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A book of ethics by one of the first female Jewish writers
European Jews, argues Iris Idelson-Shein, occupied a particular place in the development of modern racial discourse during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Simultaneously inhabitants and outsiders in Europe, considered both foreign and familiar, Jews adopted a complex perspective on otherness and race. Often themselves the objects of anthropological scrutiny, they internalized, adapted, and revised the emerging discourse of racial difference to meet their own ends. Difference of a Different Kind explores Jewish perceptions and representations of otherness during the formative period in the history of racial thought. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including philosophical and scientific works, halakhic literature, and folktales, Idelson-Shein unfolds the myriad ways in which eighteenth-century Jews imagined the "exotic Other" and how the evolving discourse of racial difference played into the construction of their own identities. Difference of a Different Kind offers an invaluable view into the ways new religious, cultural, and racial identities were imagined and formed at the outset of modernity.
This book offers an examination of Jewish communal memory in Prague in the century and a half stretching from its position as cosmopolitan capital of the Holy Roman Empire (1583-1611) through Catholic reform and triumphalism in the later seventeenth century, to the eve of its encounter with Enlightenment in the early eighteenth. Rachel Greenblatt approaches the subject through the lens of the community's own stories—stories recovered from close readings of a wide range of documents as well as from gravestones and other treasured objects in which Prague's Jews recorded their history. On the basis of this material, Greenblatt shows how members of this community sought to preserve for future ...
"The mid-seventeenth century witnessed an enormous wave of Jewish refugees and forced migrants from the wars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, who spread across the Jewish communities of Europe and Asia. A series of wars that hit the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth-the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648; the Muscovite invasion that begin in 1654; and the Swedish incursion from 1655 to 1660-all together forced many Jews out of their homes. Though not the direct targets of the combatants, within a short time many were deeply involved in the conflicts, some becoming victims of violence and some becoming arms-bearing participants. But most became refugees and forced migrants. These refugees posed ...
Joy A. Schroeder offers the first in-depth exploration of the biblical story of Deborah, an authoritative judge, prophet, and war leader. For centuries, Deborah's story has challenged readers' traditional assumptions about the place of women in society. Schroeder shows how Deborah's story has fueled gender debates throughout history. An examination of the prophetess's journey through nearly two thousand years of Jewish and Christian interpretation reveals how the biblical account of Deborah was deployed against women, for women, and by women who aspired to leadership roles in religious communities and society. Numerous women-and men who supported women's aspirations to leadership-used Deborah's narrative to justify female claims to political and religious authority. Opponents to women's public leadership endeavored to define Deborah's role as "private" or argued that she was a divinely authorized exception, not to be emulated by future generations of women. Deborah's Daughters provides crucial new insight into the history of women in Judaism and Christianity, and into women's past and present roles in the church, synagogue, and society.
In Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators, historian Katherine Aron-Beller analyzes the common Christian charge that Jews habitually and compulsively violated Christian images, identifying this allegation as one that functioned alongside other anti-Jewish allegations such as ritual murder, blood libel, and host desecration to ultimately inform dangerous and long-lasting prejudices in medieval and early modern Europe. Through an analysis of folk tales, myths, legal proceedings, and religious art, Aron-Beller finds that narratives alleging that Jews committed violence against images of Christ, Mary, and the disciples flourished in Europe between the fifth and seventeenth centuries. She ...
In Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Elisheva Baumgarten seeks a point of entry into the everyday existence of people who did not belong to the learned elite, and who therefore left no written records of their lives. She does so by turning to the Bible as it was read, reinterpreted, and seen by the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz. In the tellings, retellings, and illustrations of biblical stories, and especially of those centered around women, Baumgarten writes, we can find explanations and validations for the practices that structured birth, marriage, and death; women's inclusion in the liturgy and synagogue; and the roles of women as community leaders, givers of charity, a...
Religious conversion - a shift in membership from one community of faith to another - can take diverse forms in radically different circumstances. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, conversion can be protracted or sudden, voluntary or coerced, small-scale or large. It may be the result of active missionary efforts, instrumental decisions, or intellectual or spiritual attraction to a different doctrine and practices. In order to investigate these multiple meanings, and how they may differ across time and space, this collection ranges far and wide across medieval and early modern Europe and beyond. From early Christian pilgrims to fifteenth-century Ethiopia; from the Islamisation of the...
This work is of importance to anyone with an interest in whether women, especially Jewish Ashkenazic women, had a Renaissance. It details the participation in the Querelle des Femmes and Power of Women topos as expressed in this hagiographic work on the lives of biblical women including the apocryphal Judith. The Power of Women topos is discussed in the context of the reception of the Amazon myth in Jewish literature and the domestication of powerful female figures. In the Querelle our author pleads with husbands for generosity and respect for their wives’ piety. Whether women living in the Renaissance experienced a renaissance is a debate raging since Joan Kelly raised the possibility tha...
In A Question of Tradition, Kathryn Hellerstein explores the roles that women poets played in forming a modern Yiddish literary tradition. Women who wrote in Yiddish go largely unrecognized outside a rapidly diminishing Yiddish readership. Even in the heyday of Yiddish literature, they were regarded as marginal. But for over four centuries, women wrote and published Yiddish poems that addressed the crises of Jewish history—from the plague to the Holocaust—as well as the challenges and pleasures of daily life: prayer, art, friendship, nature, family, and love. Through close readings and translations of poems of eighteen writers, Hellerstein argues for a new perspective on a tradition of w...