Studia Rosenthaliana - Volume 47, Issue 2, 2021

Abstract During the high period of Yiddish scholarship from the 1920s to the 1980s, scholars who worked in Yiddish studied Jewish life wherever Yiddish-speaking Jews lived. Rarely, however, did they write about communities where assimilation had already led to the abandonment of Yiddish. A unique exception is the Netherlands, which had been a leading center of Yiddish culture in the 17th and 18th centuries but turned alm Read More

Abstract Dutch Jews had a profound impact on the development of Belgium’s Jewish community in the nineteenth century. More than a third of the Jews living on Belgian territory during this period were of Dutch descent. The mass arrival of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, transformed Belgian Jewish society. Dutch Jews now became a minority in Antwerp’s Jewish populati Read More

Abstract The 1668-9 Cópia da vida de bemaventurado, claiming to be a copy of text written by Manoel Cardoso de Macedo who later adopted the name Abraham Pelengrino (d. 1652), is a unique testimony of an early modern conversion to Judaism, a phenomenon of which few descriptions have survived. The English translation of the Portuguese original presented in this article shows, among others, how such conversions w Read More

Abstract The Pri Ets Haim is a collection of approximately 950 Responsa produced by the Ets Haim Rabbinical Seminary over the period 1728-1808. The responsa have been indexed, summarized, and cross-referenced, and some articles have dealt with individual questions. This paper explores the infrastructure maintaining the production of the collection over its 80-year life span. It answers questions such as: At any given time Read More