Amsterdam's People of the Book

Amsterdam's People of the Book PDF 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."

Amsterdam's People of the Book

Amsterdam's People of the Book PDF Author: Benjamin E. Fisher
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

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."

A Collage of Customs

A Collage of Customs PDF Author: Mark Podwal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780878205097
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Modernized illustrations based upon 16th-century mingahim books (books of Jewish customs), with an introduction, and descriptions of each image"--

Guidance, Not Governance

Guidance, Not Governance PDF Author: Joan S. Friedman
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 087820122X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Solomon Bennett Freehof (1892-1990) was one of America's most distinguished, influential, and beloved rabbis. Ordained at Hebrew Union College in 1915, he was of the generation of rabbis from east European immigrant backgrounds who moved Reform Judaism away from its classical form toward a renewed appreciation of traditional practices. Freehof himself was less interested in restoring discarded rituals than in demonstrating how the Reform approach to Jewish religious practice was rooted in the Jewish legal tradition (halakhah). Opposed to any attempt to create a code of Reform practice, he nevertheless called for Reform Judaism to turn to the halakhah, not in order to adhere to codified law, but to be guided in ritual and in all areas of life by its values and its ethical insights. For Reform Jews, Jewish law was to offer "guidance, not governance," and this guidance was to be provided through the writing of responsa, individual rulings based on legal precedent, written by an organized rabbinic authority in response to questions about real-life situations. After World War II, the earlier consensus about what constituted proper observance in a Reform context vanished as the children of east European immigrants flocked to new Reform synagogues in new suburbs, bringing with them a more traditional sensibility. Even before Freehof was named chairman of the Central Conference of American Rabbis Responsa Committee in 1956, his colleagues began turning to him for guidance, especially in the situations Freehof recognized as inevitably arising from living in an open society where the boundaries between what was Jewish and what was not were ambiguous or blurred. Over nearly five decades, he answered several thousand inquiries regarding Jewish practice, the plurality of which concerned the tensions Jews experienced in navigating this open society-questions concerning mixed marriage, Jewish status, non-Jewish participation in the synagogue, conversion, and so on-and published several hundred of these in eight volumes of Reform responsa. In her pioneering study, Friedman analyzes Freehof's responsa on a select number of crucial issues that illustrate the evolution of American Reform Judaism. She also discusses the deeper issues with which the movement struggled, and continues to struggle, in its attempt to meet the ever-changing challenges of the present while preserving both individual autonomy and faithfulness to the Jewish tradition.

The Geographical Journal

The Geographical Journal PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Geography
Languages : en
Pages : 626

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Book Description
Includes the Proceedings of the Royal geographical society, formerly pub. separately.

Hebrew Union College Journal

Hebrew Union College Journal PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Judaism
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description


United States Jewry, 1776-1985

United States Jewry, 1776-1985 PDF Author: Jacob Rader Marcus
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345050
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1019

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Book Description
In the final volume of this set, Marcus deals with the coming and challenge of the East European Jews from 1852 to 1920. In United States Jewry, 1776–1985, the dean of American Jewish historians, Jacob Rader Marcus, unfolds the history of Jewish immigration, segregation, and integration; of Jewry’s cultural exclusiveness and assimilation; of its internal division and indivisible unity; and of its role in the making of America. Characterized by Marcus’s impeccable scholarship, meticulous documentation, and readable style, this landmark four-volume set completes the history Marcus began in The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776. In the fourth and final volume of this set, Marcus deals with the coming and challenge of the East European Jews from 1852 to 1920. He explores settlement and colonization, dispersal to rural areas, life in large cities, the proletarians, the garment industry, the unions, and socialism. He also describes the life of the middle and upper class East European Jew. Special attention is paid to the growth of Zionism. In the epilogue, Marcus writes about the evolution of the "American Jew."

A Chosen Calling

A Chosen Calling PDF Author: Noah J. Efron
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421413817
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Rejecting the idea that Jews have done well in science because of uniquely Jewish traits, Jewish brains, and Jewish habits of mind, this book approaches the Jewish affinity for science through the geographic and cultural circumstances of Jews who were compelled to settle in new worlds in the early twentieth century.

Hebrew Union College and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Hebrew Union College and the Dead Sea Scrolls PDF Author: Jason Kalman
Publisher: Hebrew Union College
ISBN: 0615703461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
The bare outline of the story of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is well known, but the precise details are sometimes completely forgotten or misconstrued. The recovery of this history in all its complexity is vital for understanding how and why scholarly work on the Scrolls developed as it did over the six decades during which the texts were slowly published. Jason Kalman recovers the fascinating story of Hebrew Union College's involvement with the Dead Sea Scrolls from their discovery in 1948 until the early 1990s when they were first made accessible to all scholars and to the public.

Self-Portrait of a Holocaust Survivor

Self-Portrait of a Holocaust Survivor PDF Author: Werner Weinberg
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0822982897
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The breadth of Werner Weinberg's scholarship was prodigious, yielding monographs on ancient Hebrew epigraphy and biblical exegesis; the syntax of Rabbinic Hebrew; medieval grammars; and numerous studies on various aspects of Modern Hebrew. Both Weinberg and Lisl, his wife, survived internment at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This collection of essays reprinted here, a little more than three decades after it first appeared, conveys Weinberg's ongoing struggle to put into words something that might offer understanding to post-Holocaust generations. But they are also about a survivor's own desire for meaning and sense in a senseless world. Most essays are framed around a series of questions which constitute Weinberg's "prison," and each time he attempts to pass through its portal, he finds himself "held back at the threshold." Self-Portrait of a Holocaust Survivor fuses together Weinberg's most personal reflections alongside careful analysis by an erudite theologian fully-versed in traditional Jewish sources and historiography. He moves between resisting and acquiescing to the implications of Bergen-Belsen, never shying away from the most painful questions about God, morality, virtue, and the individual's potential to do good. While today there is a vast literature penned by holocaust survivors and historians, this collection grapples with the concept of survivorship from a unique perspective.

The Jews in Christian Europe

The Jews in Christian Europe PDF Author: Jacob R. Marcus
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0822981238
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 746

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Book Description
First published in 1938, Jacob Rader Marcus's The Jews in The Medieval World has remained an indispensable resource for its comprehensive view of Jewish historical experience from late antiquity through the early modern period, viewed through primary source documents in English translation. In this new work based on Marcus's classic source book, Marc Saperstein has recast the volume's focus, now fully centered on Christian Europe, updated the work's organizational format, and added seventy-two new annotated sources. In his compelling introduction, Saperstein supplies a modern and thought-provoking discussion of the changing values that influence our understanding of history, analyzing issues surrounding periodization, organization, and inclusion. Through a vast range of documents written by Jews and Christians, including historical narratives, legal opinions, martyrologies, memoirs, polemics, epitaphs, advertisements, folktales, ethical and pedagogical writings, book prefaces and colophons, commentaries, and communal statutes, The Jews in Christian Europe allows the actors and witnesses of events to speak for themselves.