Jacob Burckhardt was born in 1818 in Basel, Switzerland. He studied history at the University of Berlin and taught art history and the Italian Renaissance in Berlin and Basel. His essay, as he called The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, was first published...

Our Mutual Friend is a satiric masterpiece about money. The last novel Dickens completed, and perhaps his most angry, it sounds all the great themes of his later work: the innocence and venality of the aspiring poor, the hollow pretensions of the nouveau riche, the...

Samuel Butler was among the most wide-ranging of the accomplished crew of late Victorian writers to which be belonged -- a forceful controversialist in the debates that surrounded Darwin's theory of evolution, a painter who sometimes exhibited at the Royal Academy, a...

"Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being," said novelist Milan Kundera. "And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?" Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque advent...

Nostromo Originally published in 1904, Nostromo is considered by many to be Conrad's supreme achievement. Set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, the novel reveals the effects of unbridled greed and imperialist interests on many different lives...

The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lie at the heart of political terrorism. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, it set...

The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers and reviewers with its treatment of sex and suicide. In a departure from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets...

This collection provides a comprehensive study of Jews in the classical world. Articles examine the city of Jerusalem and other Jewish communities of the Mediterranean diaspora, as reflected in the writings of Luke, Josephus and Philo. Topics covered include social i...

This comprehensive book provides a lucid introduction to Rabbinic Judaism, defined as the Judaism built on the story of God's revelation to Moses of the Torah at Sinai. Jacob Neusner outlines and examines the four stages in which the initial period of the historica...

"The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity" explores the social position of rabbis in Palestinian (Roman) and Babylonian (Persian) society from the period of the fall of the Temple to late antiquity. Author Richard Kalmin argues that ancient rabbinic sources depic...

"The Israelites" is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the people of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah up to the razing and renaming of Jerusalem and the virtual destruction of Palestine by Hadrian in A.D. 135. Drawing on Biblical, archaeological, historical ...

"Calendars in the Dead Sea Scrolls" explores the evidence about the different uses of time-measurement in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Jewish texts. James C. VanderKam examines the pertinent texts, their sources and the different uses to w...

Wax Tablets of the Mind explores the relationship between literacy, orality and memory in classical antiquity, not only from the point of view of antiquity, but also from that of modern cognitive psychology. Jocelyn Penny Small examines how ancient techn...

This book portrays the true story of the Roman Catholic Church’s persecution of the Jewish people for 2000 years. But now Pope John Paul II, Cardinal John O’Connor, some Orthodox Catholic Clergy, Protestant Churches, and many others, are publicly apolo...

The Shealtiel Manuscripts is a unique and unprecedented presentation of original and, mostly, unpublished before, documents that shades light on Jewish life in medieval Spain via the story of the Shealtiels, Author, editor and historian, Moshe Shaltiel Gracian, bring...

During the course of the twelfth century, increasing numbers of Jews migrated into western Christendom from Islamic lands. But western Christendom was both appealing and threatening to the Jewish immigrants. Indeed, western Christendom was entering a phase of intense...

The Trials of Abraham is based on the premise that the primary concern of the Torah is with establishing a conceptual framework within which a unique nation might emerge and flourish for the exclusive purpose of facilitating the emergence of a model civilization fo...

Reader Review: This book is defiantly a classic. In a quick, but not too revealing summary, the book explains the life in the west. One of the motifs is, "No matter how bad you may have it, some one else has it worse."

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line."  Thus speaks W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk , one of the most prophetic and influental works in American literature.  In this eloquent collection of essay...

An A to Z companion to 2,000 years of encounter between Judaism and Christianity, A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations is a pioneering work which explores and defines the many factors which characterise the historic and ongoing relationship between the two trad...