Author: Carl S. Ehrlich
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110418983
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
This volume examines new developments in the fields of premodern Jewish studies over the last thirty years. The essays in this volume, written by leading experts, are grouped into four overarching temporal areas: the First Temple, Second Temple, Rabbinic, and Medieval periods. These time periods are analyzed through four thematic methodological lenses: the social scientific (history and society), the textual (texts and literature), the material (art, architecture, and archaeology), and the philosophical (religion and thought). Some essays offer a comprehensive look at the state of the field, while others look at specific examples illustrative of their temporal and thematic areas of inquiry. The volume presents a snapshot of the state of the field, encompassing new perspectives, directions, and methodologies, as well as the questions that will animate the field as it develops further. It will be of interest to scholars and students in the field, as well as to educated readers looking to understand the changing face of Jewish studies as a discipline advancing human knowledge
Author: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 087820105X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 609
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Book Description
It is not common to think that Jews were interested in happiness or that Judaism has anything to say about happiness. On the contrary, the concept of happiness was a central concern of Jewish thinkers. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson shows that rabbinic Judaism regarded itself primarily as a prescription for the attainment of happiness, and that the discourse on happiness captures the evolution of Jewish intellectual history from antiquity to the seventeenth century. These claims make sense if one understands happiness as human flourishing on the basis of Aristotle's thought in the Nichomachean Ethics. Linking virtue, knowledge, and well-being, Aristotle's analysis of happiness can be traced in Jewish understanding of human flourishing as early as the Greco-Roman world, but the fusion of Greek and Judaic perspectives on happiness reached its zenith in in the Middle Ages in the thought of Moses Maimonides and his followers. Even the controversies about Maimonides' ideas could be viewed as discussions about the meaning of happiness and the way to attain it within Judaism. Much of this book, then, concerns the reception of Aristotle's Ethics in medieval Jewish philosophy. This book shows how a certain notion of happiness reflects the intellectual culture of a given period, including cultural exchanges among Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Demonstrating the discourse on happiness as a dramatic interplay between Wisdom and Torah, between philosophy and religion, between reason and faith, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson presents, to specialists and non-specialists alike, a fascinating tour of Jewish intellectual history.
Author: Kata Bohus
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110653079
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
After the Shoah, Jewish survivors actively took control of their destiny. Despite catastrophic and hostile circumstances, they built networks and communities, fought for justice, and documented Nazi crimes. The essays, illustrations, and portraits of people and places contained in this volume are informed by a pan-European perspective. The book accompanies the first special exhibition at the re-opened Jewish Museum in Frankfurt. German edition
Author: Martin Jacobs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812290011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 346
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Book Description
Reorienting the East explores the Islamic world as it was encountered, envisioned, and elaborated by Jewish travelers from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The first comprehensive investigation of Jewish travel writing from this era, this study engages with questions raised by postcolonial studies and contributes to the debate over the nature and history of Orientalism as defined by Edward Said. Examining two dozen Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic travel accounts from the mid-twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries, Martin Jacobs asks whether Jewish travelers shared Western perceptions of the Islamic world with their Christian counterparts. Most Jews who detailed their journeys during this period hailed from Christian lands and many sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean aboard Christian-owned vessels. Yet Jacobs finds that their descriptions of the Near East subvert or reorient a decidedly Christian vision of the region. The accounts from the crusader era, in particular, are often critical of the Christian church and present glowing portraits of Muslim-Jewish relations. By contrast, some of the later travelers discussed in the book express condescending attitudes toward Islam, Muslims, and Near Eastern Jews. Placing shifting perspectives on the Muslim world in their historical, social, and literary contexts, Jacobs interprets these texts as mirrors of changing Jewish self-perceptions. As he argues, the travel accounts echo the various ways in which premodern Jews negotiated their mingled identities, which were neither exclusively Western nor entirely Eastern.
Author: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9780874518719
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488
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Book Description
Publication of Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor in 1982 inspired a generation of scholarly inquiry into historical images and myths, the construction of the Jewish past, and the making and meaning of collective memory. Here, eminent scholars in their respective fields extend the lines of his seminal study into topics that range from medieval rabbinics, homiletics, kabbalah, and Hasidism to antisemitism, Zionism, and the making of modern Jewish identity. Essays are clustered around four central themes: historical consciousness and the construction of memory; the relationship between time and history in Jewish thought; the demise of traditional forms of collective memory; and the writing of Jewish history in modern times.
Author:
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271084848
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A collection of essays and studies of diverse texts and topics in medieval and early modern Jewish literature, using contemporary critical approaches and textual analysis to explore larger ideas and themes in rabbinic Judaism.
Author: Sharon Faye Koren
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611680220
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
A fascinating analysis of why there are no female mystics in medieval Judaism
Author: Christine Hayes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107036151
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 439
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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Judaism and Law provides a conceptual and historical account of the Jewish understanding of law.
Author: University of Michigan--Dearborn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
Author: Sharon B. Oster
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345832
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285
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Book Description
An exploration of the temporal function that "the Jew" plays in literature. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how the Hebraic myth, in which Jewishness became a metaphor for an ancient, pre-Christian past, was reimagined in nineteenth-century American realism. The Hebraic myth, while integral to a Protestant understanding of time, was incapable of addressing modern Jewishness, especially in the context of the growing social and national concern around the "Jewish problem." Sharon B. Oster shows how realist authors consequently cast Jews as caught between a distant past and a promising American future. In either case, whether creating or disrupting temporal continuity, Jewishness existed outside of time. No Place in Time complicates the debates over Eastern European immigration in the 1880s and questions of assimilation to a Protestant American culture. The first chapter begins in the world of periodicals, an interconnected literary culture, out of which Abraham Cahan emerged as a literary voice of Jewish immigrants caught between nostalgia and a messianic future outside of linear progression. Moving from the margins to the center of literary realism, the second chapter revolves around Henry James's modernization of the "noble Hebrew" as a figure of mediation and reconciliation. The third chapter extends this analysis into the naturalism of Edith Wharton, who takes up questions of intimacy and intermarriage, and places "the Jew" at the nexus of competing futures shaped by uncertainty and risk. A number of Jewish female perspectives are included in the fourth chapter that recasts plots of cultural assimilation through intermarriage in terms of time: if a Jewish past exists in tension with an American future, these writers recuperate the "Hebraic myth" for themselves to imagine a viable Jewish future. No Place in Time ends with a brief look at poet Emma Lazarus, whose understanding of Jewishness was distinctly modern, not nostalgic, mythical, or dead. No Place in Time highlights a significant shift in how Jewishness was represented in American literature, and, as such, raises questions of identity, immigration, and religion. This volume will be of interest to scholars of nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century American literature, American Jewish literature, and literature as it intersects with immigration, religion, or temporality, as well as anyone interested in Jewish studies.
