Cult, Ghetto And State

Jewish studies, Maxime Rodinson says, has been a field in which ideological delirium has long had a virtually free rein. Here, in a collection of provocative essays, he tries to redress the balance, bringing his expertise and wit to bear on Jewish problems past and present.

Maxine Rodinson studied Semitic languages, ethnography, and sociology at the Sorbonne. He later became a professor of Middle Eastern Ethnology and Old South Arabian Languages at the Sorbonne. He is the author of Israel and the Arabs, Mohammed, Marxism and the Muslim World, and Islam and Capitalism, which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize for 1974.