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'His Pen and Ink Are a Powerful Mirror'
This volume is a collection of studies in the cultural history of al-Andalus in honor of Ross Brann on his 70th birthday.
Power in the Portrayal
Power in the Portrayal unveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period. Employing the methods of the new historical literary study in looking at a range of texts, Ross Brann reveals the paradoxical relations between the Andalusi Muslim and Jewish elites in an era when long periods of tolerance and respect were punctuated by outbreaks of tension and hostility. The examined Arabic texts reveal a fragmented perception of the Jew in eleventh-century al-Andalus. They depict seemingly contradictory figures at whose poles are an intelligent, skilled, and noble Jew deserving of homage a...
Iberian Moorings
To Christians the Iberian Peninsula was Hispania, to Muslims al-Andalus, and to Jews Sefarad. As much as these were all names given to the same real place, the names also constituted ideas, and like all ideas, they have histories of their own. To some, al-Andalus and Sefarad were the subjects of conventional expressions of attachment to and pride in homeland of the universal sort displayed in other Islamic lands and Jewish communities; but other Muslim and Jewish political, literary, and religious actors variously developed the notion that al-Andalus or Sefarad, its inhabitants, and their culture were exceptional and destined to play a central role in the history of their peoples. In Iberian...
Moses Maimonides: a Very Short Introduction
Moses Maimonides, a scientist, physician, philosopher, rabbinic scholar, and communal leader, was perhaps the most important Jewish figure of the pre-modern age. In this accessible introduction, Ross Brann presents a holistic picture of this towering figure, the author of The Guide for the Perplexed, the Commentary on the Mishnah, and the seminal Mishneh Torah (Code of Jewish Law), in which he reorganized and systematized all of rabbinic law in its entirety. Key to engaging Maimonides on his own terms is understanding that he applied a rationalist's regimen characteristic of his scientific research and practice of medicine to all his life's work: he observed and studied a problem, diagnosed it, and then prescribed a remedy for it whether the concern was physical, metaphysical, spiritual, intellectual, or social in nature.
Languages of Power in Islamic Spain
Ross Brann is the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and the Chair of Near-Eastern Studies at Cornell University. His books include "The Compunctious Poet," recipient of the 1992 National Jewish Book Award in Sephardic Studies. He wrote "Power in the Portrayal" with the support of the Guggenheim Foundation.
The Jews of Medieval Islam
This volume contains fifteen articles on the communal, social, and intellectual life of medieval Jewry in Islamic lands. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, 'Communities and Their Leaders' is devoted to the old Babylonian center in the East and the Andalusian community in the West. Part II, 'Self-Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Others' investigates the ways in which medieval Jews living under Islam viewed their gentile neighbours and expressed their own identity. Part III, 'Religious Philosophy, Mysticism, and Spirituality in Islam and Judaism' explores the impact of Islamic thought on the Jewish intellectual tradition. The collection depicts a civilization at once unified and diverse, revealing both consistent patterns of leadership and scholarship as well as distinctively local identities and collective memories.
The Sephardic Frontier
No subject looms larger over the historical landscape of medieval Spain than that of the reconquista, the rapid expansion of the power of the Christian kingdoms into the Muslim-populated lands of southern Iberia, which created a broad frontier zone that for two centuries remained a region of warfare and peril. Drawing on a large fund of unpublished material in royal, ecclesiastical, and municipal archives as well as rabbinic literature, Jonathan Ray reveals a fluid, often volatile society that transcended religious boundaries and attracted Jewish colonists from throughout the peninsula and beyond. The result was a wave of Jewish settlements marked by a high degree of openness, mobility, and ...
The Literature of Al-Andalus
The Literature of Al-Andalus is an exploration of the culture of Iberia, present-day Spain and Portugal, during the period when it was an Islamic, mostly Arabic-speaking territory, from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and in the centuries following the Christian conquest when Arabic continued to be widely used. The volume embraces many other related spheres of Arabic culture including philosophy, art, architecture and music. It also extends the subject to other literatures - especially Hebrew and Romance literatures - that burgeoned alongside Arabic and created the distinctive hybrid culture of medieval Iberia. Edited by an Arabist, an Hebraist and a Romance scholar, with individual chapters compiled by a team of the world's leading experts of Islamic Iberia, Sicily and related cultures, this is a truly interdisciplinary and comparative work which offers a interesting approach to the field.
Marginal Voices
This collection of essays reveals the diversity of the impact on late medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature of the socio-religious dichotomy that came to exist between conversos (New Christians), who were perceived as inferior because of their Jewish descent, and Old Christians, who asserted the superiority of their pure Christian lineage.
