Early modern Jewry Ruderman, David B
2010., 20100412, 2010, 2010-01-01
eBook
Early Modern Jewry boldly offers a new history of the early modern Jewish experience. From Krakow and Venice to Amsterdam and Smyrna, David Ruderman examines the historical and cultural factors ...unique to Jewish communities throughout Europe, and how these distinctions played out amidst the rest of society. Looking at how Jewish settlements in the early modern period were linked to one another in fascinating ways, he shows how Jews were communicating with each other and were more aware of their economic, social, and religious connections than ever before.
The set of Jewish mystical teachings known as Kabbalah are often imagined as timeless texts, teachings that have been passed down through the millennia. Yet, as this groundbreaking new study shows, ...Kabbalah flourished in a specific time and place, emerging in response to the social prejudices that Jews faced.
Hartley Lachter, a scholar of religion studies, transports us to medieval Spain, a place where anti-Semitic propaganda was on the rise and Jewish political power was on the wane.Kabbalistic Revolutionproposes that, given this context, Kabbalah must be understood as a radically empowering political discourse. While the era's Christian preachers claimed that Jews were blind to the true meaning of scripture and had been abandoned by God, the Kabbalists countered with a doctrine that granted Jews a uniquely privileged relationship with God. Lachter demonstrates how Kabbalah envisioned this increasingly marginalized group at the center of the universe, their mystical practices serving to maintain the harmony of the divine world.
For students of Jewish mysticism,Kabbalistic Revolutionprovides a new approach to the development of medieval Kabbalah. Yet the book's central questions should appeal to anyone with an interest in the relationships between religious discourses, political struggles, and ethnic pride.
During the past few decades a great amount of scholarly work has been done on the various prayer cultures of antiquity, both Graeco-Roman and Jewish and Christian. In Jewish studies this burgeoning ...research on ancient prayer has been stimulated particularly by the many new prayer texts found at Qumran, which have shed new light on several long-standing problems. The present volume intends to make a new contribution to the ongoing scholarly debate on ancient Jewish prayer texts by focusing on a limited set of prayer texts, scil. , a small number of those that have been preserved only in Greek. Jewish prayers in Greek tend to be undervalued, which is regrettable because these prayers shed light on sometimes striking aspects of early Jewish spirituality in the centuries around the turn of the era. In this volume twelve such prayers have been collected, translated, and provided with an extensive historical and philological commentary. They have been preserved on papyrus, on stone, and as part of Christian church orders into which some of them have been incorporated in a christianized from. For that reason these prayers are of great interest to scholars of both early Judaism and ancient Christianity.
According to the account in the Book of Exodus, God addresses the children of Israel as they stand before Mt. Sinai with the words, "You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (19:6). ...The sentence, Martha Himmelfarb observes, is paradoxical, for priests are by definition a minority, yet the meaning in context is clear: the entire people is holy. The words also point to some significant tensions in the biblical understanding of the people of Israel. If the entire people is holy, why does it need priests? If membership in both people and priesthood is a matter not of merit but of birth, how can either the people or its priests hope to be holy? How can one reconcile the distance between the honor due the priest and the actual behavior of some who filled the role? What can the people do to make itself truly a kingdom of priests? Himmelfarb argues that these questions become central in Second Temple Judaism. She considers a range of texts from this period, including theBook of Watchers, theBook of Jubilees, legal documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of Philo of Alexandria, and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament, and goes on to explore rabbinic Judaism's emphasis on descent as the primary criterion for inclusion among the chosen people of Israel-a position, she contends, that took on new force in reaction to early Christian disparagement of the idea that mere descent from Abraham was sufficient for salvation.
Jews and Gender features sixteen authors exploring the history and culture of the intersection of Judaism and gender from the biblical world to today. Topics include subversive readings of biblical ...texts; reappraisal of rabbinic theory and practice; women in mysticism, Chasidism, and Yiddish literature; and women in contemporary culture and politics. Accessible and comprehensive, this volume will appeal to the general reader in addition to engaging with contemporary academic scholarship.
Between the French Revolution and World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Jewish fold--by becoming Christians or, in liberal states, by intermarrying. Telling the stories of both famous ...and obscure individuals, Leaving the Jewish Fold explores the nature of this drift and defection from Judaism in Europe and America from the eighteenth century to today. Arguing that religious conviction was rarely a motive for Jews who became Christians, Todd Endelman shows that those who severed their Jewish ties were driven above all by pragmatic concerns--especially the desire to escape the stigma of Jewishness and its social, occupational, and emotional burdens. Through a detailed and colorful narrative, Endelman considers the social settings, national contexts, and historical circumstances that encouraged Jews to abandon Judaism, and factors that worked to the opposite effect. Demonstrating that anti-Jewish prejudice weighed more heavily on the Jews of Germany and Austria than those living in France and other liberal states as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, he reexamines how Germany's political and social development deviated from other European states. Endelman also reveals that liberal societies such as Great Britain and the United States, which tolerated Jewish integration, promoted radical assimilation and the dissolution of Jewish ties as often as hostile, illiberal societies such as Germany and Poland. Bringing together extensive research across several languages, Leaving the Jewish Fold will be the essential work on conversion and assimilation in modern Jewish history for years to come.
The Jewish Jesus Schafer, Peter
2012., 20120226, 2012, 2012-02-26
eBook
In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a ...profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. InThe Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.
The study disputes allegations of dualism and determinism in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the substitution of Enoch's prophecies for the Mosaic Torah, which are incompatible with the biblical doctrines ...that dominated Jewish society in the late Second Temple period.
This paper argues for a revitalization of Catholic intellectual history, in particular the modern history of Catholic thought. The author weaves her own personal narrative as a scholar of Catholic ...ideas with suggestions for renewed commitment to the discipline of intellectual history in relation to the themes of embodiment, attention/contemplation, outsiders, and humor.
