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.

Late Medieval Jewish Identities

Late Medieval Jewish Identities PDF Author: Carmen Caballero-Navas
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Medieval Iberia offers one of the few examples of coexistence over an extended period of time between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in pre-modern Europe. Taking the Jewish community as a focal point, this book thoroughly explores the various “borders”—geographical divides, religious affiliations, gender boundaries, genre divisions—that ruled the lives and intellectual production of late medieval Jews. By shedding new light on the ways in which these boundaries generated the Jewish communities’ multiple, overlapping, and conflicting identities, this book breaks new ground in the study of cultural exchange in the Middle Ages.

French and Jewish

French and Jewish PDF Author: Nadia Malinovich
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800345399
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early twentieth-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world. This stimulating and original book makes a major contribution to our understanding of modern Jewish history as well as to the history of the Jews in France and to the larger discourse about modern Jewish identities.

Becoming the People of the Talmud

Becoming the People of the Talmud PDF Author: Talya Fishman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204980
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In Becoming the People of the Talmud, Talya Fishman examines ways in which circumstances of transmission have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions. Although the Talmud's preeminence in Jewish study and its determining role in Jewish practice are generally taken for granted, Fishman contends that these roles were not solidified until the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The inscription of Talmud—which Sefardi Jews understand to have occurred quite early, and Ashkenazi Jews only later—precipitated these developments. The encounter with Oral Torah as a written corpus was transformative for both subcultures, and it shaped the roles that Talmud came to play in Jewish life. What were the historical circumstances that led to the inscription of Oral Torah in medieval Europe? How did this body of ancient rabbinic traditions, replete with legal controversies and nonlegal material, come to be construed as a reference work and prescriptive guide to Jewish life? Connecting insights from geonica, medieval Jewish and Christian history, and orality-textuality studies, Becoming the People of the Talmud reconstructs the process of cultural transformation that occurred once medieval Jews encountered the Babylonian Talmud as a written text. According to Fishman, the ascription of greater authority to written text was accompanied by changes in reading habits, compositional predilections, classroom practices, approaches to adjudication, assessments of the past, and social hierarchies. She contends that certain medieval Jews were aware of these changes: some noted that books had replaced teachers; others protested the elevation of Talmud-centered erudition and casuistic virtuosity into standards of religious excellence, at the expense of spiritual refinement. The book concludes with a consideration of Rhineland Pietism's emergence in this context and suggests that two contemporaneous phenomena—the prominence of custom in medieval Ashkenazi culture and the novel Christian attack on Talmud—were indirectly linked to the new eminence of this written text in Jewish life.

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.

Vernacular Voices

Vernacular Voices PDF Author: Kirsten A. Fudeman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205359
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
A thirteenth-century text purporting to represent a debate between a Jew and a Christian begins with the latter's exposition of the virgin birth, something the Jew finds incomprehensible at the most basic level, for reasons other than theological: "Speak to me in French and explain your words!" he says. "Gloss for me in French what you are saying in Latin!" While the Christian and the Jew of the debate both inhabit the so-called Latin Middle Ages, the Jew is no more comfortable with Latin than the Christian would be with Hebrew. Communication between the two is possible only through the vernacular. In Vernacular Voices, Kirsten Fudeman looks at the roles played by language, and especially medieval French and Hebrew, in shaping identity and culture. How did language affect the way Jews thought, how they interacted with one another and with Christians, and who they perceived themselves to be? What circumstances and forces led to the rise of a medieval Jewish tradition in French? Who were the writers, and why did they sometimes choose to write in the vernacular rather than Hebrew? How and in what terms did Jews define their relationship to the larger French-speaking community? Drawing on a variety of texts written in medieval French and Hebrew, including biblical glosses, medical and culinary recipes, incantations, prayers for the dead, wedding songs, and letters, Fudeman challenges readers to open their ears to the everyday voices of medieval French-speaking Jews and to consider French elements in Hebrew manuscripts not as a marginal phenomenon but as reflections of a vibrant and full vernacular existence. Applying analytical strategies from linguistics, literature, and history, she demonstrates that language played a central role in the formation, expression, and maintenance of medieval Jewish identity and that it brought Christians and Jews together even as it set them apart.

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.

Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning in Medieval Europe

Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning in Medieval Europe PDF Author: Mordechai Z. Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108609023
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
In this volume, Mordechai Z. Cohen explores the interpretive methods of Rashi of Troyes (1040–1105), the most influential Jewish Bible commentator of all time. By elucidating the 'plain sense' (peshat) of Scripture, together with critically selected midrashic interpretations, Rashi created an approach that was revolutionary in the talmudically-oriented Ashkenazic milieu. Cohen contextualizes Rashi's commentaries by examining influences from other centers of Jewish learning in Muslim Spain and Byzantine lands. He also opens new scholarly paths by comparing Rashi's methods with trends in Latin learning reflected in the Psalms commentary of his older contemporary, Saint Bruno the Carthusian (1030–1101). Drawing upon the Latin tradition of enarratio poetarum ('interpreting the poets'), Bruno applied a grammatical interpretive method and incorporated patristic commentary selectively, a parallel that Cohen uses to illuminate Rashi's exegetical values. Cohen thereby brings to light the novel literary conceptions manifested by Rashi and his key students, Josef Qara and Rashbam.

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.