Cultures in Collision and Conversation

“For decades, David Berger has been profoundly enriching our knowledge of the Jewish past and present. This new collection of essays exhibits Berger at his best. The essays are wide-ranging in time and space, are rich in knowledge and citation of the sources, are meticulous and convincing in their argumentation, and show a historian with deep warmth and empathy for the people—past and present—about whom he writes.” –Robert Chazan, S. H. and Helen R. Scheuer Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University|“Berger’s wise and witty essays are at once learned and effervescent, balanced and engaged essential reading for anyone interested in the Jewish past and its (mis)uses, and a pleasure to read.” –Bernard Septimus, Jacob E. Safra Professor of Jewish History and Sephardic Civilization, Harvard University|The essays contained in this volume represent a crowning achievement in a life of scholarship that primarily has been devoted to exploring polemical interaction of Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages...Cultures in Collision and Conversation will find a proud place alongside his other scholarly publications.|A fine conspectus of David Berger’s variegated contributions to Jewish intellectual history. . . . Full of references to primary sources and informed by an enviable mastery of the voluminous secondary literature on a very broad topic [the chapter on Judaism and general culture] abounds in the sort of thought-provoking insights and limpid formulations that Berger’s deft pen routinely generates. . . . Besides its impressive substance, Berger’s tome merits appreciation in terms of style and tone. . . . His writing brims with crisp formulations and a nice increment of witty (at times rabinically inflected) turns of phrase.