Book Notes

Book Notes

Biblical and Rabbinic Literature

Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament VI: Job, edited by Manlio Simonetti and Marco Conti. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2006. 253 pp. $40.00. ISBN 0-8308-1476-0.

The excerpts in this collection focus on texts from Greek sources including Origen, Didymus the Blind, Julian the Arian, John Chrysostom, Hesychius of Jerusalem, and Olympiodorus. Among Latin sources we find Julian of Eclanum, Philip the Priest, and Gregory the Great. Among Syriac sources we find Ephrem the Syrian and Isho'dad of Merv.

Etched in Stone: The Emergence of the Decalogue, by David H. Aaron. New York: T&T Clark, 2006. 352 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-567-02971-9.

Few people understand that there are three versions of what are usually called "The Ten Commandments," and that when their ideological underpinnings are examined closely, these versions prove to be quite antithetical to one another. Even fewer are aware of the probability that these documents were written very late in the history of biblical literature—indeed, so late as to constitute a literary afterthought in the development of Israelite ethnic self-definition. Aaron examines the question of when the Decalogue versions were written and why and argues that the integration of the Decalogue texts preserves vestiges of highly charged ideological conflicts that were inadvertently neutralized by the rather bland and generic ethical precepts coined among its verses.

Hills of Spices: Poetry from the Bible, edited by Rena Potok. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006. 256 pp. $20.00. ISBN 0-8276-0826-8.

This collection invites us to feast our senses on poetry from The Song of Songs and other passages of the Bible. Verses from the pages of Genesis, Exodus, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Proverbs, Psalms, and many other biblical books are here, with the JPS English translation sitting across the page from the original biblical Hebrew. The poems are organized thematically. An appendix lists the poems by biblical book, chapter, and verse.

Biography, Autobiography, Memoirs, Diaries

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, by Rebecca Goldstein. New York: Schocken, 2006. 287 pp. $19.95. ISBN 0-8052-4209-0.

In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition's persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza's philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe's first experiment with racial antisemitism.

Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, by Peter M. Ascoli. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 453 pp. $35.00. ISBN 0-253-34741-6.

Peter Ascoli presents a portrait of Julius Rosenwald, the man and his work. The son of first-generation German Jewish immigrants, Julius Rosenwald apprenticed for his uncles, who were clothing manufacturers in New York City. It would be as a men's clothing salesperson that he would encounter Sears, Roebuck and Company, which he eventually fashioned into the greatest mail order firm in the world. He also founded Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. And in the American South Rosenwald helped support the building of more than 5,300 schools. Ascoli describes Rosenwald's meteoric rise in American business, but he also portrays a man devoted to family and with a desire to help his community that led to a lifelong devotion to philanthropy.

My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud, by Janna Malamud Smith. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 292 pp. $24.00. ISBN 0-618-69166-9.

On the twentieth anniversary of novelist Bernard Malamud's death, his daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, explores her father's life in My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. Armed with a unique perspective and access to...