Jewish Apologetics Research Articles

Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun

Reviewed by: Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust by Natalia Aleksiun Helene Sinnreich (bio) Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust By Natalia Aleksiun. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2021. 329 pp. Natalia aleksiun's new monograph, conscious history: polish jewish Historians before the Holocaust, makes the compelling case that through an examination of the early historians of Polish Jewry, one gains an understanding of Jewish experience in the Second Polish Republic. According to Aleksiun, this is because not only were these scholars formed by the time in which they wrote and lived, but also that as scholar-activists they helped shape interwar Polish Jewry. Aleksiun begins and ends her analytical volume with storytelling, which wraps herself and contemporary scholars of Polish Jewry into the long history of Polish Jewish historians, which she canonizes in her important contribution to the field. She brings readers on a journey of the evolution of professional writing about the history of Polish Jews, starting with her chapter "Historical Beginnings," in which she provides a rich history of the scholars who preceded and influenced the post-World War I community of university-educated Jewish historians. This early group "embraced history as an important political and cultural tool for improving the status of the Jews and for strengthening communal self-awareness" (61). Aleksiun then introduces us in the aptly named chapter "The Making of Professional Polish Jewish Historians" to a new cohort of scholars, the main focus of the volume, whose university training led to their professional approach to the field of Polish Jewish history. They rejected Jewish apologetics and embraced "the creation of a national Jewish historiography in accordance with academic standards of critical scholarship" (63). As scholars in a freshly emerged state where nationalism helped forge the historical narrative being formed in Polish universities, these scholars created a place for Polish Jewry in the new national narratives. However, as Aleksiun informs, even as these academics saw themselves as part of the academic project of national history formation, their marginal status as Jews made placement in university positions difficult. This led these men to take positions in the public sphere and disseminate their conceptions of Polish Jewish history into the wider Jewish community. In their roles [End Page 206] as teachers, journalists, and religious leaders, they imbued those within their sphere of influence with their conception of collective Polish Jewish identity. They created curricula for Jewish schools; they discussed their conceptions of the history of Polish Jewry from the pages of newspapers and pulpits. As a result, these historians became extremely important in the formation of Jewish Polish identity in interwar Polish Jewish communities. As Aleksiun notes, Polish Jewish history, which was studied almost exclusively by Jews, ended up influencing those Jews and the members of their community. Aleksiun grapples with "the questions raised by historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, probing within the Polish context his idea that in modern times a secularizing and consciously Jewish intelligentsia takes on history-writing as a profoundly Jewish act" (11–12). These scholars became Jewish actors on their communities. Ultimately, however, it was these same Jewish historians equipped in university settings with the tools of professional historians who set to work to write the first histories of the Holocaust in Poland. In ghettos, in hiding, and in occupied cities, they compiled the documents utilized later to tell the story of their community's devastation. They composed the first narrative and analytical histories of Jewish experience during the Holocaust. Ultimately, many died during the war, but as Aleksiun informs in her "Epilogue," their work lives on as a deep influence on those writing on the Jews of Poland today. [End Page 207] Helene Sinnreich Helene Sinnreich is director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a scholar of Jewish experience during the Holocaust and European Jewry. Sinnreich serves as the coeditor in chief of the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press) and was the founding editor of the Journal of Jewish Identities (Johns Hopkins University Press). Sinnreich obtained her PhD and MA from...

The context and subtext of Ignác Goldziher’s memorial lecture on Ármin Vámbéry

AbstractThis article analyzes Ignác Goldziher’s portrayal of Ármin Vámbéry in his memorial lecture of 1915. Goldziher positioned Vámbéry, his teacher, as a Jewish Hungarian nationalist Orientalist and a foundational figure to Hungarology. Through this portrayal Goldziher opened the door to the notion that he, too, was like Vámbéry, a nationalist Hungarian Orientalist, despite the fact that his own work did not contribute to Hungarology, and did not display nationalist and patriotic tendencies as did Vámbéry’s. Goldziher’s portrayal of Vámbéry, thus, is a part of Jewish apologetics that emerged as a response to growing anti-Semitism during the early twentieth century.

