Author: Ann Oravetz Albert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jewish messianic movements
Languages : en
Pages : 546
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Book Description
This study examines the political thought of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, arguing that a distinct period of intense political self-reflection can be identified during the two decades beginning in 1665. In their sermons, polemics, moral tracts, pamphlets, and administrative records, the members of Spinoza's former Jewish community displayed a new emphasis on the exilic community as an object of pride and analysis, creatively adapted political ideas from the non-Jewish world to describe their own governance, and deeply queried the relationship between lay and rabbinic authority. The primary context offered for this shift is the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement that raged through European Jewish communities in 1665--6. This movement's promise of an imminent end to the exile, and its subsequent failure, prompted a new engagement with the meaning of the semi-autonomous Jewish community, its institutions, and its political-religious nature. The post-Sabbatian Sephardim in Amsterdam characterized the community as a true polity that was governed according to their own law and possessed political glory to rival the promised messianic kingship. Although this political re-evaluation took place in the wake of the Sabbatian movement, this is not the only relevant context. It is also related to Spinoza's discussion of similar questions about law and particularity in his Theological-Political Treatise, and to general trends in early modern European and Jewish history. For example, their depiction of the community as a Jewish "republic" was in part a reaction to the erosion of communal autonomy, as well as to the contemporaneous Christian interest in political Hebraism. Their discussions of the lay leadership's "reason of state" are another example, portraying their governance as the skillful harmonization of the demands of religion with those of politics, and mimicking Spanish treatments of the same issue.
Author: Betsalʼel Naʼor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
Author: Andrea Schatz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004393099
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture offers pioneering studies of the intense and varied reception of the historian’s work in scholarship, religious and political debates, and in literary texts, from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to the “trials” of Josephus in the twentieth century.
Author: Elisheva Carlebach
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231071918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Rabbi Moses Hagiz, one of the most prominent and influential Jewish leaders of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, devoted his career to restoring rabbinic authority. His most prominent talent was as a polemicist, and he campaigned ceaselessly against Jewish heresy in an attempt to unify the rabbinate. During Hagiz's lifetime there was an overall decline in rabbinic authority, which the author argues was the result of migration and assimilation.
Author: Richard I. Cohen
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0822980363
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
David B. Ruderman's groundbreaking studies of Jewish intellectuals as they engaged with Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment have set the agenda for a distinctive historiographical approach to Jewish culture in early modern Europe, from 1500 to 1800. From his initial studies of Italy to his later work on eighteenth-century English, German, and Polish Jews, Ruderman has emphasized the individual as a representative or exemplary figure through whose life and career the problems of a period and cultural context are revealed. Thirty-one leading scholars celebrate Ruderman's stellar career in essays that bring new insight into Jewish culture as it is intertwined in Jewish, European, Ottoman, and American history. The volume presents probing historical snapshots that advance, refine, and challenge how we understand the early modern period and spark further inquiry. Key elements explored include those inspired by Ruderman's own work: the role of print, the significance of networks and mobility among Jewish intellectuals, the value of extraordinary individuals who absorbed and translated so-called external traditions into a Jewish idiom, and the interaction between cultures through texts and personal encounters of Jewish and Christian intellectuals. While these elements can be found in earlier periods of Jewish history, Ruderman and his colleagues point to an intensification of mobility, the dissemination of knowledge, and the blurring of boundaries in the early modern period. These studies present a rich and nuanced portrait of a Jewish culture that is both a contributing member and a product of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Ruderman has fostered a community of scholars from Europe, North America, and Israel who work in the widest range of areas that touch on Jewish culture. He has worked to make Jewish studies an essential element of mainstream humanities. The essays in this volume are a testament to the haven he has fostered for scholars, which has and continues to generate important works of scholarship across the entire spectrum of Jewish history.
Author: Pawel Maciejko
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1512600539
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
The pronouncements of Sabbatai Tsevi (1626-76) gave rise to Sabbatianism, a key messianic movement in Judaism that spread across Jewish communities in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The movement, which featured a set of theological doctrines in which Jewish Kabbalistic tradition merged with Muslim and later Christian elements, suffered a setback with Tsevi's conversion to Islam in 1666. Nonetheless, for another hundred and fifty years, Sabbatianism continued to exist as a heretical underground movement. It provoked intense opposition from rabbinic authorities for another century and had a significant impact on central developments of later Judaism, such as the Haskalah, the Reform movement, Hasidism, and the secularization of Jewish society. This volume provides a selection of the most original and influential texts composed by Sabbatai Tsevi and his followers, complemented by fragments of the works of their rabbinic opponents and contemporary observers and some literary works inspired by Sabbatianism. An introduction and annotations by Pawe_ Maciejko provide historical, political, and social context for the documents.
Author: Benjamin E. Fisher
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centered on the Bible. School children studied the Bible systematically, while rabbinic literature was pushed to levels reached by few students; adults met in confraternities to study Scripture; and families listened to Scripture-based sermons in synagogue, and to help pass the long, cold winter nights of northwest Europe. The community's rabbis produced creative, and often unprecedented scholarship on the Jewish Bible as well as the New Testament. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centered culture resulted from the confluence of the Jewish community's Catholic and converso past with the Protestant world in which they came to live. Studying Amsterdam's Jews offers an early window into the prioritization of the Bible over rabbinic literature -- a trend that continues through modernity in western Europe. It allows us to see how Amsterdam's rabbis experimented with new historical methods for understanding the Bible, and how they grappled with doubts about the authority and truth of the Bible that were growing in the world around them. Amsterdam's People of the Book allows us to appreciate how Benedict Spinoza's ideas were in fact shaped by the approaches to reading the Bible in the community where he was born, raised, and educated. After all, as Spinoza himself remarked, before becoming Amsterdam's most famous heretic and one of Europe's leading philosophers and biblical critics, he was "steeped in the common beliefs about the Bible from childhood on."
Author: Logie Barrow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317268857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
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Book Description
First published in 1986. Independent Spirits is about the intellectual world of the humbly-born in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, focussing on plebeian, or working- and lower middle-class spiritualists. This book is an important study which throws light on the idealism and search for knowledge that were so central in plebeian circles and in certain, very important parts of the labour movement during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This title will be of interest to students of history.
Author: Mirjam Zadoff
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004387404
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
The articles collected in Scholar and Kabbalist: The Life and Work of Gershom Scholem offer new and fresh insights into the life and work of Gershom Scholem, one of the most prominent German-Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century.
Author: Olga Litvak
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813554373
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
Commonly translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Olga Litvak argues that the idea of a Jewish modernity, championed by adherents of this movement, did not originate in Western Europe’s age of reason. Litvak contends that the Haskalah spearheaded a Jewish religious revival, better understood against the background of Eastern European Romanticism. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Most importantly, she challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism. In Litvak’s ambitious interpretation, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals emerge as the authors of a Jewish Romantic revolution. Fueled by contradictory longings both for community and for personal freedom, the poets and scholars associated with the Haskalah questioned the moral costs of civic equality and the achievement of middle-class status. In the nineteenth century, their conservative approach to culture as the cure for the spiritual ills of the modern individual provided a powerful argument for the development of Jewish nationalism. Today, their ideas are equally resonant in contemporary debates about the ramifications of secularization for the future of Judaism.
