The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880

Download or read book The Jews of Pinsk, 1506 to 1880 written by Mordekhai Nadav and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jews of Pinsk, 1506-1880 is the first part of a major scholarly project about a small city in Eastern Europe where Jews were a majority of the population from the end of the eighteenth century. Pinsk boasted both traditional rabbinic scholars and famous Hasidic figures, and over time became an international trade emporium, a center of the Jewish Enlightenment, a cradle of Zionism and the Jewish Labor movement, and a place where Orthodoxy struggled vigorously with modernity. The two volumes of Pinsk history were originally part of a literature created by Jews who survived the Holocaust and were determined to keep in memory a vital world that flourished for half a millennium. In this case, the results are extraordinary: no town of Eastern Europe has been described in such fascinating detail, invaluable to Jewish and non-Jewish historians alike. For the second volume of this two-volume collection, see The Jews of Pinsk, 1881-1941.