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This study highlights the contributions of the great philosopher-talmudist Moses Maimonides to the rationalist, “plain sense” (peshat) tradition of Jewish Bible exegesis, assessing his place in the Geonic-Andalusian school and showing how he harnessed Greco-Arabic learning to open new hermeneutical possibilities.
Examines the changing relationship of this Jewish sect to rabbinic Judaism and the influence of Muslim and Christian environments Notions of history and the past contained in literature of the Karaite Jewish sect offer insight into the relationship of Karaism to mainstream rabbinic Judaism and to Islam and Christianity. Karaite Judaism and Historical Understanding describes how a minority sectarian religious community constructs and uses historical ideology. It investigates the proportioning of historical ideology to law and doctrine and the influence of historical setting on religious writings about the past. In the present volume, Fred Astren discusses modes of representing the past, espec...
Judah Hadassi was the most prominent Karaite Jewish author of twelfth-century Byzantium, steeped in Karaite and Byzantine Greek traditions. In Theological Encounters at a Crossroads: An Edition and Translation of Judah Hadassi’s Eshkol ha-kofer, First Commandment, and Studies of the Book’s Judaeo-Arabic and Byzantine Contexts, a scientific edition of the first quarter of the Hebrew text of Hadassi’s magnum opus is presented with an English translation, a summary of his theology, a discussion of his use of the Greek language, and a linguistic analysis and transcription of all the Greek terms which appear in Hebrew letters in the entire treatise. This book should be of interest to students of Jewish thought, Hebrew literature and medieval Byzantine culture and language.
This volume consists of a critical edition of the Arabic translation and commentary of Yefet ben Eli the Karaite on the entire Abraham narrative. The edition is preceded by an extensive introduction in which the author discusses various facets of Yefet’s exegesis.
A compelling analysis of Jewish thought from ancient times to the present on the issue of the gift of the land of Israel and the fate of the Canaanites.
Joseph Dan, the Gershom Scholem Professor of Kabbalah Emeritus at the Hebrew University and long-time Professor of Jewish Studies at the Freie Universitat Berlin, is one of the most influential figures in the fields of Jewish mystical thought, homiletical and ethical literature, modern Messianism and Hasidism, and contemporary 'belles-lettres'. His studies of the diverse aspects of Jewish creativity, with close attention to the dialectics of religious-cultural continuity versus historical innovation, provide a comprehensive overview of the complex history of Jewish thought and its multiple creative faces. It is precisely for this reason, to honor Joseph Dan's multifaceted research, that his ...
The Khazar Empire was one of the major states of medieval Eurasia. Drawing on a variety of disciplines (history, linguistics, archaeology, literary studies), the papers in this volume shed new light on many of the disputed topics in Khazar history.
In his academic career, that by now spans six decades, Daniel J. Lasker distinguished himself by the wide range of his scholarly interests. In the field of Jewish theology and philosophy he contributed significantly to the study of Rabbinic as well as Karaite authors. In the field of Jewish polemics his studies explore Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew texts, analyzing them in the context of their Christian and Muslim backgrounds. His contributions refer to a wide variety of authors who lived from the 9th century to the 18th century and beyond, in the Muslim East, in Muslin and Christian parts of the Mediterranean Sea, and in west and east Europe. This Festschrift for Daniel J. Lasker consists of four...
This volume contains an English translation of the Arabic translation and commentary on the book of Proverbs composed by one of the most acclaimed, innovative, and prolific exegetes of the Karaite “Golden Age” (10th –11th centuries), Yefet ben ʿEli ha-Levi. A critical edition and an extensive introduction was published by Ilana Sasson as vol. 1 (KTS 8) in 2016. Dr. Sasson worked for many years on an English translation of the work and, before her untimely death in 2017, passed her unfinished manuscript to the series editors. The translation was then completed, edited, and prepared for publication by Dr. Wechsler. Yefet’s commentary on Proverbs is a masterpiece of literary and rational-contextual analysis of one of the most difficult and important books of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible. His work is an invaluable link in the history of interpretation of the book of Proverbs.
Written in Judeo-Arabic in eleventh-century Muslim Spain but quickly translated into Hebrew, Bahya Ibn Paquda's Duties of the Heart is a profound guidebook of Jewish spirituality that has enjoyed tremendous popularity and influence to the present day. Readers who know the book primarily in its Hebrew version have likely lost sight of the work's original Arabic context and its immersion in Islamic mystical literature. In A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, Diana Lobel explores the full extent to which Duties of the Heart marks the flowering of the "Jewish-Arab symbiosis," the interpenetration of Islamic and Jewish civilizations. Lobel reveals Bahya as a maverick who integrates abstract negative theology,...