Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews PDF Author: Javier Castano
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786949903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
The origins of Judaism’s regional ‘subcultures’ are poorly understood, as are Jewish identities other than ‘Ashkenaz’ and ‘Sepharad’. Through case studies and close textual readings, this volume illuminates the role of geopolitical boundaries, cross-cultural influences, and migration in the medieval formation of Jewish regional identities.

Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews PDF Author: Javier Castano
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786949903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
The origins of Judaism’s regional ‘subcultures’ are poorly understood, as are Jewish identities other than ‘Ashkenaz’ and ‘Sepharad’. Through case studies and close textual readings, this volume illuminates the role of geopolitical boundaries, cross-cultural influences, and migration in the medieval formation of Jewish regional identities.

Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews

Regional Identities and Cultures of Medieval Jews PDF Author: Javier Castaño
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The origins of Judaism's regional 'subcultures' are poorly understood, as are Jewish identities other than 'Ashkenaz' and 'Sepharad'. Through case studies and close textual readings, this volume illuminates the role of geopolitical boundaries, cross-cultural influences, and migration in the medieval formation of Jewish regional identities.

Rashi's Commentary on the Torah

Rashi's Commentary on the Torah PDF Author: Eric Lawee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019093784X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Winner of the Jewish Book Council Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award in Scholarship This book explores the reception history of the most important Jewish Bible commentary ever composed, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki; 1040-1105). Though the Commentary has benefited from enormous scholarly attention, analysis of diverse reactions to it has been surprisingly scant. Viewing its path to preeminence through a diverse array of religious, intellectual, literary, and sociocultural lenses, Eric Lawee focuses on processes of the Commentary's canonization and on a hitherto unexamined--and wholly unexpected--feature of its reception: critical, and at times astonishingly harsh, resistance to it. Lawee shows how and why, despite such resistance, Rashi's interpretation of the Torah became an exegetical classic, a staple in the curriculum, a source of shared religious vocabulary for Jews across time and place, and a foundational text that shaped the Jewish nation's collective identity. The book takes as its larger integrating perspective processes of canonicity as they shape how traditions flourish, disintegrate, or evolve. Rashi's scriptural magnum opus, the foremost work of Franco-German (Ashkenazic) biblical scholarship, faced stiff competition for canonical supremacy in the form of rationalist reconfigurations of Judaism as they developed in Mediterranean seats of learning. It nevertheless emerged triumphant in an intense battle for Judaism's future that unfolded in late medieval and early modern times. Investigation of the reception of the Commentary throws light on issues in Jewish scholarship and spirituality that continue to stir reflection, and even passionate debate, in the Jewish world today.

Religion Or Ethnicity?

Religion Or Ethnicity? PDF Author: Zvi Y. Gitelman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Can someone be considered Jewish if he or she never goes to synagogue, doesn't keep kosher, and for whom the only connection to his or her ancestral past is attending an annual Passover seder? In Religion or Ethnicity? fifteen leading scholars trace the evolution of Jewish identity. The book examines Judaism from the Greco-Roman age, through medieval times, modern western and eastern Europe, to today. Jewish identity has been defined as an ethnicity, a nation, a culture, and even a race. Religion or Ethnicity? questions what it means to be Jewish. The contributors show how the Jewish people have evolved over time in different ethnic, religious, and political movements. In his closing essay, Gitelman questions the viability of secular Jewishness outside Israel but suggests that the continued interest in exploring the relationship between Judaism's secular and religious forms will keep the heritage alive for generations to come.

The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time

The Medieval Postcolonial Jew, In and Out of Time PDF Author: Miriamne Ara Krummel
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472132377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Introduction: Calculating Time: Eosturmonath, Nisan, and the Paschal Table -- Just In Time: Sacrificial Gifts, Rotting Corpses, and Annus Domini -- An (Un)Common Era: Passionate Narratives, Temporal Clashes-Jewish and Christian -- Taking Jews out and Putting Them Back in: Christian Chronometry, the York Massacre, and a Cycle of Mystery Plays -- A Time of Many Layers: Feasting on the Temporalities of The Siege of Jerusalem -- Repressing a Perpetually Resurfacing Temporality: Four Authorial Orphans and The Fifteenth-Century 'Tale of the Litel Clergeon and the Jews' -- Epilogue: The Empire of Common Time.

