Contemporary Jews Research Articles

Creating a Theology of Icons in Umayyad Palestine: John of Damascus’ ‘Three Treatises on the Divine Images’

John of Damascus (c. 655–745) is a striking figure in church history as a defender of icon veneration and as a Church Father who maintained Byzantine Orthodoxy despite living under Muslim rule. His life amongst Muslims and his association with the Umayyad Melkite Christian community, the Christian Church which attempted to maintain an adherence to Byzantine Orthodoxy after the Arab conquest, is often associated with his defence of icons. However, most scholarship claims that his Three treatises on the divine images were written solely against Byzantine iconoclasm. This article provides a close reading of his Treatises focusing on themes which overlap with contemporary Jewish and Muslim debates on figurative images, arguing that John wrote his Treatises in an attempt to create a seminal Melkite theology on icons for both Byzantine and Umayyad Christians faced with iconoclastic arguments from all three Abrahamic faiths.

The Barcelona Disputation: Texts and Contexts

Abstract Scholars of Jewish history have paid consistent and devoted attention to the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. Records of this event preserve contemporary Jewish and Christian responses to the proceedings, which pitted Nahmanides, the most important exegete and teacher of the region, against a convert from Judaism to Christianity, took place in the royal court before an illustrious audience. This essay traces trends in scholarly treatments of the Barcelona Disputation from the early days of the Wissenschaft des Judentums to the present. By examining challenges of veracity posed by the documentary sources as well as foundational assumptions about what the medieval authors intended to achieve with their accounts, this article provides broad overview of the historiography that has developed around the Barcelona Disputation.

Jewish Perceptions of Antisemitism in the European Union, 2018: A New Structural Look

AbstractThis paper aims at providing a new systemic contribution to research about perceptions of antisemitism/Judeophobia by contemporary Jews in 12 European Union countries. The perspective – the viewpoint of the offended side – has been less prominent relatively in research literature on antisemitism. The data analysis demonstrates the potential power of Similarity Structure Analysis (SSA) as a better theoretical and empirical tool to describe and conceptualize the contents of chosen research issues. After a brief review of some methodological problems in the study of antisemitism, this paper will re-elaborate data first published in the report of the 2018 FRA study Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism – Second survey on Discrimination and Hate Crimes against Jews in the EU (FRA 2018a). Topics include the perceived importance of antisemitism as a societal issue, the contents of anti-Jewish prejudice and discrimination, channels of transmission, perpetrators of offenses, regional differences within Europe, and the role of antisemitism perceptions as a component of Jewish identification. Special attention is paid to the distinction between cognitive and experiential perceptions of antisemitism, and to the typology of practical, populist, political, and narrative antisemitism.

Sharon B. Oster. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 368 pp.

