The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History

by David N. Myers (Editor), Alexander Kaye (Editor)

From his first book, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, to his well-known volume on Jewish memory, Zakhor, to his treatment of Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Moses, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009) earned recognition as perhaps the greatest Jewish historian of his day, whose scholarship blended vast erudition, unfettered creativity, and lyrical beauty. This volume charts his intellectual trajectory by bringing together a mix of classic and lesser-known essays from the whole of his career. The essays in this collection, representative of the range of his writing, acquaint the reader with his research on early modern Spanish Jewry and the experience of crypto-Jews, varied reflections on Jewish history and memory, and Yerushalmi’s enduring interest in the political history of the Jews. Also included are a number of little-known autobiographical recollections, as well as his only published work of fiction.

Genres: Judaism

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

David N. Myers received his A.B. from Yale College in 1982, and undertook graduate studies at Tel-Aviv and Harvard Universities before completing his doctorate at Columbia in 1991. He has written extensively in the fields of modern Jewish intellectual and cultural history, with a particular interest in the history of Jewish historiography. He has authored Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (Oxford: 1995) and Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2003). Myers has edited five books, including The Jewish Past Revisited and Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases.

At present, Myers is working on books on the Diaspora Hebraist thinker Simon Rawidowicz and (together with Nomi Stolzenberg) the Satmar Hasidic community of Kiryas Yoel, New York. He is also actively involved in a major project on the history of Jews in Los Angeles. Myers has taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Russian State University for the Humanities, and visited at the Institute for Advanced Studies (Jerusalem) and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Philadelphia). Since 2003, he has served as co-editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review. At UCLA, Myers teaches courses in ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish history.