Who Rules the Synagogue? explores how American Jewry in the nineteenth century transformed from a lay dominated community to one whose leading religious authorities were rabbis. Previously, scholars have chartered the religious history of American Judaism during this era, but Zev Eleff reinterprets this history through the lens of religious authority. Early in the century, American Jews consciously excluded rabbinic forces from playing a role in their community's development. By the final decade...
The thirteenth-century Jewish mystical classic Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor), commonly known as the Zohar, took shape against a backdrop of rising anti-Judaism in Spain. Mystical Resistance reveals that in addition to the Zohar's role as a theological masterpiece, its kabbalistic teachings offer passionate and knowledgeable critiques of Christian majority culture. During the Zohar's development, Christian friars implemented new missionizing strategies, forced Jewish attendance at religio...
Histories of ancient Israel have usually focused attention on major figures in powerful positions: kings, prophets, and patriarchs. Kessler asks about the larger social patterns that shaped the everyday life of ordinary people, from the emergence of Israel in the hills of Canaan, to the Jewish populations of Greek city-states in the Hellenistic age. The introductory section includes discussion of social history as discipline and as method, event history and the "long haul," the representation of...
Jewish-Christianity and the Origins of Islam (Judaisme Ancien Et Origines Du Christianisme, #13)
Voices of History Israel: A Country with Its Institutions (Voices of History Israel, #3)
by Shlomo Goren, Abba Eban, Avraham Harman, Moshe Landau, Kalman Mann, Zvi Kaspi, Nahum Pessin, Sister Selma, and Meyer W Weisgal
Tractate Berakhot (Studia Judaica)
After World War II, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921-2007) published works in English and German by eminent Israeli scholars, in this way introducing them to a wider audience in Europe and North America. The series he founded for that purpose, Studia Judaica, continues to offer a platform for scholarly studies and editions that cover all eras in the history of the Jewish religion.
The Legends of the Jews Volume 4 - Primary Source Edition
by Professor Louis Ginzberg and Boaz Cohen
Jewish-Christian contact and controversy were central to early Christian experience. An understanding of their role in Christian origins and their continuation over the centuries is essential for any serious engagement with the history of Christianity and the history of Judaism. In Jews and Christians William Horbury makes an important contribution to the understanding of under-explored primary sources, both Jewish and Christian. 'Horbury is to be applauded for writing a careful, considered work...
Der vorliegende Sammelband thematisiert in einem weiten historischen Rahmen die rechtliche und soziale Stellung und Rolle von Frauen im antiken Judentum, im fruhen Christentum und in der griechisch-roemischen Welt. Herangezogen werden dokumentarische Texte aus AEgypten und der Judaischen Wuste, ausgewahlte Texte vom Toten Meer sowie Zeugnisse aus der judisch-hellenistischen, fruhchristlichen und rabbinischen UEberlieferung. Thematisiert werden Fragen der liturgischen und gottesdienstlichen Funkt...
The patriarch Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi headed the independent Jewish leadership institutions in Roman Palestine at the turn of the second and third centuries CE. He conducted the affairs of the patriarchate with a high hand, was renowned for his learning and behaved like a kind of anointed king. He was also incredibly rich, a consummate politician, and close to the Roman authorities. He made taqqanot (reforms) in the light of circumstances, and tried to cancel mitzvoth (religious regulations), such a...
The Star of Redemption (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization)
by Franz Rosenzweig
The Star of Redemption is widely recognized as a key document of modern existential thought and a significant contribution to Jewish theology in the twentieth century. An affirmation of what Rosenzweig called "the new thinking," the work ensconces common sense in the place of abstract, conceptual philosophizing and posits the validity of the concrete, individual human being over that of "humanity" in general. Fusing philosophy and theology, it assigns both Judaism and Christianity distinct but e...
Myths in Israeli Culture (Parkes-Wiener Series on Jewish Studies)
by Nurith Gertz
A twentieth-anniversary reprint of the landmark book that launched the current explosion of social-scientific studies in the biblical field. It sets forth a cultural-material methodology for reconstructing the origins of ancient Israel and offers the hypothesis that Israel emerged as an indigenous social revolutionary peasant movement. In a new preface, written for this edition, Gottwald takes account of the 'sea change' in biblical studies since 1979 as he reviews the impact of his work on chur...
King, Priest, Prophet (Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah, #47)
by Geza Xeravits
Among the newly published texts of the Qumran Library there are a good number with eschatological content. Some of these texts relate the eschatological activity of certain figures who seem to play an important role in the events of the eschaton. This study explores these figures. The material of this study is divided into two main parts. The first is analytical, in which the related textual material is investigated, each passage in turn. The second, systematic section contains the evaluation an...
A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Volume II (The Old Testament Library)
by Rainer Albertz
This book, the second of two volumes, offers a comprehensive history of Israelite religion. It is a part of the Old Testament Library series. The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.
Battle of the Gods: The God of Israel Versus Marduk of Babylon (Studia Semitica Neerlandica, #42)
Figurative Language in Biblical Prose Narrative (Vetus Testamentum, Supplements, #107)
by Andrea Weiss
This study applies several linguistic approaches to the book of Samuel in order to investigate the defining features of metaphor and the way metaphor and other forms of figurative language operate in biblical narrative. The book begins with an exploration of how to identify and interpret the metaphors in 1 Samuel 25. Next, the metaphors in 2 Samuel 16:16-17:14 are compared with other tropes, primarily metonymy and simile. Then the notion of "dead" metaphors is challenged while examining the fi...
A unique chronicle of the hundred-year period when the Jewish people changed the world - and it changed them Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Bernhardt and Kafka. Between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. But many have vanished from our collective memory despite their enduring importance in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusions or major surgery. Without Paul Ehrli...
The Theocratic Ideology of the Chronicler (Biblical Interpretation, #33)
by Jonathan ok Dyck
This volume is a study of the ideology of the Chronicler in the context of the emerging theocratic community of Judah in the Persian period. This study breaks new ground in treating the 'purpose' of Chronicles from an explicitly social-theoretical perspective. The first two chapters examine the relationship between biblical interpretation and ideological criticism, moving from the historical critical concept of 'purpose' to the hermeneutical issues of understanding, ideological distortion and cr...