Reviewed by: No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Sharon B. Oster Julian Levinson Sharon B. Oster. No Place in Time: The Hebraic Myth in Late-Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. 368 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001077 Sharon Oster's insightful, well-researched book is framed by a discussion of the notorious Seligman affair, which she describes as a turning point in the relationship between Jews and American society. In the summer of 1877, the German Jewish financier Joseph Seligman was denied entry to the prestigious Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, on the grounds that he represented what hotel manager Judge Henry Hilton called a class of "ostentatious … vulgar" outsiders who were "repulsive to the well-bred" (8). Seligman was a Jew "in the trade sense of the word" (8) and hence deemed irredeemably unfit to rub shoulders with the leisure class. Scholarship on Jews in America has dwelt considerably on negative stereotyping of Jews, but Oster draws attention to the surprising note of praise that Hilton reserved for another kind of Jew: those like the old New York Sephardic families the Nathans and the Hendricks. These represented what he termed the "Orthodox Hebrew Church" (8), a noble religious heritage that the Seligman Jews had long forgotten. For Oster, this opposition between the debased materialistic Jew and the noble Hebrew is a central, if unstable, binary structure in the American imaginary. Seligman may have been sent packing, but the idea of the noble Hebrew endured even from this notorious episode as an alternate source of value, and it is chiefly here that Oster's interest lies. Oster's book may be seen as an effort to reread American literary representations of Jewishness in light of the recent "temporal turn" in the humanities. Whereas many recent scholars of American Jewish culture have analyzed constructions of Jewishness in relation to discourses of race and nationhood (e.g., Sander Gilman, Jonathan Freedman, Eric Goldstein, and Jennifer Glaser), Oster explores how Jews have been associated with competing models of temporality and history. The "Hebraic myth" in her subtitle refers to a constellation of ideas about the deep biblical past within American Protestant culture: biblical Israel is an ancient nation whose erstwhile privileged role in salvation history has been superseded by Christianity; yet it also continues to exert its presence throughout history, either as a typological precedent for Christians (as in the Puritan settlers' self-conception as the "new" Israel), or as a still-legible stratum within the practices, sensibilities, even the physiognomy, of contemporary Jews (as in Hilton's understanding of the Sephardim). As an enduring, alternate locus of meaning within Christian society, the "Hebraic myth" thus complicates the notion of history as a unilinear progression. As Oster contends, "the noble Hebrew marks the disruptive return of the past, complicating narratives of Protestant redemption in anticipation of alternate futures" (25). In order to show a range of uses for this Hebraic myth in American literature, Oster brings together a set of texts written by Jews and Christians (the key figures are Abraham Cahan, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, and Emma Lazarus). In her readings, she explores how ostensibly secular literary [End Page 214] texts are bound up with religious modes of thinking, specifically ideas about temporality. Cahan represents New York City as a "crossroads of different orders of time" (85); Yezierska creates a protagonist who "convert[s] her noble Jewish past into the stuff of narrative and social distinction" (221); and Lazarus "harness[es] the Hebraic myth to disrupt typology" (235). Her readings of these figures are solid and illuminating. By linking secular and religious themes under the broader rubric of temporality, Oster enables us to reconsider important questions such as the roles of nostalgia, redemptive futurity, and cultural critique in Jewish American texts. The most original and, to my mind, the truly inspiring sections of the book are those that take up non-Jewish writers, particularly James and Wharton. Anyone interested in the representation of Jews in the classic texts of American literature will especially welcome Oster's extended readings of The Golden Bowl...

유대계 영문학의 분기점: 에이미 레비의 『루벤 삭스』를 중심으로

Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs, among her three novels published in her very short literary career, is the only one which intendedly tackles the “Anglo-Jewish question” set in a upper-middle class Jewish community in West London. As the first Jewish female student at Cambridge, Levy has an ambition for placing her poems and fictions in the great tradition of women’s literature, also in the tradition of Anglo-Jewish writing.BR As Britain had been regarded as a “sweet exile” for the wandering Jews of Europe since the re-establishment of Anglo-Jewish communities in the 17th century, Levy’s contemporary Jews were enjoying the status of ‘successful minority’ in Britain, especially after the Jewish Emancipation in 1858. However, there remained all the stereotypes of the Jewish, both anti- and pro-Semite, which polarized the Jewish characters in fiction into the innocent and the pious on the one hand, and the shrewd and the greedy, as the ones in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.BR Levy tries to portray Jewish people as they really are, with all their complexities and self-contradictions, without those apologetic or self-congratulatory attitudes of Jewish writers before her. In Reuben Sachs, Levy sneers at the snobbery and materialist culture among the Jewish middle class, through the unrequited love and inter-racial marriage of Judith Quixano. Levy switches focus from the successful career and the sudden death of a promising Reuben, to the frustration of Judith, a Jewish woman of intellect and dignity whom she sympathizes with.BR Reuben Sachs is not only a creative reworking of marriage plot which has been popularized since the rise of the novel itself, but also a very unique feminist fiction where all the problems of race, gender and class are entangled around the suffering of an attractive, but all too modest Jewish woman.

