Author: S. Leyla Gurkan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134037066
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 498
Get Book Here
Book Description
The concept of the Jews as a chosen people is a key element of the Jewish faith and identity. This book explores the idea of chosenness from the ancient world, through modernity and into the Post-Holocaust era. Analysing a vast corpus of biblical, ancient, rabbinic and modern Jewish literature, the author seeks to give a better understanding of this central doctrine of the Jewish religion. She shows that although the idea of chosenness has been central to Judaism and Jewish self-definition, it has not been carried to the present day in the same form. Instead it has gone through constant change, depending on who is employing it, against what sort of background, and for what purpose. Surveying the different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the doctrine of chosenness that appear in Ancient, Modern, and Post-Holocaust periods, the dominant themes of ‘Holiness’, ‘Mission’, and ‘Survival’ are identified in each respective period. The theological, philosophical, and sociological dimensions of the question of Jewish chosenness are thus examined in their historical context, as responses to the challenges of Christianity, Modernity, and the Holocaust in particular. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Jewish Studies, the Holocaust, religion and theology.
Author: Daniel Bernardi
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814338070
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
As studio bosses, directors, and actors, Jews have been heavily involved in film history and vitally involved in all aspects of film production. Yet Jewish characters have been represented onscreen in stereotypical and disturbing ways, while Jews have also helped to produce some of the most troubling stereotypes of people of color in Hollywood film history. In Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, leading scholars consider the complex relationship between Jews and the film industry, as Jews have helped to construct Hollywood's vision of the American dream and American collective identity and have in turn been shaped by those representations. Editors Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson introduce the volume with an overview of the history of Jews in American popular culture and the American film industry. Multidisciplinary contributors go on to discuss topics such as early Jewish films and directors, institutionalized anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and gossip culture, and issues of Jewish performance on film. Contributors draw on a diverse sampling of films, from representations of the Holocaust on film to screen comedy; filmmakers and writers, including David Mamet, George Cukor, Sidney Lumet, Edward Sloman, and Steven Spielberg; and stars, like Barbra Streisand, Adam Sandler, and Ben Stiller. The Jewish experience in American cinema reveals much about the degree to which Jews have been integrated into and contribute to the making of American popular film culture. Scholars of Jewish studies, film studies, American history, and American culture as well as anyone interested in film history will find this volume fascinating reading.
Author: A. Chadwick Thornhill
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830840834
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this careful and provocative study, Chad Thornhill considers how Second Temple understandings of election influenced key Pauline texts with sensitivity to social, historical and literary factors. While Paul is able to move beyond ancient categories of a collective view of election, Thornhill shows how he also follows these patterns.
Author: Richard Lynn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781593680367
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 405
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Einstein... Shylock... Rothschild... Trotsky... Jesus. The scientist and philosopher... the greedy money-lender and middle man... the impoverished immigrant... the elite of politics and high finance... the prophet... the revolutionary. All of these have been faces of the Jewish people over the centuries. They have inspired admiration, envy, suspicion, and hatred and overflowed with world-changing personages. The historian Yuri Slezkine claimed that the 20th century was nothing less than the 'Jewish century,' so indispensable were they in the creation of the modern world"--Cover, p. [4].
Author: Yaakov Ariel
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860530
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Get Book Here
Book Description
With this book, Yaakov Ariel offers the first comprehensive history of Protestant evangelization of Jews in America to the present day. Based on unprecedented research in missionary archives as well as Jewish writings, the book analyzes the theology and activities of both the missions and the converts and describes the reactions of the Jewish community, which in turn helped to shape the evangelical activity directed toward it. Ariel delineates three successive waves of evangelism, the first directed toward poor Jewish immigrants, the second toward American-born Jews trying to assimilate, and the third toward Jewish baby boomers influenced by the counterculture of the Vietnam War era. After World War II, the missionary impulse became almost exclusively the realm of conservative evangelicals, as the more liberal segments of American Christianity took the path of interfaith dialogue. As Ariel shows, these missionary efforts have profoundly influenced Christian-Jewish relations. Jews have seen the missionary movement as a continuation of attempts to delegitimize Judaism and to do away with Jews through assimilation or annihilation. But to conservative evangelical Christians, who support the State of Israel, evangelizing Jews is a manifestation of goodwill toward them.
