From Europe and America to the Middle East, North Africa and other non-European Jewish settlement areas, the Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture covers the recent history of the Jewish people from 1750 through the 1950s. Originally published in German as the Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur by J.B. Metzler Verlag (Stuttgart/Weimar) in 2011 the work includes approximately 800 entries that present the state of international research and reveal a complex portrait of Jewish life - illuminated by many maps and illustrations. Central themes convey information on topics such as autonomy, exile, emancipation, literature, liturgy, music, and science of Judaism. The encyclopedia provides knowledge in an overall context and offers academics and other interested readers new insights into Jewish history and culture. The work is an outstanding contribution to the understanding of Judaism and modernity.

The first volume of the English edition will appear in 2017 with subsequent volumes following in due course. The volumes may be purchased individually as they appear or as a set once all 7 are available. Both the German and the English editions will also be available online.

Die Schlacht bei El Alamein im Herbst 1942 beendete den Siegesmarsch des „Wüstenfuchses“ Erwin Rommel und damit jede Hoffnung der Achsenmächte, in den Besitz des Suezkanals zu gelangen. Den englischen Kriegsbemühungen hatte so ein entscheidender Schlag versetzt werden sollen. Während das populäre Bild des Wüstenkrieges bis heute von der Vorstellung blitzartiger Vorstöße deutscher Panzer geprägt ist, handelte es sich bei El Alamein jedoch eher um eine Material- und Abnutzungsschlacht. Die Achsenmächte waren von Beginn an unterlegen. Alexander Querengässer korrigiert in seinem Buch manche verbreiteten Vorstellungen vom Krieg in Nordafrika.
Hatten die Deutschen bis dahin ihren Gegnern eine bewegliche Kriegsführung aufzwingen können, so war es der britischen 8. Armee bei El Alamein gelungen, Rommels Vormarsch zum Stehen zu bringen, die Front zu festigen und später mit großer materieller Überlegenheit einen Gegenschlag zu führen. Alexander Querengässer betrachtet die gemeinhin als Erste und Zweite Schlacht von El Alamein bezeichneten Ereignisse in ihrem Zusammenhang. Er beleuchtet die Bedingungen und konkreten Umstände der Auseinandersetzung im Rahmen der Kriegslage und zeigt die operationsgeschichtlichen Besonderheiten auf. Aber auch die unmittelbaren Konsequenzen für den Kriegsverlauf kommen zur Sprache. Ein eigenes Kapitel ist dem Fortleben der Schlacht in den Erinnerungskulturen der ehemaligen Kriegsgegner gewidmet.

In Engaging the Other: “Japan and Its Alter-Egos”, 1550-1850 Ronald P. Toby examines new discourses of identity and difference in early modern Japan, a discourse catalyzed by the “Iberian irruption,” the appearance of Portuguese and other new, radical others in the sixteenth century. The encounter with peoples and countries unimagined in earlier discourse provoked an identity crisis, a paradigm shift from a view of the world as comprising only “three countries” ( sangoku), i.e., Japan, China and India, to a world of “myriad countries” ( bankoku) and peoples. In order to understand the new radical alterities, the Japanese were forced to establish new parameters of difference from familiar, proximate others, i.e., China, Korea and Ryukyu. Toby examines their articulation in literature, visual and performing arts, law, and customs.

This work is an anthology of 225 translated and annotated Sinitic poems ( kanshi 漢詩) composed in public and private settings by nobles, courtiers, priests, and others during Japan’s Nara and Heian periods (710-1185). The authors have supplied detailed biographical notes on the sixty-nine poets represented and an overview of each collection from which the verse of this eminent and enduring genre has been drawn. The introduction provides historical background and discusses kanshi subgenres, themes, textual and rhetorical conventions, styles, and aesthetics, and sheds light on the socio-political milieu of the classical court, where Chinese served as the written language of officialdom and the preeminent medium for literary and scholarly activity among the male elite.