The Impurity of Stone Vessels in 11QTa and CD in Light of the Chalk Vessel Finds at Kh. Qumran

Abstract Scholars have argued that 11QTa and CD view stone vessels as susceptible to impurity. Chalk vessel finds at Kh. Qumran have presented a challenge to this idea, and solutions to date have been unsatisfying. The recent publication of final reports on these finds invites us to reconsider both the archaeological and textual evidence relating to the ritual status of stone vessels at Qumran. The typological profile of the Kh. Qumran assemblage parallels that found at Jewish sites elsewhere. It will be argued that both 11QTa and CD viewed stone vessels as unsusceptible to most kinds of ritual impurity—apart from corpse impurity. The pentateuchal basis for this understanding will be elucidated, and it will be argued that the position of 11QTa and CD on the matter was common among contemporary Jews. The foregoing will allow an investigation into the origins of the chalk vessel industry in the late 1st century BCE.

Roman Past, Jewish Future: Prophecy, Poetry, and the End of Empire

Although classical political values and their Latin sources continuously informed Elizabethan and Jacobean public culture, assessment of the Roman experience itself became sharply contested. By the 1590s reformist Protestants in both England and Scotland discounted the Roman Empire and ultimately the entire arc of Roman history. Instead, they looked to the Hebrew commonwealth, Jewish learning, and, increasingly, contemporary Jews. These developments issued in a preoccupation with Judeocentric prophecy and piety. In stark contrast, anti-reform Protestantism constructed a competing Christocentric piety linked with a resolutely imperial vision. At the center of this emergent push-pull within late sixteenth-century Anglophone spirituality lay conflicted readings of the Roman past.

A Case of re-translatio studiorum: the Jewish Reception of Giles of Rome from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

From the beginning of the XIV century, many leading works by Latin scholars were translated into Hebrew only a few years after being written. This practice reveals the extraordinary process of philosophical re-acculturation that has its roots in precise ideological and social reasons: implementing contemporary Latin culture rapidly and systematically meant, for late Medieval Hebrew translators, renewing Hebrew wisdom in the light of their Christian neighbours’ thought. This was certainly the purpose of one of the protagonists of Hebrew Scholasticism, Yehudah ben Moses Romano: openly hostile to the philosophical inertia of his Jewish contemporaries, who were still convinced of being the sole holders of the truth bestowed on them from on high, he translated for his co-religionists new knowledge from his Christian colleagues. Particularly intense and sustained were the translations he made of Giles of Rome, which display transversal interests in all aspects of his work (from logic and rhetoric to physics, ethics, psychology and metaphysics). The history of the reception and success of Giles of Rome’s thought on the Jewish world goes far beyond Yehudah Romano’s intellectual project: the reference here is to Yoseph Taitazak (1480-1545 circa), who from his home in Salonica wrote the Porat Yosef, a bizarre Commentary on Ecclesiastes, in which Koholet’s words are used as an occasion for Taitazak to reinterpret the Aristotelian system through a Thomist and Aegidian lens. The inclusion of the Scholastic doctrine in Taitazak’s Commentary on Ecclesiastes, however, responds to a need symmetrically specular to the work of Yehudah Romano: not to proceed with a project of updating Hebrew culture, but to show instead how the Torah is the repository of all knowledge, indeed that the Torah is the knowledge.

The Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi by Earl Schwartz

Reviewed by: The Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi by Earl Schwartz Laura Yares (bio) The Arc of the Covenant: Jewish Educational Success on the Upper Mississippi. By Earl Schwartz. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. x + 152 pp. "To a disinterested observer," wrote Isaac Leeser in the January 1844 edition of the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, "the state of the American Israelites must present itself as anomalous in the highest degree. There are congregations scattered over an immense surface of country, from the snows of Canada to the tropical heats of Guiana [sic], and one community knows absolutely nothing of the state and the wants of the other." While some "congregations" are today relatively familiar, having been featured extensively within American Jewish historiography as well as in American popular culture more broadly, in the case of others Leeser's description remains, perhaps, still apt. Earl Schwartz's The Arc of the Covenant offers a valuable account of one of these lesser chronicled communities, that of St. Paul, Minnesota, through a study of its Jewish educational institutions. To investigate the contours of regional Jewish experiences, particularly outside major metropolitan centers, the history of Jewish education offers the opportunity to examine how national paradigms have met local realities. The Arc of the Covenant offers an institutional study examining the surprising successes and the challenges of community-sponsored Jewish learning in the upper Mississippi during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Written in part as a historical chronicle in its own right and in part to inform strategic planning for the future of Jewish education in St. Paul, The Arc of the Covenant straddles the domains of local history and communal policy making. The historical chapters in Part I narrate the surprising successes of St. Paul's communal education initiatives, an account that focuses on fruitful efforts to build and maintain a community sponsored Talmud Torah in the twentieth century. Schwartz's narrative is most compelling when he highlights the local story of St. Paul against national patterns in American Jewish education, reflecting, for example, on how the initiatives of Samson Benderly, conceived in New York City, flourished in this quite different locale. The midsize, midwestern setting, Schwartz surmises, made uniquely possible a regional educational collaboration that brought together "school, shul and community" (31). Chapter two, focusing on the last quarter of the twentieth century, offers an analysis of the dynamics that Schwartz sees as contributing to this successful collaborative effort, inclusive of factors specific to the regional demographics of St. Paul as well as national ideological trends such as increased attentiveness to Israel and Israel education in the aftermath of the Six Day War. The third chapter offers a historical overview of [End Page 474] institutional change during the first decades of the twenty-first century, a less than sanguine tale of decreasing Jewish population in St. Paul combined with a rising average population age, leading to a decline in Jewish enrollment in the community-sponsored Talmud Torah. At the end of his historical account, Schwartz is thus forced to conclude that despite the twentieth-century successes it enjoyed, "a communal school cannot produce a multigenerational, Jewishly knowledgeable and concerned community out of whole cloth" (113). In its place, congregational education, as well as the Jewish day schools planted in Minneapolis in the latter decades of the twentieth century, have taken up the Jewish educational baton. Chapters four through seven, focusing on the current strategic planning progress for St. Paul's communal Jewish educational institutions in the light of this historical narrative, will principally be of interest to scholars invested in the contemporary Jewish educational landscape, as well as to educational practitioners and policy makers. The chief limitation of this study for students and teachers of the American Jewish historical experience lies in its top-down approach to Jewish educational history. This is overwhelmingly an institutional study, and its chief protagonists are the administrators, policy makers and benefactors of the educational institutions it surveys. Absent from the book are, arguably, its primary subjects: the students, parents, and classroom teachers who animated the enterprise. Schwartz offers little insight into the ways that the titular "covenant" was made...

Diction And Contextualization of The Jews Verses In The Holy Qur’an; Text, Translation And Commentary of Abdullah Yusuf Ali

This paper explores how Abdullah Yusuf Ali interpreted the Jews in his tafseer book; The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation and Commentary. His interpretation becomes worth to discuss due to his profile as a Moslem officer of Great Britain which politically supported the contemporary Jews in Israel. Additionally, Yusuf Ali was the big fan of the concept of inter-faith dialogue. On the other hand, he was so proud of being a Moslem so that he wrote an English translation and commentary of the Koran in order international society can understand Islam well. This paper is going to show how Yusuf Ali put himself as a Moslem and at the same time, a Britain officer, (and also admirer) who also lived in non-Moslem milieus. The discussion will explore two parts. The first one is the diction(s) used by Yusuf Ali to interpret the Jews verses, while the second is the contemporary contextualization on his interpretation on Jews verses into nowadays life. Using library research method through primary and secondary references combined with a hermeneutical approach, this paper comes to the following conclusion. First, there found five dictions to mention the Jews at the Jews verses, which are Jews, those who followed the Jewish law, those that stand on Judaism, those who follow the spirit of Moses and those who follow the Jewish scripture. Second, by the diverse diction, Yusuf Ali implied that The Jews is all about the spirit and physical action of individual instead of religious institution or affiliation.

