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Gabriel's Palace
Over 150 tales from the Talmud, the Zohar, Jewish folktales, and Hasidic lore.
A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse
"This monograph argues that Roman bathhouses were laboratories in which Jews interacted with Graeco-Roman culture. It tells the story of the Jews who frequented them, documenting their pleasures, anxieties, and concerns, and reconstructing their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the activities that took place there. The chapters of the book are arranged as an invitation to follow the ancient Jew as he or she engages the bath, and highlights details small and large about what Jews knew about the place, but even more so, about what they felt about it. Were they intimidated by the nudity that prevailed there or by the sculptures that adorned the place? How did Jewish law configure the bath?...
Legal Fictions
Ancient Jewish writings combine interpretive narratives of Israel’s sacred history with legal prescriptions for a divinely ordered way of life. Two ancient Jewish societies have left us extensive textual corpora preserving interpenetrating legal and narrative interpretive teachings: the sectarian community of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the sage-disciple circles of the early Rabbis. This book comprises studies that explore specific aspects of the interplay of interpretative, narrative, and legal rhetoric with an eye to pedagogic function and social formation for each of these communities and for both of them in comparison. It addresses questions of how best to approach these writings for purposes of historical retrieval and reconstruction by recognizing the inseparability of literary-rhetorical textual analysis and a non-reductive historiography.
Deborah's Daughters
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.
Textual Mirrors
As they were entering Egypt, Abram glimpsed Sarai's reflection in the Nile River. Though he had been married to her for years, this moment is positioned in a rabbinic narrative as a revelation. "Now I know you are a beautiful woman," he says; at that moment he also knows himself as a desiring subject, and knows too to become afraid for his own life due to the desiring gazes of others. There are few scenes in rabbinic literature that so explicitly stage a character's apprehension of his or her own or another's literal reflection. Still, Dina Stein argues, the association of knowledge and reflection operates as a central element in rabbinic texts. Midrash explicitly refers to other texts; bibl...
A Kabbalist in Montreal
This book illuminates important issues faced by Orthodox Judaism in the modern era by relating the life and times of Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935). In presenting Yudel Rosenberg’s rabbinic activities, this book aims to show that Jewish Orthodoxy could serve as an agent of modernity no less than its opponents. Yudel Rosenberg’s considerable literary output will demonstrate that the line between “secular” and “traditional” literature was not always sharp and distinct. Rabbi Rosenberg’s kabbalistic works will shed light on the revival of kabbala study in the twentieth century. Yudel Rosenberg’s career in Canada will serve as a counter-example to the often-expressed idea that Hasidism exercised no significant influence on the development of American Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century.
Studies in the Philosophy of Philo
Why does Philo of Alexandria seem to avoid the open use of dialectic, which was regarded in the ancient world – together with physics and ethics – as one of the three main divisions of philosophy? Has this got anything to do with the tension between proper logic and the sophistic practices of his age? Does Philo’s interpretation of Abraham’s migration from Ur of the Chaldees include a hidden political message? Why, according to Philo, did Jacob mourn the manner of Joseph’s death more than his death itself? These and other questions of the same kind are discussed in the present collection of essays, investigating Philo’s philosophical, historical and cultural background, as well as his relations to Judaism and Christianity. This book attempts to improve our understanding of some of the complexities of Philo’s thought by raising new questions, exploring the ideological aspects of Philo’s approach to Scripture, and attempting to understand the nature of Philo “the Platonist’s” attitude to various issues raised in Plato’s dialogues.
Prophets
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Seder Eliyahu
The book is concerned with a so called ethical midrash, Seder Eliyahu (also known as Tanna debe Eliyahu), a post-talmudic work probably composed in the ninth century. It provides a survey of the research on this late midrash followed by five studies of different aspects related to what is designated as the work’s narratology. These include a discussion of the problem of the apparent pseudo-epigraphy of the work and of the multiple voices of the text; a description of the various narrative types which the work, itself as a whole of non-narrative character, makes use of; a detailed treatment of Seder Eliyahu’s parables and most characteristic first person narratives (an extremely unusual form of narrative discourse in rabbinic literature); as well as a final chapter dedicated to selected women stories in this late midrash. As it emerges from the survey in chapter 1 such a narratologically informed study of Seder Eliyahu represents a new approach in the research on a work that is clearly the product of a time of transition in Jewish literature.
Stepping Stones to a Higher Vision
Stepping Stones to a Higher Vision examines the development of religious consciousness from religion to spirituality to mysticism. This developmental path imaginatively described as "stepping stones" in the title of the book and as "elevators of religion" in chapter one, has its rewards but also its dangers and pitfalls. Intended for the non-specialist lay person interested in religion, as well as the scholar, the book focuses on Jewish tradition and its sources (Hebrew Bible, Talmud-Midrash, and Kabbalah), but in a broad cross-cultural interdisciplinary context. Ritual, prayer, including meditation and contemplation, ethics and morality, religious leadership, and the afterlife are analyzed in the context of sociology, science, and the history of religion.
