Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648

Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648 PDF Author: Benjamin R. Gampel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231109237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
Leading scholars reflect on the 1492 expulsions of the Jews from Spain.

Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648

Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648 PDF Author: Benjamin R. Gampel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231109237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Get Book Here

Book Description
Leading scholars reflect on the 1492 expulsions of the Jews from Spain.

Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648

Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648 PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sephardim
Languages : en
Pages : 12

Get Book Here

Book Description


Sephardim and Ashkenazim

Sephardim and Ashkenazim PDF Author: Sina Rauschenbach
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110695413
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism have long been studied separately. Yet, scholars are becoming ever more aware of the need to merge them into a single field of Jewish Studies. This volume opens new perspectives and bridges traditional gaps. The authors are not simply contributing to their respective fields of Sephardic or Ashkenazic Studies. Rather, they all include both Sephardic and Ashkenazic perspectives as they reflect on different aspects of encounters and reconsider traditional narratives. Subjects range from medieval and early modern Sephardic and Ashkenazic constructions of identities, influences, and entanglements in the fields of religious art, halakhah, kabbalah, messianism, and charity to modern Ashkenazic Sephardism and Sephardic admiration for Ashkenazic culture. For reasons of coherency, the contributions all focus on European contexts between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

The En Yaaqov

The En Yaaqov PDF Author: Marjorie Lehman
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814335969
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 534

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the origins of the En Yaaqov in the tumultuous medieval period and the motivations of its creator, exiled Spanish rabbi Jacob ibn Habib. After his expulsion from Spain in 1492, Jacob ibn Habib created the En Yaaqov, a collection of Talmudic aggadah (non-legal material), by removing the majority of the Talmud’s legal portions but preserving the chapter order of the remaining material and adding his own introduction and running commentary. In The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus author Marjorie Lehman argues that the En Yaaqov’s anthologizer, Jacob ibn Habib, purposely sought to create a Talmud "look-alike" in order to prove that Judaism’s foundational legal tract could also be seen as a theological document. By considering the factors that influenced ibn Habib, Lehman argues that his En Yaaqov was a reaction to the way that the Talmud was perceived and studied during the late medieval period among Spanish Jewry. In four chapters, Lehman explores the first printed edition of the En Yaaqov, delving into the intellectual culture and theological intricacies surrounding its creation and elaborating on the contributions of the En Yaaqov to the development of faith. Chapter 1 considers the political turmoil and challenges of resettlement that ibn Habib encountered after expulsion and that prompted him to produce the En Yaaqov. Chapter 2 focuses on the intellectual framework within which ibn Habib’s attitude toward Talmudic aggadah developed and explains why few running commentaries on the aggadot of the Talmud existed prior to his work. Chapter 3 discusses ibn Habib’s editorial decisions in choosing to construct the En Yaaqov as a Talmud "look-alike." In Chapter 4, Lehman analyzes key passages in ibn Habib’s commentary to the En Yaaqov to examine how he integrated text and context to provide a resource that Jews could utilize for spiritual growth and continuity of faith. In her conclusion, Lehman addresses the evolving printing history of the collection, which was quite different from that of the Talmud. Lehman argues that ibn Habib’s experiences as a Spanish Jew who was forced to flee Spain prompted him to make decisions not only about how the Talmud should be studied in the name of spiritual restoration but also about how Jews could survive future expulsions by cultivating a sustainable faithful relationship with God. This insightfully researched book will be informative to scholars of Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, late-medieval intellectual history and culture, Sephardic history, and the history of the Jewish book as well as to readers interested in the still-popular En Yaaqov.

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women PDF Author: Isaac Jack Lévy
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252026973
Category : Europe
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Ellii Kongas-Maranda Prize from the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society, 2003. Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses. For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.

Haskalah

Haskalah PDF Author: Olga Litvak
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813554373
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book Here

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.

Emigration and the Sea

Emigration and the Sea PDF Author: Malyn Newitt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190613262
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
Today Portuguese is the seventh most widely spoken language in the world and Brazil is a new economic powerhouse. Both phenomena result from the Portuguese 'Discoveries' of the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Catholic missions that planted Portuguese communities in every continent. Some were part of the Portuguese empire but many survived independently under other rulers with their own Creole languages and indigenized Portuguese culture. In the 19th and 20th centuries these were joined by millions of economic migrants who established Portuguese settlements in Europe, North America, Venezuela and South Africa - and in less likely places, including Bermuda, Guyana and Hawaii. Interwoven within this global history of the diaspora are stories of the Portuguese who left mainland Portugal and the islands, the lives of the Sephardic Jews, the African slaves imported into the Atlantic Islands and Brazil and the Goans who later spread along the imperial highways of Portugal and Britain. Much of Portugal's contribution to science and the arts, as well as its influence in the modern world, can be attributed to the members of these widely scattered Portuguese communities, and these are given their due in Newitt's engrossing volume

Sephardi Jewry

Sephardi Jewry PDF Author: Esther Benbassa
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520218222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Modified and updated version of a book that first appeared in Paris in 1993 under the title Juifs des Balkans ... (Editions La Decouverte)"--Acknowledgments, p. [xi].

Early Modern Jewry

Early Modern Jewry PDF Author: David B. Ruderman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691152888
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
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. Ruderman explores five crucial and powerful characteristics uniting Jewish communities: a mobility leading to enhanced contacts between Jews of differing backgrounds, traditions, and languages, as well as between Jews and non-Jews; a heightened sense of communal cohesion throughout all Jewish settlements that revealed the rising power of lay oligarchies; a knowledge explosion brought about by the printing press, the growing interest in Jewish books by Christian readers, an expanded curriculum of Jewish learning, and the entrance of Jewish elites into universities; a crisis of rabbinic authority expressed through active messianism, mystical prophecy, radical enthusiasm, and heresy; and the blurring of religious identities, impacting such groups as conversos, Sabbateans, individual converts to Christianity, and Christian Hebraists. In describing an early modern Jewish culture, Early Modern Jewry reconstructs a distinct epoch in history and provides essential background for understanding the modern Jewish experience.

The Jewish Contribution to Civilization

The Jewish Contribution to Civilization PDF Author: Jeremy Cohen
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800345402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book investigates the idea of a distinct ‘Jewish contribution to civilization’ as it has been understood from the seventeenth century to the present. Offering a broad spectrum of academic opinion, it explores the role that the concept has played in Jewish self-definition and how it has influenced the history of the Jews and of others. It also considers the centrality of the concept in modern Jewish culture and for modern Jewish studies.