Peter Schäfer who celebrated his 60th birthday on 29 June 2003 has left a decidedly firm imprint on the young discipline "Jewish Studies" in Germany, which could only be set up at a German university after the Shoah. For someone directing a “small” academic institution he has managed during his academic career to guide and influence a strikingly large number of students in their scholarly pursuits in the field.
The collected essays of this volume encompass quite a variety of topics, whereby the focal points in Peter Schäfer’s own research are not difficult to recognize in the themes chosen by his former students: mysticism and magic are most conspicuous, followed by Rabbinic Judaism and the studies on the Middle Ages and the Early Modern and Modern Periods. Of note is also the fact that the methodological approaches of these contributions are no less manifold than their themes. Part of the contributions of this book were submitted in English, and all the German-language texts have an English summary or abstract.