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In training to be a scribe like his father, thirteen-year-old Joel longs for a different life. He is an artist, but drawing is not allowed in Israel. Like King Solomon, Joel understands the languages of animals, but few believe in such a power or understand its value. How can he find a life that will allow him to be himself and still find a place in his world, ancient Jerusalem? Jerusalem: a city without cats—impossible? Yet such is the case. Wise King Solomon sits upon Israel’s throne, and the temple of God crowns Mount Zion—but still, no cats! Then a passing caravan leaves behind it Ta-Muit, who determines that Joel will be its new master (if cats may be said to accept masters). Misc...
This monument of rabbinical exegesis written at the end of the twelfth century has exerted an immense and continuing influence upon Jewish thought. Its aim is to liberate people from the tormenting perplexities arising from their understanding of the Bible according only to its literal meaning. This edition contains extensive introductions by Shlomo Pines and Leo Strauss, a leading authority on Maimonides.
Written by Abraham ibn Daud of Toledo (c. 1110-1180), Dorot ‘Olam (Generations of the Ages) is one of the most influential and innovative historical works of medieval Hebrew literature. In four sections, three of which are edited and translated in this volume for the first time, Dorot ‘Olam asserts the superiority of rabbinic Judaism and stresses the central role of Iberia for the Jewish past, present, and future. Combining Jewish and Christian sources in new ways, Ibn Daud presents a compelling vision of the past and formulates political ideas that stress the importance of consensus-driven leadership under rabbinic guidance. This edition demonstrates how Dorot ‘Olam was received by Jewish and Christian readers who embraced the book in Hebrew, Latin, and two English and German translations.
This volume contains studies based on papers delivered at the international conference of the PESHAT in Context project entitled “Themes, Terminology, and Translation Procedures in Twelfth-Century Jewish Philosophy.” The central figure in this book is Judah Ibn Tibbon. He sired the Ibn Tibbon family of translators, which influenced philosophical and scientific Hebrew writing for centuries. More broadly, the study of this early phase of the Hebrew translation movement also reveals that the formation of a standardized Hebrew terminology was a long process that was never fully completed. Terminological shifts are frequent even within the Tibbonide family, to say nothing of the fascinating terminological diversity displayed by other authors and translators discussed in this book.
This volume treats the interrelationship between Judaism and Christianity from the first centuries and into modern times, paying particular attention to these faiths’ social, cultural, and theological interactions. The issues covered range from the formation of Jewish and Christian ideology in the context of Roman paganism to the ways in which Christian culture and theology of the medieval and modern periods form a backdrop to the creation of Jewish identity. While the historical periods and issues discussed are diverse, the result is to suggest the importance of our recognizing the close development of Judaism and Christianity. Written by top scholars in Judaic and Christian studies, these essays reflect on how the two faiths related to and were shaped by each other as they evolved in shared historical and cultural contexts, even as each maintained its own distinctive ideologies and beliefs.
The study assesses the main issues in the current debate about the early history of Pesach and Easter and provides new insights into the development of these two festivals. The author argues that the prescriptions of Exodus 12 provide the celebration of the Pesach in Jerusalem with an etiological background in order to connect the pilgrim festival with the story of the Exodus. The thesis that the Christian Easter evolved as a festival against a Jewish form of celebrating Pesach in the second century and that the development of Easter Sunday is dependent upon this custom is endorsed by the author’s close study of relevant texts such as the Haggada of Pesach; the “Poem of the four nights” in the Palestinian Targum Tradition; the structure of the Easter vigil.
Moses Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed is the greatest philosophical text in the history of Jewish thought and a major work of the Middle Ages. For almost all of its history, however, the Guide has been read and commented upon in translation—in Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, French, English, and other modern languages—rather than in its original Judeo-Arabic. This volume is the first to tell the story of the translations and translators of Maimonides’ Guide and its impact in translation on philosophy from the Middle Ages to the present day. A collection of essays by scholars from a range of disciplines, the book unfolds in two parts. The first traces the history of the translations of the Guide, from medieval to modern renditions. The second surveys its influence in translation on Latin scholastic, early modern, and contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, as well as its impact in translation on current scholarship. Interdisciplinary in approach, this book will be essential reading for philosophers, historians, and religious studies scholars alike.
Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism explores the discursive formation of the commandments as a generative matrix of Jewish thought and life in the posttalmudic period, correlating the diverse domains of jurisprudence, philosophy, ethics, pietism, and kabbalah.
In Jewish Education from Antiquity to the Middle Ages fifteen scholars offer specialist studies on Jewish education from the areas of their expertise. This tightly themed volume in honour of Philip S. Alexander has some essays that look at individual manuscripts, some that consider larger literary corpora, and some that are more thematically organised. Jewish education has been addressed largely as a matter of the study house, the bet midrash. Here a richer range of texts and themes discloses a wide variety of activity in several spheres of Jewish life. In addition, some notable non-Jewish sources provide a wider context for the discourse than is often the case.
From Renaissance to Risorgimento, the Hebrew tombstones of Padua express the cultural currents of their age, in text and art. The inscriptions are mainly rhymed and metered poems, about life, love and faith, while the design and ornamentation of the actual stones reflect prevailing architectural and artistic tastes. Additionally, the inscriptions illuminate the society of Padua's Jews, and the social and cultural changes they underwent during the 330 years covered by this study. Thus these tombstones capture the flow of Italian Jewish culture from Renaissance to Baroque, and from the early modern to the modern era.