Teaching the Global Middle Ages

Teaching the Global Middle Ages PDF Author: Geraldine Heng
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603295194
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
While globalization is a modern phenomenon, premodern people were also interconnected in early forms of globalism, sharing merchandise, technology, languages, and stories over long distances. Looking across civilizations, this volume takes a broad view of the Middle Ages in order to foster new habits of thinking and develop a multilayered, critical sense of the past. The essays in this volume reach across disciplinary lines to bring insights from music, theater, religion, ecology, museums, and the history of disease into the literature classroom. The contributors provide guidance on texts such as the Thousand and One Nights, Sunjata, Benjamin of Tudela's Book of Travels, and the Malay Annals and on topics such as hotels, maps, and camels. They propose syllabus recommendations, present numerous digital resources, and offer engaging class activities and discussion questions. Ultimately, they provide tools that will help students evaluate popular representations of the Middle Ages and engage with the dynamics of past, present, and future world relationships.

"Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe

Author: Ivan G. Marcus
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250095
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," was composed and how it extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism

Abraham Abulafia’s Esotericism PDF Author: Moshe Idel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110598779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
This book focuses on Abraham Abulafia's esoteric thought in relation to Maimonides, Maimonideans, and Islamic thought in the line of Leo Strauss' theory of the history of philosophy. A survey of Abulafia's sources leads into an analysis of the esoteric meaning on the famous parable of the three rings, considering also the possible connection between this parable, which Abdulafia inserted into a book dedicated to his student, the 13th century rabbi Nathan the wise, and the Lessing's Play "Nathan the Wise." The book also examines Abulafia's universalistic understanding of the nature of the Bible, the Hebrew language, and the people of Israel (or the Sinaic revelation). The universal aspects of Abulafia’s thought have been put in relief against the more widespread Kabbalistic views which are predominantly particularistic. A number of texts have also been identified here for the first time as authored by Abulafia.

The Jews

The Jews PDF Author: John Efron
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351017853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1239

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Book Description
The Jews: A History is a comprehensive and accessible text that explores the religious, cultural, social, and economic diversity of the Jewish people and their faith. Placing Jewish history within its wider cultural context, the book covers a broad time span, stretching from ancient Israel to the modern day. It examines Jewish history across a range of settings, including the ancient Near East, the age of Greek and Roman rule, the medieval realms of Christianity and Islam, modern Europe, including the World Wars and the Holocaust, and contemporary America and Israel, covering a variety of topics, such as legal emancipation, acculturation, and religious innovation. The third edition is fully updated to include more case studies and to encompass recent events in Jewish history, as well as religion, social life, economics, culture, and gender. Supported by case studies, online references, further reading, maps, and illustrations, The Jews: A History provides students with a comprehensive and wide-ranging grounding in Jewish history.

Early Modern Jewish Civilization

Early Modern Jewish Civilization PDF Author: David Graizbord
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040004784
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
This collection is an introductory historical survey and selective cultural analysis of the development, coalescence, and eventual waning of a diasporic civilization—that of the Jews of the early modern period (ca. 1391–1789) in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and key nodes of the Iberian Empires in the Americas. Each chapter explores key factors that shaped both distinctive early modern Jewish communities and a remarkably coalescent and far broader community-of-communities. The contributors engage and answer the following questions: What do historians mean by “early modernity,” and to what extent does the concept illuminate the history and culture(s) of Jews from the end of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment? What were the general demographic contours of the Jewish diaspora over this period and how did they change? How did culture, politics, technology, economics, and gender shape diasporic Jewish communities across eastern and western Europe and the New World over the course of some 400 years? Ultimately, the work renders a portrait of coherence and diversity, continuity and discontinuity, in early modern Jewish life within and across temporal and geographic boundaries. Early Modern Jewish Civilization is essential reading for all students of Jewish history and civilization and early modern history more broadly.