The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism represents the first systematic and comprehensive study of the post-Marxist writings of the Budapest School to be published in English. The School itself has long been known in English-speaking circles for its neo-Marxist critique of the now-defunct Soviet system. The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism enriches this understanding by situating the confrontation with ‘actually existing socialism’ as but one moment, however formative, within a much richer and much more theoretically relevant philosophical itinerary. From the early critique of alienation through to the contemporary critical theories of modernity, The Budapest School: Beyond Marxism charts the evolution of the School’s thinking with a specific emphasis on the themes of culture, critique, history and the contingency of modern subjectivity.

In her groundbreaking investigation from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion, Isabel Laack explores the religion and art of writing of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs of Mexico. Inspired by postcolonial approaches, she reveals Eurocentric biases in academic representations of Aztec cosmovision, ontology, epistemology, ritual, aesthetics, and the writing system to provide a powerful interpretation of the Nahua sense of reality.

Laack transcends the concept of “sacred scripture” traditionally employed in religions studies in order to reconstruct the Indigenous semiotic theory and to reveal how Aztec pictography can express complex aspects of embodied meaning. Her study offers an innovative approach to nonphonographic semiotic systems, as created in many world cultures, and expands our understanding of human recorded visual communication.

This book will be essential reading for scholars and readers interested in the history of religions, Mesoamerican studies, and the ancient civilizations of the Americas.

'This excellent book, written with intellectual courage and critical self-awareness, is a brilliant, multilayered thought experiment into the images and stories that made up the Nahua sense of reality as woven into their sensational ritual performances and colorful symbolic writing system.'
Davíd Carrasco, Harvard University

Interruptions and Transitions: Essays on the Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture is an anthology of the most recent works by Barbara Baert, discussing the connection between the experiences of the senses in the medieval and early modern visual culture, the hermeneutics of imagery, and the limits and possibilities of contemporary Art Sciences.
The six chapters include Pentecost, Noli me tangere, the woman with an issue of blood, the Johannesschüssel, the dancing Salome, and the role of the wind.
The reader is shown a medieval and early modern visual culture as a history of artistic solutions, as the fascinating approach between biblical texts, plastic imagination, and the art-scientific métier. This makes him a privileged guest in a unique in-between space where humans and their artistic expression can meet existentially.

The Reflexivity of Pain and Privilege offers a fresh and critical perspective to people of indigenous and/or marginalized identifications. It highlights the research, shared experiences and personal stories, and the artistic collections of those who are of mixed heritage and/or identity, as well as the perspectives of young adolescents who identify as being of mixed racial, socio-economic, linguistic, and ethno-cultural backgrounds and experiences. These auto-ethnographic collections serve as an impetus for the untold stories of millions of marginalized people who may find solace here and in the stories of others who are of mixed identity.

The Codex Amiatinus and its “Sister” Bibles examines the full Bibles (Bibles containing every scriptural text that producers deemed canonical) made at the northern English monastery of Wearmouth–Jarrow under Abbot Ceolfrith (d. 716) and the Venerable Bede (d. 735), and the religious, cultural, and intellectual circumstances of their production. The key manuscript witness of this monastery’s Bible-making enterprise is the Codex Amiatinus, a massive illustrated volume sent toward Rome in June 716, as a gift to St. Peter. Amiatinus is the oldest extant, largely intact Latin full Bible. Its survival is the critical reason that Ceolfrith’s Wearmouth–Jarrow has long been recognized as a pivotal center in the evolution of the design, structure, and contents of medieval biblical codices.

This volume contains sixteen contributions from the fourth conference on the Foundations of Arabic linguistics (Genova, 2016), all having to do with the development of linguistic theory in the Arabic grammatical tradition, starting from Sībawayhi's Kitāb (end of the 8th century C.E.) and its continuing evolution in later grammarians up till the 14th century C.E. The scope of this volume includes the links between grammar and other disciplines, such as lexicography and logic, and the reception of Arabic grammar in the Persian and Malay linguistic tradition.