Read e-book online The Jewish Community: Its History and Structure to the PDF

By Salo Wittmayer Baron

Original 12 months of publication: 1942

Preface
Jewish communal heritage in the course of the millennia of diaspora lifestyles has lengthy been the topic of substantial scholarly cognizance. the ecu group of the pre-Emancipation period, particularly, has for many years attracted smooth investigators through its quite a few notable gains. Its outstanding blend of spiritual and secular authority, its virtually “extraterritorial” prestige and “sovereign” political powers and its overwhelming keep an eye on over its participants have flattered the political targets of nationally minded glossy Jews, yet antagonized many reformers and anti-segregationists. Philo-Sémites and anti-Semites one of the non-Jews, too, have usually held certain evaluations in regards to the “ghetto” neighborhood. Like their Jewish confreres, besides the fact that, they, too, have often substituted one or one other bias for trustworthy info and sound reasoning. it really is was hoping that this primary try out at a complete ancient and sociological research of the whole communal evolution to the Emancipation period may help to advertise readability, if no longer unanimity of appraisal.

Apart from the standard embarrassment in defining the hugely ambiguous time period “community” — it really is used the following within the winning, organizational experience that is even narrower than that of the German Gemeinde — scholars of communal elements of Jewish background are beset via opposing problems: an severe dearth of fabric for sure components and sessions and a plethora of extant details on different areas and epochs. glossy literature at the topic, too, is erratically disbursed and lots more and plenty repetition in a single box is annoyed via approximately overall silence in others. the current writer has made an attempt to keep up the relative proportions of some of the stages of his ramified subject despite this quantitative disparity. within the use of the gigantic and important literature of rabbinic responsa, for instance, he has been guided mostly via the significance of the nations or centuries in their provenance. consultant samples from various parts and sessions have been thought of extra promising than mere focus on works of some remarkable masters, even if nice a power the latter can have wielded at the next evolution of Jewish law.

The concentration of this whole paintings is established at the eu neighborhood of the center a while and early sleek instances, either as a result of nice richness and diversity of its ancient accomplishments and, genetically, as a result of its intimate linkage to Jewish neighborhood existence during the international at the present time. whilst its deep moorings within the historical and contemporaneous japanese groups have come to the fore ever extra insistently. in reality, whereas attempting to realize the hidden springs of this phenomenally tenacious evolution, the author came across himself delving deeper and deeper not just into the vague geographical regions of the 1st Exile and the Persian and Hellenistic dispersion, but in addition into the early manifestations of old Palestinian municipal existence. Many quite unforeseen relationships have laid naked the most autochthonous roots of the diaspora neighborhood securely ensconced within the ever fertile soil of historical Israel. it's been came upon helpful, accordingly, to commit the 1st chapters to a common define of either the fashionable foreground and the traditional heritage of the neighborhood in dispersion in its striking old profession from the Babylonian Exile to the yankee and French Revolutions.

About the Author

Salo W. Baron, who used to be a rabbi, educator, and editor, was once esteemed as a Jewish historian. A prolific author, Baron used to be most sensible identified for his eighteen-volume paintings A Social and spiritual historical past of the Jews. He was once ordained a rabbi in 1920 and bought doctoral levels in philosophy, political technology, and legislation from the college of Vienna. He later served as a professor of Jewish heritage and literature at Columbia collage for thirty-three years. As a pupil, Baron is credited with broadening and modernizing the historical view of the Jewish adventure. moreover, he supplied testimony for the prosecution on the trial of Nazi reputable Adolf Eichmann. Baron additionally edited Jewish Social stories and the sequence "A Documentary historical past of yankee Jews."

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