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This is the first study of monstrosity in Jewish history from the Middle Ages to modernity. Drawing on Jewish history, literary studies, folklore, art history and the history of science, it examines both the historical depiction of Jews as monsters and the creative use of monstrous beings in Jewish culture. Jews have occupied a liminal position within European society and culture, being deeply immersed yet outsiders to it. For this reason, they were perceived in terms of otherness and were often represented as monstrous beings. However, at the same time, European Jews invoked, with tantalizing ubiquity, images of magical, terrifying and hybrid beings in their texts, art and folktales. These ...
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.
Journeys of dislocation and return, of discovery and conquest hold a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Wherever an individual or community may be located, it would seem, there is always the dream of being elsewhere. This has been especially true throughout the ages for Jews, for whom the promises and perils of travel have influenced both their own sense of self and their identity in the eyes of others. How does travel writing, as a genre, produce representations of the world of others, against which one's own self can be invented or explored? And what happens when Jewish authors in particular—whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagin...
World missions needs a fully biblical ethos. This is the contention of the editors of and contributors to World Mission, a series of essays aimed at reforming popular approaches to missions. In the first set of essays, contributors develop a biblical theology of world missions from both the Old and New Testaments, arguing that the theology of each must stand in the foreground of missions, not recede into the background. In the second, they unfold the Great Commission in sequence, detailing how it determines the biblical strategy of all mission enterprises. Finally, they treat current issues in world missions from the perspective of the sufficiency of Scripture. Altogether, this book aims to reform missions to be thoroughlyâ€"not just foundationallyâ€"biblical, a needed correction even among the sincerest missionaries.
How the rise of Christianity profoundly influenced the development of Judaism in late antiquity In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.
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.
In order to determine how history education can be harnessed to reduce conflict attitudes and intentions and create a culture of peace, this book examines how history curricula and textbooks shape the identities of their students through their portrayals of ingroup and outgroup identity, intergroup boundaries, and value systems.
Bovo d'Antona by Elye Bokher (Elyiahu ben Asher haLevi Ashkenazi, 1469-1549) is a chivalry poem written in Yiddish in Padoa, in the year 1507, and printed under the author's supervision in Isny (Germany) in the year 1541. The present book intends to present a critical edition of this poem, together with a commentary. An introduction will focus on various related questions, such as the place of the Bovo d'Antona in European literature and in Italian literature, Bovo d'Antona and the chivalric genre in Old Yiddish literature, the analysis of the manuscript versions in comparison with the printed edition, the relationship with the Italian source and the readership. An appendix will deal with later transformations of the Bovo-Bukh. "Bovo Bukh is an excellent example of the relationship between romances and folktales,and Rosenzweigʼs introduction and edition of this important early Yiddish text will be appreciated by scholars of early Modern literature and folk narrative." - Dr. David Elton Gay, Indiana University, in: Fabula 59:1-2 (2018)
It is often assumed that natural philosophy was the forerunner of early modern natural sciences. But where did these sciences’ systematic observation and experimentation get their starts? In Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, the laboratories, workshops, and marketplaces emerge as arenas where hands-on experience united with higher learning. In an age when chemistry, mineralogy, geology, and botany intersected with mining, metallurgy, pharmacy, and gardening, materials were objects that crossed disciplines. Here, the contributors tell the stories of metals, clay, gunpowder, pigments, and foods, and thereby demonstrate the innovative practices of technical experts, the developm...