Susan Weissman, Final Judgement and the Dead in Medieval Jewish Thought. London: The Littmann Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020, viii, 443 pp.

Given recent scholarly interest in pre-modern attitudes toward the return of the dead and the afterlife, it is surprising that so little work has been done on the relationship between the living and the dead in medieval Jewish thought. This book offers to fill this lacuna with a study of the views of Ashkenazi Jews on this topic. It focuses on the so-called German Pietists (Hasidei Ashkenaz), who followed the teachings of R. Judah the Pious (1150−1217), and makes extensive use of the