Author: Jacob S. Dorman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195301404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book Here
Book Description
Named Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE Winnter of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association Winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize Winner of the 2014 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions Jacob S. Dorman offers new insights into the rise of Black Israelite religions in America, faiths ranging from Judaism to Islam to Rastafarianism all of which believe that the ancient Hebrew Israelites were Black and that contemporary African Americans are their descendants. Dorman traces the influence of Israelite practices and philosophies in the Holiness Christianity movement of the 1890s and the emergence of the Pentecostal movement in 1906. An examination of Black interactions with white Jews under slavery shows that the original impetus for Christian Israelite movements was not a desire to practice Judaism but rather a studied attempt to recreate the early Christian church, following the strictures of the Hebrew Scriptures. A second wave of Black Israelite synagogues arose during the Great Migration of African Americans and West Indians to cities in the North. One of the most fascinating of the Black Israelite pioneers was Arnold Josiah Ford, a Barbadian musician who moved to Harlem, joined Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist movement, started his own synagogue, and led African Americans to resettle in Ethiopia in 1930. The effort failed, but the Black Israelite theology had captured the imagination of settlers who returned to Jamaica and transmitted it to Leonard Howell, one of the founders of Rastafarianism and himself a member of Harlem's religious subculture. After Ford's resettlement effort, the Black Israelite movement was carried forward in the U.S. by several Harlem rabbis, including Wentworth Arthur Matthew, another West Indian, who creatively combined elements of Judaism, Pentecostalism, Freemasonry, the British Anglo-Israelite movement, Afro-Caribbean faiths, and occult kabbalah. Drawing on interviews, newspapers, and a wealth of hitherto untapped archival sources, Dorman provides a vivid portrait of Black Israelites, showing them to be a transnational movement that fought racism and its erasure of people of color from European-derived religions. Chosen People argues for a new way of understanding cultural formation, not in terms of genealogical metaphors of -survivals, - or syncretism, but rather as a -polycultural- cutting and pasting from a transnational array of ideas, books, rituals, and social networks.
Author: Maristella Botticini
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691144877
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Get Book Here
Book Description
Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein show that, contrary to previous explanations, this transformation was driven not by anti-Jewish persecution and legal restrictions, but rather by changes within Judaism itself after 70 CE--most importantly, the rise of a new norm that required every Jewish male to read and study the Torah and to send his sons to school. Over the next six centuries, those Jews who found the norms of Judaism too costly to obey converted to other religions, making world Jewry shrink. Later, when urbanization and commercial expansion in the newly established Muslim Caliphates increased the demand for occupations in which literacy was an advantage, the Jews found themselves literate in a world of almost universal illiteracy. From then forward, almost all Jews entered crafts and trade, and many of them began moving in search of business opportunities, creating a worldwide Diaspora in the process.
Author: Reuven Firestone
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 1594733503
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 189
Get Book Here
Book Description
What Does It Mean to Be "Chosen"? Why Did God Have to Choose? “To be chosen can have a range of meaning from the mundane to the holy, but in all cases it means to be singled out and preferred over others. In a deep sense that permeates much or most of Western culture, having been chosen communicates a sense of something that is extraordinary, is transcendent, and entitles a reward. What is assumed in this sense of the term is that God has done the choosing and the reward is something that is unequaled, for what could possibly equal divinely ordained eternal happiness?” —from the Introduction Religious people who define themselves as monotheists have often advanced the idea that their relationship with God is unique and superior to all others. Theirs supersedes those who came before, and is superior to those who have followed. This phenomenon tends to be expressed in terms not only of supersessionism, but also “chosenness,” or “election.” Who is most beloved by God? What expression of the divine will is the most perfect? Which relationship reflects God's ultimate demands or desire? In this fascinating examination of the religious phenomenon of chosenness, Reuven Firestone explores the idea of covenant, and the expressions of supersessionism as articulated through the scriptures of the three major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He explores how and why the ongoing competition and friction between these religions came about, and offers thoughts about how to overcome it.
Author: John Allegro
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 098932804X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Chosen People tells the history of the Jews from the conquest of Jersualem by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 587 B.C.E. to the Second Jewish Revolt of C.E. 132. John Allegro bases his account on traditional texts — books of the Old Testament, Josephus, Philo Judaeus, Dio Cassius, and others — and sets out the complicated parade of plots, counter-plots, betrayals, and insurrections in a brisk and highly readable sequence. His main theme is how the conception of the Jewish nation as a divinely chosen race was planted as a political ambition among the exiled Jews. Bringing together old customs and stories, the idea was fired by the longing of the Babylonian Jews for their traditional homeland. Many of them grew prosperous outside Palestine, and their wealthy communities manipulated the wish for identity in the idea of an exclusive Judaism embodied as a political state and fighting for autonomy against local and imperial neighbors — more dream than fact. The author writes that “When the ‘new Judaism' came to be hammered out after the return from captivity, it was around these ancient customs and a historicized mythology that it was fashioned.” The religion was devised not, as popularly presented, by gift of the desert god Yahweh who had manifested himself in opposition to the Canaanite fertility god Baal but by reinterpreting the Sumerian idea of a life-giving god over many generations. For there was no fundamental opposition — the god-names originally meant the same. This second edition features a new introduction by James M. Donovan.
Author: David Novak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521416906
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this book, David Novak conducts an historical, philosophical and theological reflection on the central Jewish doctrine of Israel's election by God, also known as the idea of the chosen people. Historically, he analyses the great change in modern Jewish thought brought about by Spinoza's inversion of the doctrine: that it was not God who elected Israel, but Israel who elected God. The development of that inversion is illustrated by the thought of the German philosopher-theologian, Hermann Cohen. Philosophically, Novak explores the ontological implications of the two differing theologies of election. Theologically, he argues for the correlation of election and revelation, and maintains that a theology of election is required in order to deal with two central questions, namely: who are the Jews, and how are Jews to be related to the world? The constructive picture which results leads to a fresh understanding of Jewish modernity.
