Returning to New York City, June 2009

Since my return to New York City from Jerusalem, in June 2009, I have been rejoined by old friends and new friends, and have also returned to my favorite library haunts of New York City (and Kew Gardens Hills, Silver Spring, and Lake Como too), where I have been happily spending my days tracking down many of those harder to find items that I have been looking for throughout the entire year, and have also driven down some new avenues too and have put in a request for additional harddrive space on my computer.

Among the interesting items that I came across over the past few weeks is "the famous exchange" (dated forty years ago on 26 June 1969) from Morton Smith to Gershom Scholem, who, writing from his faculty office in Fayerweather Hall at Columbia University, apologized-in-advance for not being able to attend the then-upcoming Fifth World Congress of Jewish Studies, held in Jerusalem on 4-12 August 1969 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in Guy G. Stroumsa, ed., Morton Smith and Gershom Scholem, Correspondence 1945-1982 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2008), 147 (#88). With this post at the Michtavim blog, I shall likewise offer as my own excuse for not attending this year's Fifteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies -- which will include approximately 1,400 lectures in 380 sessions -- with a similar "excuse" as I move inch-by-inch towards finishing my MA coursework at the Bernard Revel Graduate School, Yeshiva University, and will study this summer with Prof. Immanuel Etkes ("Hasidim and Mitnagdim") and Prof. Jeffrey R. Woolf ("History of the Jews of Italy"); a cornerstone reading from the graduate course is the as-of-yet-unsurpassed magesterial tome by Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946), available here, courtesy of the Internet Archive (Archive.org), and it is fully-searchable too! For a quarter-century-young evaluation of this legacy, see Robert Bonfil, "The Historian's Perception of the Jews in the Italian Renaissance: Towards a Reappraisal," Revue des Études Juives 143:1-2 (January-June 1984): 59-82; and also idem, "The History of the Jews in Italy: Memory and Identity," in Bernard D. Cooperman & Barbara Garvin, eds., The Jews of Italy: Memory and Identity (Bethesda, MD: University Press of Maryland, 2000), 25-44; idem, "How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography?" History and Theory 27:4 [Beiheft 27: Essays in Jewish Historiography in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano] (December 1988): 78-102, reprinted in David B. Ruderman, ed., Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (New York and London: New York University Press, 1992), 219-251; and for a bibliography of Roth's writings until 1966 -- he passed away in 1970 just after seeing the final galleys of (his) Encyclopedia Judaica -- see Oskar K. Rabinowicz, "A Bibliography of the Writings of Cecil Roth," in John M. Shaftesley, ed., Remember the Days: Essays on Anglo-Jewish History presented to Cecil Roth by members of the Council of The Jewish Historical Society of England (London: The Jewish Historical Society of England, 1966), 351-387; and for a thesis that I have not yet read (notwithstanding my persistent efforts of the past several years), but would greatly appreciate if someone can please send me, see Elisa Lawson, "Cecil Roth and the Imagination of the Jewish Past, Present and Future in Britain, 1925-1964," (PhD dissertation, University of Southampton, 2005).