When it first appeared in Hebrew in 1958 and in English in 1961, Tradition and Crisis, Jacob Katz’s groundbreaking study of Jewish society at the end of the Middle Ages dramatically changed our perceptions of the Jewish community prior to the era of modernity. This new, unabridged translation by Bernard Dov Cooperman makes this classic available to new generations of students and scholars, together with Katz’s original source notes, and an afterword and an updated bibliography by Bernard Dov Cooperman. Katz revolutionized the field by tapping into a rich and hitherto unexplored source for reconstructing the sociology of a previous era: the responsa literature of the rabbinic establishment during the Middle Ages. The self-governing communities of Jews in Europe dealt with issues both civil and religious. The questions and answers addressed to the rabbinic authorities and courts provide an incomparable wealth of insights into life as it was lived in this period and into the social, historical, cultural, and economic issues of the day. How did European Jewry progress from a socially and culturally segregated socviety to become a component of European society at large? What were Jewish attitudes toward the Gentile world from which Jewry had been secluded for centuries? What were the bridges from the old to the new era? Tradition and Crisis traces the roots of modernity to internal developments within the communities themselves. Katz traces the modern movements of the Haskalah (Enlightenment) in the West and Hasidism in the East, to an internal breakdown in the structure of these communities and the emergence of an alternative leadership in the wake of the Sabbatean challenge. A dynamic work that has radically changed our view of this history, Tradition and Crisis remains the pivotal text for under-standing the revolution in the entire conception of Jewish identity in the modern era.

This book re-interprets the histoey of ideas which influenced Jewish-Christan relations between medieval times and the end of the eighteenth century. Making use of a wealth of untapped sources, the author. Professor of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. shows how the ancient dialogue between Christian and Jew continued unimpaired throughout the Middle Ages, despite the powerful restraints of social pressures and religious zeal on both sides. Many cherished notions of contemporary Jewry are exploded, among them the belief that Israel was always a “liberal” faith. The author reconstructs the picture which the medieval Jew held to be an accurate representation of the religion, nature and morality of the Gentile world. He examines the steady deterioration of relations which set in between the two communities until, by the middle of the ghetto period. Jewry was almost completely estranged from the outer world. Paradoxically, this estrangement promoted the re-emergence of tolerance, and, as an idea, it took on new import with the disintegration of an exclusively Jewish society at the end of the ghetto period.

The collection of essays, chosen by the auther, discusses the principal themes of modern Jewish history, involving the emancipation of the jews, his assimilation into the gentile society, anti-semitism and the Jewish answer to the state of affairs in the emergence of modern nationalalism. The introduction of former ghetto-dwellers into modern European society, with all its implications for Jewish and their gentile environment, is here reviewed with the approach of historical andsociological analysis.