THE POSEN LIBRARY OF JEWISH CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION

The sixth book in an anthology series about Jewish history and culture that covers the years 1750 to 1880.

The latest volume, edited by Carlebach—a professor of Jewish history, culture, and society and director of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University—contains a wide range of material by and about major Jewish figures of the era, including autobiographical excerpts, poetry, fiction, and scholarly writing. Authors include well-known figures, such as Karl Marx, and lesser-known ones, such as socialite and poet Rebecca Franks, known as the “Jewish Belle” of Philadelphia. Sections devoted to visual and material culture include images of finials on the rolls that hold Torah scrolls, a stylized topographic map of Israel by scribe and illustrator Moses Ganbash, and paintings such as one depicting a Jewish burial society from the late 1700s. Also included are excerpts from sheet music, such as that for Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Ancienne melodie de la synagogue from 1844. Even those who are well versed in the time period will learn much from these pages, which include a wide range of material, from an epistle that expresses opposition to Hasidism, penned by scholar Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, to a piece on bare-knuckle boxing by an Englishman known as “Mendoza the Jew.” The greatest takeaways from the work involve questions that readers may not have considered; for example, just how did a soldier go about celebrating Passover in the middle of the Civil War, as a Union Army private set out to do in 1862? An account from American Mordecai Sheftall, who was captured by the British in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, is brief but highly engaging. Other, more well-known sources don’t have the same enlightening appeal; for instance, excerpts from the work of Benjamin Disraeli prove relatively dry, with familiar statements, such as how “the fitness of a material object for a material purpose is a test of its utility.” Images of items such as an amulet made to protect pregnant women from Lilith, Adam’s first wife in biblical lore, create more lasting states of wonder.

An essential collection of Judaica that ably combines the known and the obscure.