Reading the Torah

This book is written for the modern Jewish reader conversant with the text of the Pentateuch and Rashi’s commentary, exploring text and meaning using modern linguistic and historical tools to understand the Torah as a uniform composition by Moses, the Lawgiver. The origin of the book are weekly commentaries to the Torah readings in the Sephardic (originally Moroccan) Minyan of Congregation Anshe Shalom in West Hempstead NY. The encouragement of the rabbinic listeners for the ideas of a nonprofessional Jewish student was most welcome. This book was written on the request of a Yeshiva-educated grandson to see the weekly Notes turned into a book, showing points of view of which he never heard in the Yeshiva.

About the Author :

Heinrich W. Guggenheimer is a German born (1924), Swiss educated, American mathematician, since 1989 Professor Emeritus of Polytechnic University (today Polytechnic Institute of New York University.) He received his advanced Jewish education at the Bet Midrash of Basel, Switzerland. After retirement following a successful career as research scientist, he turned his interests to Jewish subjects, writing with his wife Eva nee Horovics, “Jewish Family Names, an etymological dictionary” (1992, 2 nd ed. 2017; German version 1996), and as sole author “The Scholar’s Haggadah” (1995), “Seder Olam, the rabbinic view of Biblical chronology” (1998), a seventeen volume edition, translation, and commentary of the Jerusalem Talmud (2000-2014), and “The Songs of Psalms” (2017).