S. D. Luzzatto’s Program for Restoring Jewish Leadership in Hebrew Studies

This article demonstrates that S. D. Luzzatto’s Prolegomeni a una grammatica ragionata della lingua ebraica (1836) was a critical response to the scholarship of Christian Hebraists, motivated by the drive of its author to reclaim from Christians the leading position in the study of the Hebrew language. Luzzatto took exception to Christian scholars’ reliance on Arabic in their linguistic descriptions of Hebrew, an approach championed by the eighteenth-century Dutch Hebraist Albert Schultens. Somewhat unfairly, Luzzatto attributed this approach to his contemporary Wilhelm Gesenius, whose grammar of Hebrew inspired him to undertake his own rival analysis of the language. Melding comparative linguistics with the Enlightenment notion that language was the truest expression of national character, Luzzatto sought to establish scientifically, and in line with rabbinic belief, a close historical linkage between Aramaic and Hebrew. Luzzatto’s committed efforts to disseminate his theory among Christians and Jews reveal his determination to win a scholarly dispute over language by negotiating between philological reasoning and reverence to tradition. However, his program to subvert Christian scholarship by undermining its foundations failed. Luzzatto’s reliance on nationalistic theories of language origin hampered his attempts to master empirical methodology and thus supersede Gesenius’s comparative approach. By examining Luzzatto’s methods as well as contemporary scholars’ reactions to his work, this article shows how Hebrew linguistics could serve as a vehicle for Jewish apologetics and a medium for defending Jewish tradition against critical scholarship that challenged the divine revelation of Scripture.

Jesus in Sasanian Babylonia

Jesus in Sasanian Babylonia PETER SCHAfer. Jeaiut in the Talmud. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xv + 210.AS PETER SCHAfer informs us in this important, powerful, and absorbing volume, Christian anti-Semitism and supersessionism on the one hand and Jewish apologetics on the other have marred earlier scholarly attempts to study Jesus 's portrayal in the Talmud. Most misguided, however, are those scholars, chief among them Johann Maier, who dismiss the talmudic traditions about Jesus as nonsensical rubbish on the grounds that they contain no reliable information about the historical Jesus. Maier, in fact, concludes that rabbinic literature refers in most instances to a Jesus other than Jesus of Nazareth, thinking thereby to have concluded the discussion and to have consigned the talmudic traditions to oblivion.1Schafer argues convincingly (1) that the talmudic traditions are speaking about Jesus of Nazareth; (2) that they contain no historically reliable evidence about the founder of Christianity independent of what can be found in Christian traditions; and (3) that these conclusions represent only the beginning of the story rather than the end. What the Talmud has to say on the subject, Schafer proposes, is of crucial importance because of what it tells us about fourth-century (and later) Jewish attitudes toward Jesus and Christianity. What the rabbis of Babylonia had to say about Jesus is not simply to be dismissed as bizarre nonsense but rather is to be appreciated as the rabbis' brilliant but bitter polemical responses to Christianity, the development and maturation of which had immense political, social, and religious consequences for Jews and against which they were engaged in a life and death struggle. The comments of the rabbis are couched in an idiom that is often foreign to nonspecialists, and these comments are often transmitted in the context of larger discussions concerned primarily with issues that seem strange to the uninitiated. It is necessary, therefore, to decipher the rabbis' comments and make them intelligible to those not immersed in rabbinic patterns of argumentation, and this is perhaps Schafer's most important contribution. In addition, Schafer repeatedly shows himself to be a skilled and sensitive exegete. Particularly innovative are his demonstrations of the interpretive importance of close attention not only to the immediate context of scriptural verses cited in rabbinic midrash but to the fuller context, whether the surrounding verses, the entire chapter, or even an entire biblical book.2As Schafer reads the evidence, the Talmud supplies us with fragments of a counter- Gospel, a Jewish perspective on the events of Jesus 's life, despite the fact that this counternarrative is preserved haphazardly and scattered throughout the pages of the Bavli, no more than a drop in the proverbial sea of the Talmud. This Jewish Gospel derives from a point of view hostile to Christianity and sympathetic to Judaism as understood and taught by the rabbis, in contrast to the New Testament Gospels, which are all, to differing degrees and in varying ways, hostile to Jews and Judaism. Schafer passionately insists that what the Talmud has to say about Jesus is important in its own right, and not simply for what it teaches us about Christian origins. The Talmud's statements about Jesus are often ferocious and at times even obscene (pp. 13, 82-94), but never gratuitously so, since these statements were the rabbis' ammunition against Christianity's core beliefs, which they used to make the case that Christianity was utterly false and that Jesus and his followers were hopelessly deluded. Those interested in the history of Jewish- Christian relations will find in these statements a perspective without parallel in other literatures, since the rabbis uttered these statements from a position of relative strength vis-a-vis the more vulnerable Christian communities of Sasanian Persia. …

