Izzy´s eBook Library - Chapters on Jewish Literature by Israel Abrahams

Chapters on Jewish Literature
Author: Israel Abrahams
Year: 1899
Source: Project Gutenberg

A study of Jewish works from the Rabbinic Age until the end of the 19th century. Covers the Talmud, Flavius Josephus, The Midrash, Letters of the Goanim, Karitic Literature, Saadiah of Fayum, Spanish-Jewish Poets, Rashi, Maimonides, Nachmanides, The Zohar, Italian Jewish Poets, Travelers Tales, Historians and Chroniclers, Isaac Abaranel, The Shulchan Aruch, Spinoza, Manasseh ben Israel, and Moses Mendelssohn.

These twenty-five short chapters on Jewish Literature open with the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the current era, and end with the death of Moses Mendelssohn in 1786. Thus the period covered extends over more than seventeen centuries. Yet, long as this period is, it is too brief. To do justice to the literature of Judaism even in outline, it is clearly necessary to include the Bible, the Apocrypha, and the writings of Alexandrian Jews, such as Philo. Only by such an inclusion can the genius of the Hebrew people be traced from its early manifestations through its inspired prime to its brilliant after-glow in the centuries with which this little volume deals.

(from the preface)