History, Revolution, and Achievements of the Nostra Aetate

A little over half a century ago, there came about a remarkable change in the Catholic Church’s attitude to the Jewish people. Once an accursed nation, responsible for the death of the Redeemer, Jews became the blessed elder brother of Christianity. Nostra Aetate traces the process of this revolutionary change in detail, through its primary Catholic and Jewish sources. Rabbi Professor Daniel Sperber is a leading scholar of Jewish law, customs, and ethics. He taught in the Talmud Department of Bar-Ilan University, where he also served as dean of the Faculty of Jewish Studies and president of the Jesselson Institute for Advanced Torah Studies. In 1992, he was awarded the Israel Prize for Jewish Studies. For close to five decades, Rabbi Sperber served as rabbi in Jerusalem, first at Yad Tamar Synagogue in Katamon and then at Menachem Zion Synagogue in the Old City. Prof. Sperber has published more than thirty books and over four hundred articles on the subjects of Talmudic and Jewish socio-economic history, law and customs, classical philology, and Jewish art. Among his major works is a well-known, eight-volume series, Minhagei Yisrael, on the history of Jewish customs. More recently, he has written books on halachic methodology and rabbinic decision-making in confrontation with modernity and has established an independent beit din dealing with agunah issues.