A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era

The history of a single book sheds light on the beginnings of modern Jewish thought In 1797, in what is now the Czech Republic, Pinḥas Hurwitz published Book of the Covenant . Nominally an extended commentary on a sixteenth-century kabbalist text, Pinḥas’s publication was in fact a compendium of scientific knowledge and a manual of moral behavior. Its popularity stemmed from its ability to present the scientific advances and moral cosmopolitanism of its day in the context of Jewish legal and mys