Jews in the Early Middle World Dean Phillip Bell "Dean Phillip Bell provides at last a masterful and comprehensive overview of the era that was traditionally seen as an interim between the Middle Ages and the modern Age of Jewish emancipation. Bells' important innovation is to bring an already distinguished tradition of Jewish history the fruits of generation of scholarship on European, including Jewish, social history. Bell is critical where he must be, generous where he can be, and always thorough. This is a book for students, scholars, and all lovers of history." Thomas A. Brady, University of California, Berkeley "The presentation of three hundred years of Jewish life over much of the world requires a balance of vivid examples and simplified generalization. Bell skillfully navigates between [these extremes] to provide the fundamental features of the period. The book subdues the dizzying variety of phenomena by presenting them consistently in the categories of social, legal, and economic history rather than multiple, disconnected narratives from unrelated places. A timeline and glossary of terms, as well as illustrations, maps, and tables, assist readers who are unprepared in Jewish history. " Arthur Lesley, Baltimore Hebrew University Dean Phillip Bell is dean and professor of Jewish History at Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago and the author of Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power, and Community and the coeditor of Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (with Stephen G. Burnett) .