray], set in seventeenth-century Poland with the background of pogroms and the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, appeared in 1934, and the next year, he joined Israel Joshua in New York City where both wrote for the Yiddish press. In 1950, Singer married Alma Haimann Wassermann, a German Jewish immigrant from a once-wealthy family, who supported the couple by working as a retail clerk. Singer wrote in Yiddish for his entire life; most of his novels were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward Yiddish newspaper. Unlike most great Yiddish writers, he found success in translation, particularly after Saul Bellow’s translation of the story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ appeared in Partisan Review in 1953.

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Outside the Ghetto: Jews and Christians in the Duchy of Modena

Journal of Early Modern History ◽

10.1163/15700658-12342368 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 17 (3) ◽

pp. 245-271

Author(s):

Katherine Aron-Beller

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Social Relations ◽

Rural Areas ◽

Jewish Life ◽

The Political ◽

The Past ◽

Jewish Immigrants ◽

City States ◽

Main City

Abstract Historians have in the past concentrated their studies of early modern Jewish life on the main city-states of Northern Italy where the largest Jewish communities existed. These areas have been categorized as territories which absorbed Jewish immigrants, enclosed them in ghettos, and monitored their actions with the creation of specific agencies. My essay turns to Jewish existence in the smaller towns and rural areas of the duchy of Modena in the seventeenth century, and attempts to question how this alienated minority was able to fare in areas which housed no ghettos. Here the political and religious decentralization, particularly in the early seventeenth century, generated retaliatory hostility as well as intimacy between Jews and Christians. Sources for this study will be Inquisitorial documents that concerned professing Jews. These sources, once decoded, provide extraordinarily rich images of daily life and provide a unique picture of social relations between the two religionists.

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THE ABIDING LEGACY OF THE REFORMATION’S CONFESSIONAL ORTHODOXY: THE REQUIRED VOWS OF WESTMINSTER SEMINARY PROFESSORS AND NAPARC MINISTERS

VERBUM CHRISTI: JURNAL TEOLOGI REFORMED INJILI ◽

10.51688/vc6.2.2019.art2 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 109-132

Author(s):

Peter Lillback

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

North American ◽

Historical Overview ◽

Historical Survey ◽

Theological Seminary ◽

The North ◽

The Reformation

This article revisits how Christians since almost two millenniums have made use of creeds and confessions. Especially confessional vows used at Westminster Theological Seminary, also refer to the vows of the churches who are members of NAPARC (The North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council). First, it examines the historical overview of various Reformed confessions, and historical survey of Reformed confessions from the Reformation to the present. Then, Westminster seminary's Presbyterian and Reformed heritage, and finally, authority of and subscription to the confessions. To define Reformed confessional theology which arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, this article include the table of the confessions of Westminster seminary or the NAPARC churches. KEYWORDS: creeds, confessions, Westminster, Reformed.

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Jacob Ṣemaḥ, Humanist

European Journal of Jewish Studies ◽

10.1163/1872471x-bja10032 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-24

Author(s):

J. H. Chajes

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Jewish Life ◽

Educational Background ◽

Humanist Education ◽

Curriculum Vitae

Abstract Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ was responsible for the consolidation of the Lurianic literary corpus in the second third of the seventeenth century. His contribution, I argue, should be situated in the broader context of a scholarly curriculum vitae that began decades before his flight from Portugal, as Ṣemaḥ embraced Jewish life as a humanist. Coupled with his natural gifts and genius, Ṣemaḥ’s humanist education served him remarkably well in his new life. The interesting question is therefore not “how might he have learned Torah in Portugal” but “how did his Portuguese educational background affect—indeed, effect may be the more apt term—his Jewish scholarship?”

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