You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Hebrew manuscripts are considered to be invaluable documents and artefacts of Jewish culture and history. Research on Hebrew manuscript culture is progressing rapidly and therefore its topics, methods and questions need to be enunciated and reflected upon. The case studies assembled in this volume explore various fields of research on Hebrew manuscripts. They show paradigmatically the current developments concerning codicology and palaeography, book forms like the scroll and codex, scribes and their writing material, patrons, collectors and censors, manuscript and book collections, illuminations and fragments, and, last but not least, new methods of material analysis applied to manuscripts. The principal focus of this volume is the material and intellectual history of Hebrew book cultures from antiquity to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, its intention being to heighten and sharpen the reader’s understanding of Jewish social and cultural history in general.
Vita Daphna Arbel investigates depictions of the emblematic Eve that are embedded in one of the most influential accounts of Adam and Eve after the Hebrew Bible, namely the apocryphal Greek Life of Adam and Eve (GLAE) from late antiquity.
The historiographers of religious studies have written the history of this discipline primarily as a rationalization of ideological, most prominently theological and phenomenological ideas: first through the establishment of comparative, philological and sociological methods and secondly through the demand for intentional neutrality. This interpretation caused important roots in occult-esoteric traditions to be repressed. This process of “purification” (Latour) is not to be equated with the origin of the academic studies. De facto, the elimination of idealistic theories took time and only happened later. One example concerning the early entanglement is Tibetology, where many researchers ...
Exploring the link between German biblical interpretation and anti-Semitism, this book is a fresh, comprehensive study of leading German exegetes, concluding that although Nazism brought anti-Semitic exegesis to a head, age-old thought structures provided powerful legitimation for oppression.
Between 1941 and 1945, thousands of German Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the Nazi capital. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence and interviews with survivors, this book reconstructs the daily lives of Jews who stayed in Berlin during the war years. Contrary to the received wisdom that “hidden” Jews stayed in attics and cellars and had minimal contact with the outside world, the author reveals a cohort of remarkable individuals who were constantly on the move and actively fought to ensure their own survival.
Highlights the emergence of self-knowledge in rabbinic literature, showing how Babylonian rabbis relied on knowledge accessible only to the individual to determine the law.
In Legal Practice in the Formative Stages of the Chinese Empire, Ulrich Lau and Thies Staack offer a richly annotated English translation of the Wei yu deng zhuang si zhong 爲獄等狀四種, a collection of criminal case records from the pre-imperial state of Qin (dating from 246 BC–222 BC) that is part of the manuscripts in the possession of Yuelu Academy. Through an analysis of the collection and a comparison with similar manuscript finds from the Qin and Han periods, the authors shed new light on many aspects of the Qin administration of justice, e.g. criminal investigation, stages of criminal procedure, principles for determining punishment, and interaction of judicial officials on different administrative levels.
"Before the Scrolls: A Material Approach to Israel's Prophetic Library traces the media history of the biblical prophetic corpus in order to propose a material approach to biblical literature. Though often ignored, the realia of a text's form, format, production, and material substance have profound influence on the meaning of the text. The literature of the Bible was not initially written as discrete books with determined beginnings, middles, and ends. Before the Scrolls argues instead that biblical compositions of length, such as the great prophetic books Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, were initially written on loosely organized collections of multiple short papyrus scrolls. Only later in ...
From Kehinde Wiley to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Nubia to Cuba, Willie Doherty's terror in ancient landscapes to the violence of institutional Neo-Gothic, Reagan's AIDS policies to Beowulf fanfiction, this richly diverse volume brings together art historians and literature scholars to articulate a more inclusive, intersectional medieval studies. It will be of interest to students working on the diaspora and migration, white settler colonialism and pogroms, Indigenous studies and decolonial methodology, slavery, genocide, and culturecide. The authors confront the often disturbing legacies of medieval studies and its current failures to own up to those, and also analyze fascist, nationalist, colonia...