David Solomon explores the past 500 years of Jewish History, from approximately 1500 to today.
In this talk, David examines each century in detail, looking at:
Sixteenth Century –
- Johannes Reuchlin
- The printing of the Talmud
- Shlomo Molcho and David HaReuveni
- Yosef Karo
- Moshe Isserles
- Azariah de Rossi
- Donna Gracia
- Suleiman the Magnificent and the land of Israel
- The persecution of Marranos
- The publication of the Zohar
- The Ari
- The Maharal of Prague.
Seventeenth Century –
- The Council of the Four Lands
- The publication of Emeq Hamelekh
- The Khmelnytsky massacre
- Jewish Amsterdam
- Jews under Protestantism
- Menasseh ben Israel
- Spinoza
- Shabtai Zvi and Nathan of Gaza
- The Enlightenment
- Newton
- Leibniz.
Eighteenth Century –
- The Shtetl, Berlin and Italy
- The Emden/Eubshytz controversy
- The Baal Shem Tov
- Jacob Frank
- The Vilna Gaon
- Moses Mendelssohn
- Solomon Maimon
- The Haskalah
- The Aliyot of 1740
- The Ramchal, the Or HaChayim, and the RaShaSh
- The American and French Revolutions.
The Nineteenth Century –
- Rothschild
- Napoleon
- Emancipation
- The rise of “Reform” versus “Orthodoxy”
- Chatam Sofer
- Samson Raphael Hirsch
- Abraham Geiger and Samuel Holdheim
- Wissenschaft des Judentums
- Montefiore
- Jewish America.
The Twentieth Century –
- Herzl to the Balfour Declaration
- The Aliyot
- Eliezer ben Yehudah and the revival of Hebrew
- Rav Kook
- The Shoah
- The establishment State of Israel
- Vatican 2
- Six-Day War in 1967
- The Seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe
- Chabad
- The Golden Age of Jewish Publishing.
As always, David places Jewish History in the context of world history. He ends this lecture with a discussion on predictions for the future of the Jewish people and the world more broadly.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:33:53 — 115.7MB)
This is the fourth part of David’s six-part series, an edited version of a live talk given in 2020 for Chabad South Africa and Daminyan Shule in Melbourne.