Houses of Life by Joachim Jacobs
Establishing a cemetery has always been the first step for a Jewish community in the process of settling in a new location. In telling the story of more than thirty Jewish cemeteries in Europe, Houses of Life offers a group portrait of two thousand years of Jewish history. From the catacombs of Ancient Rome, the story is traced through medieval cemeteries in Venice, Prague and England, across the cemeteries of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, of the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Krakow and Istanbul and the cemeteries of the period of emancipation in Paris, Budapest, St Petersburg and Berlin. Each of the cemeteries and the communities they have served is richly illustrated with historical plans, maps, paintings, drawings and photographs. After 1945, Jewish life tentatively began to re-emerge in many parts of Europe, and the book also looks at a range of the continent's post-war cemeteries. From funerary customs to gravestone designs and topographical situations, Jewish cemeteries have enshrined cultural and spiritual values in a dangerous and often deadly world. Houses of Life is a record of two thousand years of tradition and change, of persecution and survival.
I came to this wonderful book as someone who could be called a graveyard addictFrom boyhood on I have wandered around country churchyards, city cemeteries and cathedral precincts philosophically absorbing everything from their monuments to their botany. But never did I walk where the Jews lay buried nor did it occur to me that in London and all over Europe they would do so in the same way as their patriarchs and ‘my’ Christ. Joachim Jacobs sets them out before us, these ‘houses of life’, which Christianity never succeeded in darkening, so that in his beautifully restrained account of them they will in future add to our vision of human existence. Marvellous photographs and paintings create their own illumination. Here an almost entirely neglected subject is brilliantly added to the traveller's tale, plus a scholarly footnote to European history. While everyone will learn something from this remarkable book, I felt that in some ways I had learned everything. Not the least of the Nazis' enormities was to deny six million men, women, boys and girls their houses of life. Their ashes were left to blow across the cold fields. There is a huge poetry in all this.
Joachim Jacobs ist Professor fur Germanistische Linguistik an der Universitat Wuppertal.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780711226487 |
| ISBN 10 | 0711226482 |
| Title | Houses of Life |
| Author | Joachim Jacobs |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Quarto Publishing PLC |
| Year published | 2008-10-09 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |