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This exhaustive history of Provençal Jewry examines the key aspects of Jewish life in Provence over some 1,500 years of cultural florescence with far-reaching consequences. A seminal examination of the crucial role of the Jews of Provence in shaping medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean basin.
National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2016. From its first appearance, the Zohar has been one of the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books in Jewish culture. Many scholarly works have been dedicated to its mystical content, its literary style, and the question of its authorship. This book focuses on different issues: it examines the various ways in which the Zohar has been received by its readers and the impact it has had on Jewish culture, including the fluctuations in its status and value and the various cultural practices linked to these changes. This dynamic and multi-layered history throws important new light on many aspe...
Yaron Harel has constructed a dramatic story of how eleven chief rabbis all became the subject of controversy and were subsequently dismissed. This took place against a background of crime and licentiousness rarely documented in the context of Jewish society. Set firmly in the social and political developments of the time, this colourful picture is very different from the commonly accepted image of Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire.
The clear structure of psalm groups in Psalms 107-150 can be interpreted as signaling a renewed hope in the royal/Davidic promises. Each psalm group of Book V is organized around a theme or key word that is related to the royal/Davidic hope in the earlier sections of the Psalter: Psalms 107-118; Psalm 119; Psalms 120-137; Psalms 138-145; Psalms 146-150. These words and themes figure prominently at the major seam psalms of the Psalter – Psalms 1-2 and 89. Thus, the content and subject matter at the end of the Psalter is integrally related to the content and subject matter at the beginning. The editorial-critical method used by Snearly is an extension of the method used by David M. Howard, Jr. in The Structure of Psalms 93-100. Snearly also draws from recent insights in the fields of poetics and text-linguistics in order to establish a linguistically based foundation for reading the Psalter as a unified text. The methodology emphasizes parallel features, with special focus on key-word links. This method advances editorial criticism by not only discerning links within a group but also showing that those links do not occur with the same frequency outside of the group.
The enigmatic kabbalist Samuel Falk, known as the Ba’al Shem of London, has piqued the curiosity of scholars for generations. Eighteenth-century London was fascinated by Jews, and as a miracle-worker and adventurer, well connected and well read, Falk had much to offer. Interest in the man was further aroused by rumours of his dealings with European aristocrats and other famous characters, as well as with scholars, Freemasons, and Shabbateans, but evidence was scanty. Michal Oron has now brought together all the known source material on the man, and her detailed annotations of his diary and that of his assistant give us rich insights into his activities over several years. We learn of his m...
The articles presented in this book include studies in Rabbinics, Classical Hebrew linguistics, and early Hebrew-Greek glossary. The articles substantially cover the fields included in Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Written by leading scholars in the field, they offer a fine example of the wealth and variety of the present day academic study of Hebrew, Judaism, and Jewish culture.
Sharon Flatto's comprehensive study offers the first systematic overview of the eighteenth-century Jewish community of Prague and the first critical account of the life and thought of its pre-eminent rabbinic authority, Ezekiel Landau. Her detailed analysis, firmly rooted in the historical and cultural context of the period, challenges the conventional portrayal of Landau as a staunch opponent of esoteric practices and reveals the centrality of kabbalistic thought in this key central European city.
The martyrdom of a young Jewish girl from Tangier in 1834 sparked a literary response that continues today. This book translates and analyzes printed and manuscript versions of her story in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, Spanish and French written in the first century after her death.
Sephardic Jews have contributed some of the most important Jewish philosophers, poets, biblical commentators, Talmudic and Halachic scholars, and scientists, and have had a significant impact on the development of Jewish mysticism. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry brings together original work from the world's leading scholars to present a deep introductory overview of their history and culture over the past 1500 years.
The fifth volume of the Posen Library demonstrates through a rich array of texts and images the extraordinary diversity of Jewish life during the early modern period "A rich and varied gateway into the primary source material of early modern Jewish history that is very strong on geographical diversity. A magnificent achievement."--Adam Sutcliffe, King's College London The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 5, covering the early modern period (1500-1750), presents a variety of Jewish texts to demonstrate the diversity of Jewish culture and life. These texts originate from Eastern and Western Europe, the Americas, the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Kurdistan, Persia, Yemen...