CONTEXTUALISING PAUL IN ATHENS: THE PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL BEFORE PAGAN AUDIENCES IN THE GRAECO-ROMAN WORLD

Abstract<title> Abstract </title>This article contextualises Paul's speech on the Areopagus as reported in Acts 17 in the light of the contemporary religious situation obtaining in Athens in the middle of the first century C.E. Against the background of the pluralistic and polytheistic religious context of life in Athens, Paul's speech is interpreted and situated primarily in the light of the role of the Council of the Areopagus as guardians of traditional Athenian ways. The speech before the Council is characterised by agreements with Graeco-Roman philosophy (Stoicism and Epicureanism), as well as by contradictions with these. It is clear that the thrust of the speech derives from Old Testament prophetic traditions and contemporary Jewish apologetics. Rather than drawing on Graeco-Roman philosophical traditions as a kind of preparation for the gospel, then, Paul is transcending these with revealed theology.

High-Priestly Succession in Jewish Apologetics and Episcopal Succession in Hegesippus

Journal Article High‐Priestly Succession in Jewish Apologetics and Episcopal Succession in Hegesippus Get access T. C. G. Thornton T. C. G. Thornton Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 54, Issue 1, April 2003, Pages 160–163, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/54.1.160 Published: 01 April 2003

The Jews in the diaspora of the Roman empire

There is little literary evidence and archaeological sources pointing to a high degree of contact partly in the sense of Hellenization of Judaism and partly in the sense of Jewish apologetics and Jewish influence on the non-Jewish world. But there is also evidence – the Jewish struggles and revolts and the Rabbinic literature – pointing in the opposite direction of conflict and isolation. In both the diaspora and in Palestine the Jews were involved in a tense and strained dialectic relationship with their non-Jewish fellow-citizens, and in both cases did this relationship produce significant events and important literature. As in other periods, the Jews in the Roman period formulated their beliefs and ideas, and reached their social positions by the way of various forms for dialectic interaction and communication with the non-Jewish world. They shaped their social, political, ethnic, religious and cultural identity in the process of exchange with the non-Jewish. Accordingly, in their relations with the non-Jewish world the Jews and Judaism were important parts of the on-going acculturation process in Hellenistic and Roman times.

Y. Yerushalmi, "From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: a study in seventeenth-century Marranism and Jewish apologetics" (Book Review)

Y. Yerushalmi, "From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: a study in seventeenth-century Marranism and Jewish apologetics" (Book Review)

From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsFrom Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi A. A. SicroffA. A. Sicroff Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 45, Number 4Dec., 1973 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/241120 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1973 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish ApologeticsYerushalmiY. H. From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics Columbia University PressNew York & London, 1971, xix, 524

From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish ApologeticsYerushalmiY. H. <i>From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics</i> Columbia University PressNew York &amp;#38; London, 1971, xix, 524