The Troubled Friendship of Clemens Brentano and Rahel Levin in the Shadow of the Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft*

Abstract This article reconstructs the friendship between the Romantic author Clemens Brentano and the Jewish salonnière Rahel Levin, and explores her motivations for maintaining a friendship with him in spite of his public and private attacks on contemporary Jews, including her. Through analysis of his 1811 speech at the Christlich-deutsche Tischgesellschaft and the letters they exchanged, the article shows how limited Levin’s options were for balancing her identity as a Jew with her social and intellectual ambitions.

Philo’s Eschatology, Personal and Cosmic

AbstractAlthough first-century writings in the New Testament, Dead Sea Scrolls, and the pseudepigrapha are widely recognized for their descriptions of the ultimate destiny of individuals and the world, the views of Philo of Alexandria do not get the same attention. To situate the apocalyptic eschatologies of Jesus, the Qumran sectarians, and Enoch in their context, we must compare them to the eschatology of this contemporary Hellenistic Jew. I demonstrate that Philo’s eschatology is shaped by two convictions: (1) that God is good and can do no evil, and (2) virtue must be developed within people in this life. These convictions entail that the purpose of punishment must be solely for correction, and that God provides unlimited opportunity for souls to improve. Philo held that reincarnation provides just such an ever-improving spiral in which souls finally become wise by honoring God and consequently the world becomes a peaceful, prosperous paradise.

Talking heads:‎ Necromancy in Jewish and Christian Accounts ‎ from Mesopotamia and beyond

Relations between Jewish and Christian communities in Late Antiquity involved interactions relating to a complex cultural and religious landscape. An intrinsic aspect of the exchange between Jews and Christians refers to attitudes towards pagan communities in their shared environment as a common discourse pertaining to a symbolic construction of the “Other”. More specifically, a persisting topos was the implication of “pagan” communities and their respective religious specialists in illicit magical practices including necromancy. In the following, a discussion of testimonies regarding variants of necromantic practices in ancient, rabbinic and Christian sources will explore the dissemination and special characteristics of the different necromantic accounts in Late Antiquity and contextualise this peculiar practice of a divinatory “talking head” as evidenced in contemporary Jewish and Christian traditions.

Talking heads:‎ Necromancy in Jewish and Christian Accounts ‎ from Mesopotamia and beyond

Relations between Jewish and Christian communities in Late Antiquity involved interactions relating to a complex cultural and religious landscape. An intrinsic aspect of the exchange between Jews and Christians refers to attitudes towards pagan communities in their shared environment as a common discourse pertaining to a symbolic construction of the “Other”. More specifically, a persisting topos was the implication of “pagan” communities and their respective religious specialists in illicit magical practices including necromancy. In the following, a discussion of testimonies regarding variants of necromantic practices in ancient, rabbinic and Christian sources will explore the dissemination and special characteristics of the different necromantic accounts in Late Antiquity and contextualise this peculiar practice of a divinatory “talking head” as evidenced in contemporary Jewish and Christian traditions.

