Prof. Benjamin Fisher discusses the Jewish community in Amsterdam and their contributions to Jewish scholarship.
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who is the associate professor of medieval and early modern Jewish history at Towson University. And we will be discussing his new book with which uh was published a year or two ago. I'm forgetting offhand as we started. And it is titled Amsterdam's People of the Book, Jewish Society and the Turn to Scripture in the 17th Century. So, thank you, Professor Fisher, for joining me. >> My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. >> Okay, let's start off. Tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background. >> Okay, um well, I just I'm professor of Jewish history at Towson University and director of the Jewish studies program at Towson which has a wonderful group of scholars and experts in all kinds of all kinds of areas of Jewish history and I'm delighted to be talking about Amsterdam's people of the book today which was based on my doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania and research follow up that was done at Harvard and Oxford. >> Okay, so obviously this book has like two parts. It's about Amsterdam's Jewish community and about like it said turns to scripture about the Bible about and their interest in that. So I guess these two parts of the book how did you become you know why did you become interested in this and studying this and writing your your dissertation and then this book? >> Sure. So [snorts] it feels like a million years ago I became extremely fascinated and I guess hopefully excited about Amsterdam because I thought that I thought they wanted to do a project on
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