From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 403 William of Sherwood's Treatise on Syncategorematic Words trans, with intro, and notes by Norman Kretzmann. (Minneapolis. University Press, 1968. Pp. xm+ 173) Already known by his William of Sherwood's Introduction to Logic (Minneapolis: University Press, 1966), the translator offers us an advanced treatise on Medieval logic, the Syncategoremata of William of Sherwood, published in Medieval Studies, III (1941). Once more we are acquainted with scholastic logic of which we knew already the Tractatus Syncategorematum of Peter of Spain translated by Joseph Mullally and Roland Houde and published by the Marquette University Press in 1964. Thanks to the diligent work of ,the translator, the notes and the index, the reading of this difficult treatise becomes relatively easy. The translator did well by keeoing the latin equivalent of the expressions, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions analysed by the treatise. What is the object of this logical work? William of Sherwood, in a short introduction, answers this question: the objects are these secondary parts of a statement (enuntiatio) which "are determinations of principal parts (the substantival name and the verb) insofar as they are subjects or predicates." In other words, the syncategorematic words (syncategoremeta ) with which W. of Sherwood is dealing do not mean something which belongs to things but results from the "mind of the speaker" (p. 118). For a contemporary logician, the syncategorematic words signify the structure of language, the syntactical elements of it; for a medieval thinker, they express all the entia ration&, the logical entities of thought. As a matter of fact, both speak of the same thing in a different mentality: on the one hand nominalism, on the other hand conceptualism. Anyway, the specifically logical doctrines are almost the same. Consequently, it is still very fruitful to go back to these treatises of the Middle Ages. The following topics are dealts with: words which determine the distributivity of the predicate, "Every" or "All" (omnis), "Whole" (totum), "Both" (uterque), "of Every sort" (quaelibet), "No" (nullus), "Nothing" (nihil), "Neither" (neutrum)---these sync~tegorematic words correspond to quantifiers; "But" (praeter), "Alone" (solus), "Only" (tantum)---these syneategorematie words introduce the implicitly compound propositions of the Scholastic logicians; "Is" (est)---it is syncategorematie insofar as it signifies a composition; otherwise, it is not; "Necessarily" (necessario), "Contingently" (contingenter)----these words introduce modal propositions; "Not" (non), "If" (si), "unless" (nisi), "and" (et)---these words correspond to the connectives of the propositional logic. One word "but that" (quin) is rather a grammatical expression than a logical one. The same has to be said of "he.... an", which correspond to "Whether" or "Or." Many subtile analyses distinguish the several uses of the syncategorematic words. Many sophisms are proposed and solved thanks to the distinctions. It is evident that these analyses are made in an epistemological context which implies Metaphysics. E. WINANCE Claremont Graduate School Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso, ,4 Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish ,4pologetics. (Columbia University Press, New York. xx+524 pp.) This excellent scholarly study of the amazing career of Isaac Cardoso, 1603/4-1683, brings to life a much neglected current in 17th century intellectual history, that of 404 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the philosophical and theological odysseys of Iberia's thinkers of Jewish origins who had been forced to live and develop in the Inquisitional Catholic world. The powerful and often innovative contributions of these tormented intellectuals vlayed a very significant role that is just beginning to be recognized in the "making of the modern mind." Cardoso was raised in Portugal and Spain, and at age twenty-one was professor of philosophy at Valladolid, and two years later was professor of medicine. He was apparently a great success as a eeacher and doctor and became a royal physician. He was in the circle of Lope de Vega (who died after fainting while a~tending one of Cardoso's lectures). He published some important scientific works in Spain, as well as a funeral oration for Lope de Vega. In spite of his Jewish background, Cardoso rose to great heights in Spain, and was protected by some of the strongest figures in the Inquisitional world. Then, for unknown reasons, Cardoso left Spain in 1648, and turned...

From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso. A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

<i>From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso. A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics</i>, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

The Ideology of the Letter of Aristeas

Modern scholars commonly regard the “Letter of Aristeas” as a work typical of Jewish apologetics, aiming at self-defense and propaganda, and directed to the Greeks. Here are some instances illustrating this general view. In 1903 Friedländer wrote that the glorification of Judaism in the Letter was no more than self-defense, though “the book does not mention the antagonists of Judaism by name, nor does it admit that its intention is to refute direct attacks.” Stein sees in the Letter “a special kind of defense which practices diplomatic tactics,” and Tramontano also speaks of “an apologetic and propagandist tendency.” Vincent characterizes it as “a small apologetic novel written for the Egyptians” (i.e. the Greeks in Egypt). Pfeiffer says: “This fanciful story of the origin of the Septuagint is merely a pretext for defending Judaism against its heathen denigrators, for extolling its nobility and reasonableness, and for striving to convert Greek speaking Gentiles to it.” Schürer classes the Letter with a special kind of literature, “Jewish propaganda in Pagan disguise,” whose works are “directed to the pagan reader, in order to make propaganda for Judaism among the Gentiles.” Andrews, too, believes that the role of a Greek was assumed by Aristeas in order “to strengthen the force of the argument and commend it to non-Jewish readers.” And even Gutman, who rightly recognizes that the Letter sprang “from an inner need of the educated Jew,” sees in it “a strong means for making Jewish propaganda in the Greek world.”