The Integration of Arabo-Islamic Culture into the Emergent Hebrew Culture of Late Ottoman Palestine

This essay explores the ways in which Abraham Shalom Yahuda (1877–1951) mobilizes Arabo-Islamic culture for the construction of Hebrew culture as manifested in his writings that treat Arabic literature. The essay's argument comprises two parts: first, that Yahuda's production of Arabic poetical literature endeavored to familiarize Jewish communities, in particular European Jews, with Arabic culture. As such, I argue that Yahuda did not Hebraize Arabic poetical texts nor he Judaize Arab figures that he treated. Rather, he preserved essential characteristics that were intended to acquaint European Jews with the otherness of Arabs and simultaneously with the Jewish self. Second, Yahuda's efforts also sought to draw a connection between contemporary Jews and their "Israelite brethren"—in Yahuda's words—as Yahuda concurrently urged his Hebrew-reading audience to embrace spiritual and moral values that characterized the Jewish forefathers. Prominent Arab figures, particularly poets, represented the perfect example to transmit moral values that Jews needed in order to restore their relation with the land of their ancestors. In advocating for embracing moral values such as bravery, loyalty, and hospitality, Yahuda's noble Arabs and heroes represented the Orientalism of Arabic culture and its relevance to the Jews of his time, highlighting the common denominators between Arabs and Israelites.

Divine Wrath and Salvation in Matthew: The Narrative World of the First Gospel

Divine Wrath and Salvation in Matthew: The Narrative World of the First Gospel

Modernizing Leah: The Biblical Leah in Contemporary Anglo-American Jewish Women’s Poetry

Modernizing Leah: The Biblical Leah in Contemporary Anglo-American Jewish Women’s Poetry

Teaching and learning Jewish history in the 21st century: New priorities and opportunities

ABSTRACTNew 21st-century circumstances in the Jewish world—including the changing nature of Jewish identification, the retreat from identity and continuity as singular aims of Jewish education, the democratization of Jewish learning opportunities, increased emphasis on informal and experiential Jewish education activities, and demonstrable interest among contemporary Jews in Jewish history and culture—combined with new developments in the teaching of history—including new ways to organize subject matter, account for student interest and perspective-taking, and develop disciplinary skills—create the potential to grow the field of Jewish history education in fresh and imaginative directions.

Exilic Landscapes: Synagogues and Jewish Architectural Identity in 1870s Britain

When Jews in Florence, Italy submitted plans for a new Great Synagogue in 1872, the designs were rejected not on the usual religious or political grounds, but for stylistic reasons. The local municipality had decided that the Jewish community was not building in a ‘Jewish enough’ style, although it was not at all clear what this style ought to be. This debate over how Jews ought to build raged across Europe throughout that decade, and beyond. This essay revisits that particular historical problem, by looking at a sample of five new synagogues that were erected in England during the 1870s and 1880s: St John’s Wood Synagogue (1880–82) in London; Bradford Synagogue (1880–81) in Yorkshire; West London Synagogue (1867–70); Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool (1872–74); and New West End Synagogue in London (1877–79). Each offered its own different way to think about the appropriate design style for a contemporary Jewish place of worship, and how this coincided, or not, with the rituals of worship and with the requirements of the various congregations involved. The essay concludes by asking what relevance such debates might have today.

Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries, and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel

This paper discusses an early-eighteenth-century Yiddish translation of the famous early modern Schwankroman (jest-novel), Eulenspiegel . The uniqueness of the translation lies in its incorporation of five distinct tales, which do not appear in any other extant Jewish or non-Jewish edition. Four of these original tales feature monstrous creatures, such as cynocephali (dog-headed men), strong, venomous women, and monkey-faced men. The article offers a close reading of these monstrous creatures, revealing how they serve to unpack concerns surrounding problems of transgressed borders and confused hierarchies, which were shared by many of the unnamed Yiddish translator's Jewish and non-Jewish contemporaries. I offer a review of these anxieties, locating them against their wider cultural background, and tracing their unique manifestations within the Jewish—and particularly Yiddish—literary realm. I argue that there was something special about writing monstrosity in Yiddish, and particularly in a Yiddish translation of a German work. A hybrid genre, formed by the unnatural coupling of separate tongues, literature, cultures, classes, and genders—Yiddish literature was a monstrous creation in its own right; an almost natural breeding ground for monsters.