Read for pleasure by millions of Jews and Christians, consulted by students, scholars, and ordinary folk, The Legends of the Jews has itself become legendary, the magnum opus of one of the twentieth century's greatest and most original Jewish scholars." -- James R. Kugel, from the IntroductionThe first books of the Bible describe powerfully but briefly the creation, the first generations of humanity, and the early history of the Jews. In addition to their power to inspire thought and worship, they inspired imagination. Much of the richness of Jewish belief and wisdom comes from the many legends that answered questions raised by the silences of the Bible. From the second to the fourteenth centuries, the Talmud, Midrash, and their Targums incorporated apocryphal views of Biblical persons and events to help explain scripture. Other legends found their way into the Kabbalah, into Biblical commentaries, and into Christian literature.Never before available in paperback, Louis Ginzberg's landmark, seven-volume The Legends of the Jews assembles the many elaborations and embellishments of Biblical stories that flourished in the centuries following the Bible's own creation. From a portrait of Adam and Eve as innocent cannibals to tales of Moses ascending the throne of Ethiopia and visiting both hell and paradise, these legends offer strange, delightful, and occasionally bizarre variations of familiar Biblical stories. Other tales describe Eden and the building of the Tower of Babel, explain how the first Sabbath was celebrated, and chronicle the punishment of the rebel angels. There are legends that detail how Noah cared for the animals on the ark and tell of David purchasing Jerusalem rather than conquering the city.Ginzberg devoted most of his life to gathering these Jewish legends from their original sources -- written in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syrian, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Arabic, Persian, and Old Slavic -- and reproducing them completely, accurately, and vividly. He presents these legends following the traditional Biblical sequence and reconciling the sometimes contradictory versions of the same stories found in different sources. In addition to four volumes of the legends themselves, The Legends of the Jews includes two indispensable volumes of notes that provide the sources for every legend and attest to the immense depth and range of Ginzberg's research, as well as a comprehensive index to the people, places, and motifs found in the legends and their sources. Nearly one hundred years after Ginzberg began, his work remains a fundamental tool of contemporary research and a classic of Jewish literature.

    Purchased from a friend ostensibly to protect him from the pogroms sweeping the empire, the weapon instead opens a portal to Shloyme’s innermost demons, and through it he begins his methodical mission to eradicate any remnants of life and humanity in him and pave the way for his self-destruction. A Death takes the form of a diary that follows the Jewish calendar, describing hallucinatory demons and parasitical urges as its author spends his remaining days excising all his responsibilities and acquaintances from a life now devoted to not living.Written in Yiddish in 1905 and published with immediate success in Warsaw in 1909, A Death utilizes the influences of Dostoyevsky and Schopenhauer to depict a distinctly Jewish experience of homelessness and uprooted modernity. Zalman Shneour’s short novel presents a much lesser-known strand of Jewish decadent literature and an authorial voice that has been buried for too long. This introduction of Shneour’s inaugural novel is his first appearance in English since 1963. Its exploration of alienation, mental health, toxic masculinity, and violence is remarkably contemporary.Born in Shklow, Zalman Shneour (1887–1959) was a major figure of Jewish modernity and one of the most popular Yiddish writer between the World Wars. He wrote poetry, prose, and plays in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Like many of his generation, his life was spent moving from city to city in search of literary community or escaping political turmoil: from Odessa to Warsaw to Vilne, and on to such Western cities as Bern, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, New York (where he died), and Tel Aviv (where he is buried). His psychological fiction brought the insights of Nietzsche and Freud into the narrative world of Eastern European Jewish life.