An Alternative Path to Modernity

An Alternative Path to Modernity PDF Author: Yosef Kaplan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004500944
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The essays in this volume deal with the social and intellectual history of the Western Spanish and Portuguese Jews who established new communities in Northwestern Europe during the seventeenth century. The founders of these communities were mainly former Marranos, descendants of those Jews who had converted to Christianity in the closing years of the Middle Ages. After being separated from the Jewish world for many generations, they returned to Judaism and became an integral part of the Sephardi nation. Amsterdam became the metropolis of this new Jewish diaspora, which was characterised by both its involvement in colonial trade and its intellectual ferment. The reencounter of these Jews with Judaism was a complex affair, and for many of these former New Christians rabbinic Judaism aroused harsh criticism. In order to set the boundaries of their new identity, the leadership of the Sephardi communities of Amsterdam, Hamburg and London adopted a variety of strategies designed to rein in these wayward spirits. This process of socialisation into the Jewish world created a new type of Judaism, and those whose Jewish life was framed by this new amalgam can be considered the precursors of modernity in European Jewish society.

An Alternative Path to Modernity

An Alternative Path to Modernity PDF Author: Yosef Kaplan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004500944
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The essays in this volume deal with the social and intellectual history of the Western Spanish and Portuguese Jews who established new communities in Northwestern Europe during the seventeenth century. The founders of these communities were mainly former Marranos, descendants of those Jews who had converted to Christianity in the closing years of the Middle Ages. After being separated from the Jewish world for many generations, they returned to Judaism and became an integral part of the Sephardi nation. Amsterdam became the metropolis of this new Jewish diaspora, which was characterised by both its involvement in colonial trade and its intellectual ferment. The reencounter of these Jews with Judaism was a complex affair, and for many of these former New Christians rabbinic Judaism aroused harsh criticism. In order to set the boundaries of their new identity, the leadership of the Sephardi communities of Amsterdam, Hamburg and London adopted a variety of strategies designed to rein in these wayward spirits. This process of socialisation into the Jewish world created a new type of Judaism, and those whose Jewish life was framed by this new amalgam can be considered the precursors of modernity in European Jewish society.

An Alternative Path to Modernity

An Alternative Path to Modernity PDF Author: Yôsēf Qaplan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004117426
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The essays in this book depict the social and intellectual ferment of the former "Marranos" from Spain and Portugal who returned to the fold of Judaism in Western Europe during the seventeenth century and established new Jewish communities in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London.

Dissident Rabbi

Dissident Rabbi PDF Author: Yaacob Dweck
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691189943
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
A revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to assert the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty In 1665, Sabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Messiah with a mass following throughout the Ottoman Empire and Europe, announced that the redemption of the world was at hand. As Jews everywhere rejected the traditional laws of Judaism in favor of new norms established by Sabbetai Zevi, and abandoned reason for the ecstasy of messianic enthusiasm, one man watched in horror. Dissident Rabbi tells the story of Jacob Sasportas, the Sephardic rabbi who alone challenged Sabbetai Zevi's improbable claims and warned his fellow Jews that their Messiah was not the answer to their prayers. Yaacob Dweck's absorbing and richly detailed biography brings to life the tumultuous century in which Sasportas lived, an age torn apart by war, migration, and famine. He describes the messianic frenzy that gripped the Jewish Diaspora, and Sasportas's attempts to make sense of a world that Sabbetai Zevi claimed was ending. As Jews danced in the streets, Sasportas compiled The Fading Flower of the Zevi, a meticulous and eloquent record of Sabbatianism as it happened. In 1666, barely a year after Sabbetai Zevi heralded the redemption, the Messiah converted to Islam at the behest of the Ottoman sultan, and Sasportas's book slipped into obscurity. Dissident Rabbi is the revelatory account of a spiritual leader who dared to articulate the value of rabbinic doubt in the face of messianic certainty, and a revealing examination of how his life and legacy were rediscovered and appropriated by later generations of Jewish thinkers.

In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond

In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond PDF Author: Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443883085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
This book is the result of two scientific encounters hosted by the University of Évora in 2012, with the theme “Muslims and Jews in Portugal and the Diaspora. Identities and Memories (16th–17th centuries)”, and co-financed by the Foundation for Science and Technology, and by FEDER, through “Eixo I” of the “Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade” (POFC) of QREN (COMPETE). Beginning with an analysis of the forced conversion of Iberian Jews and Muslims, this volume examines the effects of this on their respective diasporas, focusing on a variety of approaches, from language and culture to identity discourses and interchanges between those communities.

The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza: De intellectus emendatione. Ethica. Select letters

The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza: De intellectus emendatione. Ethica. Select letters PDF Author: Benedictus de Spinoza
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description


Hebrew and Judaic Manuscripts in Amsterdam Public Collections

Hebrew and Judaic Manuscripts in Amsterdam Public Collections PDF Author: Lajb Fuks
Publisher: Brill Archive
ISBN: 9789004042711
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description


Improvement of the Understanding

Improvement of the Understanding PDF Author: Benedictus de Spinoza
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ethics
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description


On the Improvement of the Understanding

On the Improvement of the Understanding PDF Author: Benedict de Spinoza
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486121089
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
Also contains Ethics, Correspondence, all in excellent R. Elwes translation. Basic works on entry to philosophy, pantheism, exchange of ideas with great contemporaries.

Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx

Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx PDF Author: Jonathan I. Israel
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748672
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness. Leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel shows how the radical ideas in the early Marx’s writings were influenced by this legacy, which, he argues, must be understood as part of the Radical Enlightenment. He traces the rise of a Jewish revolutionary tendency demanding social equality and universal human rights throughout the Western world. Israel considers how these writers understood Jewish marginalization and ghettoization and the edifice of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained them. He investigates how the quest for Jewish emancipation led these thinkers to formulate sweeping theories of social and legal reform that paved the way for revolutionary actions that helped change the world from 1789 onward—but hardly as they intended.

Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis

Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis PDF Author: David B. Ruderman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297032
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
An examination of the life and work of Alexander McCaul and his impact on Jewish-Christian relations In Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis, David B. Ruderman considers the life and works of prominent evangelical missionary Alexander McCaul (1799-1863), who was sent to Warsaw by the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews. He and his family resided there for nearly a decade, which afforded him the opportunity to become a scholar of Hebrew and rabbinic texts. Returning to England, he quickly rose up through the ranks of missionaries to become a leading figure and educator in the organization and eventually a professor of post-biblical studies at Kings College, London. In 1837, McCaul published The Old Paths, a powerful critique of rabbinic Judaism that, once translated into Hebrew and other languages, provoked controversy among Jews and Christians alike. Ruderman first examines McCaul in his complexity as a Hebraist affectionately supportive of Jews while opposing the rabbis. He then focuses his attention on a larger network of his associates, both allies and foes, who interacted with him and his ideas: two converts who came under his influence but eventually broke from him; two evangelical colleagues who challenged his aggressive proselytizing among the Jews; and, lastly, three Jewish thinkers—two well-known scholars from Eastern Europe and a rabbi from Syria—who refuted his charges against the rabbis and constructed their own justifications for Judaism in the mid-nineteenth century. Missionaries, Converts, and Rabbis reconstructs a broad transnational conversation between Christians, Jews, and those in between, opening a new vista for understanding Jewish and Christian thought and the entanglements between the two faith communities that persist in the modern era. Extending the geographical and chronological reach of his previous books, Ruderman continues his exploration of the impact of Jewish-Christian relations on Jewish self-reflection and the phenomenon of mingled identities in early modern and modern Europe.