Jewish Terms Research Articles

‘Rabbinising’ in sixteenth-century polemics

‘Rabbi’ is the title of Jewish scholars and teachers. Yet, in the sixteenth century, the word was sometimes employed in Christian discourse, when Christian scholars referred to their Christian peers as rabbis. How could non-Jews be called rabbis? This article explores the meaning of the term ‘rabbi’ in sixteenth-century intra-Christian polemics and discourse. It shows how the image of the ‘rabbi’, a figure of (negative) intellectual authority, penetrated the speech of Christian intellectuals and polemicists. It suggests that this ‘rabbinic’ figure was not necessarily Jewish. Although ‘rabbi’ is a Jewish term – the incarnation of Jewish intellectual life – the term also denotes Jesus as well as his opponents, the Pharisees. Thus, polemical ‘rabbinising’ of Christian scholars potentially involved very different images of scholarly authority.

“My Father’s Face”: Judaism, God, and Ritual Practice in Philip Roth’sEveryman,Indignation, andNemesis

This article is about the occurrence and centrality of distinctly Jewish ideas and ritual practices in Philip Roth’s Nemesis (2010), Indignation (2008), and Everyman (2006). In these three novels, Roth constructed characters whose existential crises most often come during or when meditating upon moments of Jewish ritual or Jewish theological expression, and what emerges is that the when, where, and how moments in which Roth’s protagonists interact with Judaism are particularly Judaic. When they are practicing Jewish ritual or speaking in Jewish terms, Roth’s characters end up creating meaning through what Stephen Kepnes calls the great theatrical performance of Judaism.

Decoding with Gematria the Number 1737, Jesus Christ’s Lifespan in Weeks, according to a XX-Century Mystic

The paper reports a mathematical exercise, mainly based on Jewish Gematria, to decode the integer 1737, Jesus’ lifespan calculated in weeks according to the Italian mystic Maria Valtorta. We show that the sequence of integers 1000 + 700 + 37 = 1737 describes the character Jesus, seen as the Messiah. The first two integers can be directly interpreted with Gematria; the third can be related to Jesus’ life, both as 33 + 4—the number of years (33) and months (4) of his life—, or as 34 + 3—the calendar year of his death (34, Julian calendar) and the number of days (3) to Resurrection. With the exponential function, other meanings can be extracted from 1737, related to the Act of Creation, in Jewish terms, and/or to the second person of the Trinity, in Christian terms. From the integer 1737, it is also possible to estimate the approximate hour of Jesus’ birth and verify the hour of death reported in the Gospels. Since the knowledge and mathematical tools we have used were surely not known to Maria Valtorta, it is surprising to arrive at a self-consistent and coherent framework from what she writes.

Synagogenordnungen als Zeichen und Instrumente für eine Neudefinition jüdischer Identität im Mähren des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts

AbstractTakkanot have been an important instrument for the unification of Ashkenazi culture since the Middle Ages. They spread from the Rhineland to the East, to Poland, Bohemia and Moravia. They regulated all areas of Jewish life. Whereas the addressees of the Takkanot were the Jewish communities, the new Synagogenordnungen (Statutes for the Synagogue), developed first in the West and soon followed by Moravia in the East, were directed primarily at the Christian authorities. This change began as early as the mid-18th century when the Austrian empress Maria Theresia asked for a translation of older Takkanot in order to formulate new legal standards for the Jewish life in her lands. The translation of these Jewish regulations into German, brought with it, nolens volens, a Christianization of Jewish technical terms used in their institutions. Soon, the Jewish Neologists and reformers welcomed these translations as useful for their own aspirations to transform Judaism. This was the case in both the West and the East. Among them was Samson Raphael Hirsch, the later leader of the Neo-Orthodox community in Frankfurt am Main and Chief Rabbi of Moravia in Nikolsburg.

Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion by Daniel Boyarin

Reviewed by: Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion by Daniel Boyarin Ira Robinson Boyarin, Daniel – Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Pp. 217. Scholarship always reflects its times, and Daniel Boyarin's book Judaism is definitely of the moment. In the "about the author" blurb, he meticulously informs his readers of his utilization of feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies in his work. Elsewhere, he self-identifies as a "non-Zionist" Jew (p. 153), and he is at pains to avoid any possibility that his readers might think that he attributes any essential superiority to European culture: "It is important to emphasize … since I do not want to be misunderstood. When I speak of the premodern or extra Euro-American, I am not claiming that modern Europe represents an advance over all other cultures" (p. 76; emphasis in original). In this, he is the very model of a contemporary Western scholar of the humanities and social sciences. Looking back on previous generations of scholarship on the concept of "Judaism," Boyarin is generous in acknowledging the merits of that scholarship while nonetheless letting the reader clearly understand that his own considered understanding differs. Thus, he greatly appreciates George Foot Moore's effort to redeem the term Judaism "from the prejudiced anti-Judaism of … Protestant Biblical scholars" (p. 13) while dismissing Moore's definition as a "normative essentialism" (p. 16). He lauds Jacob Neusner's attempt to define a "'Judaism' … that would purportedly be neither essentialistic nor normative," while criticizing it as "monothetic" (p. 14). He appreciates Michael Satlow, informed by Jonathan Z. Smith, who attempted to improve on Neusner by mapping a polythetic variety of Judaisms. Nonetheless, for all his appreciation, Boyarin concludes that Satlow "leaves us with the question of why we should seek to define something that no one knows of at the time about which the research is being done. … We end up with a polythetic definition of a word which did not exist" (p. 17). This brings Boyarin to his main thesis in the book, that "Judaism," "arguably one of the most key of key words for Jewish studies" (p. xi) is not a useful term for scholarship. In a theoretical sense, Boyarin juxtaposes the views of two influential scholars of religious and cultural studies, Jonathan Z. Smith and Talal Asad, and greatly prefers Asad's understanding over that of Smith. Asad asserts the necessity for scholars translating the concepts of other cultures to make "the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own." Smith, on the contrary, states that "giving primacy to native terminology yields, at best, lexical definitions. … But lexical definitions are almost always useless for scholarly work. … How 'they' use a word cannot substitute for the stipulative procedures by which the academy contests and controls second-order specialized usage" (pp. 4–5). Boyarin devotes the majority of the book to demonstrating that "'Judaism' is not a Jewish term" (p. xii) and was not used by Jews themselves until the modern period (p. 11). In Part II, "The State of the Lexicon," he searches for antecedent terms that correspond in meaning to "Judaism" in ancient and medieval Jewish texts and by and large does not find them. He rather asserts that the term "Judaism" as such was created by ancient Christians. The term was "invented initially for [End Page 677] the purposes of the formulation of Christian orthodoxy" (p. 105). For Christian thinkers, Judaism was a "false Ekklesia … to set off and solidify the identity of the orthodox Christian Ekklesia" (p. 110). It is only in modern times that Jews themselves, in adopting Western languages and mores, have adopted "Judaism" as the word describing their "religion," though it is clear that even with respect to modernity, what Jews do, and what scholars of Jewish studies teach, goes far beyond "religion" in the strict sense of that term (p. 153). Boyarin has created a very interesting argument but also a fairly narrow one. While it could be said that his investigation of ancient sources seems reasonably comprehensive, his survey of medieval and especially modern Jewish sources...

“I Turned away from the Temple”: Sethian Counterculture in the Apocryphon of John

In the myth as well as the frame story of the Apocryphon of John, Sethian conflict with others is narrativized. For instance, Adam and Eve withdraw from the biblical creator just as John turns away from the temple in Jerusalem after an altercation with a Jewish antagonist. The gnostic authors of the text portrayed the creator so negatively that he is incomparable with most demiurgic figures in Platonism, Judaism, and Christianity. Their ignorant, boastful, jealous and apostate Ialdabaoth was shocking to their ancient opponents. And for modern scholars, this countercultural vilification of the creator makes it difficult to categorize the authors of the apocryphon in Platonic, Jewish, or Christian terms.

On the Margins and Other Impossible Spaces

On the Margins and Other Impossible Spaces Naomi Seidman (bio) My friend tells an old Yiddish joke about a rabbi who comes into the synagogue during the Days of Awe, prostrates himself in front of the Holy Ark and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” A few minutes later, the chazn (cantor) walks in, prostrates himself in front of the ark of the Torah and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” After yet a few more minutes, in comes the lowly shammes (synagogue sexton), who prostrates himself in front of the ark and says: “Master of the universe, forgive me for I am nothing.” Hearing this, the rabbi sits up, pokes the chazn, and, pointing to the shammes, says: “Look who’s a nothing!” (ze nor ver s’iz a gornisht). On the Margins of Modernism1 If the students of Chana Kronfeld form a Wittgensteinian rope, which “consists of fibres, but . . . does not get its strength from any fibre which runs through it from one end to the other, but from the fact that there is a vast number of fibres overlapping,”2 then the fiber that constitutes my own part in the cohort of Chana’s students twists its frizzy way near the top of that rope. If we are rather a braid—Chana’s more feminine and Jewish term for a complex interweaving of periods and trends connected through partial overlap and complex “family resemblance”—I am down near the bottom, in the narrowest part just beyond the hair band. What I mean by these elaborate metaphors is that I was there at the very beginning of Chana’s teaching career at Berkeley, having arrived as a doctoral student in the fall of 1984, the semester before Chana started. The first seminar she taught, if I remember correctly, was held around her living room sofa since Chana, pregnant with Maya, was on bed rest. Somehow we discovered that she was craving loquats, and we brought her bags of the fruit, a curious twist on the way American students, back in the days of the one-room schoolhouse, brought their lady-teachers a red apple. I had never tasted a loquat before, nor had a teacher anything like Chana Kronfeld. We all became aware soon enough of Chana’s breadth of knowledge, clarity of mind, and methodological rigor. But along with all that came a sense of her particular and even peculiar tastes and enthusiasms, not only for certain hard-to-find fruits and one particular color (purple) but also for specific writers (David Fogel, Dvora Baron, Yehuda Amichai), biblical texts (Genesis 22, the Song of Songs), literary movements, trends, or schools (modernisms of all [End Page 9] stripes), musicians (Leonard Cohen), films (Monty Python’s The Life of Brian) and jokes (the one cited in the epigraph above, to which we were introduced in Bluma Goldstein’s Yiddish rendering.) These enthusiasms were illuminated but hardly exhausted by close reading, just as Chana’s fierce disdain for gossip masquerading as literary criticism was explained by, but also somehow exceeded, her neo-formalist training and inclinations. To the range of fallacies inherited from the New Critics, the intentional, the natural, and—my own personal favorite—the pathetic, we learned another Kronfeldian set: the religious fallacy (particularly prevalent among organizers of solemn national-memorial events in need of poetry that could be misread as pious) and its cousin, the Jewish fallacy, to which American Jews were particularly and embarrassingly prone. The study of Baron led us to a new set of fallacies, the ethnographic and the biographical, which were especially egregious not so much for their wrongness as for their favored target: women writers. It was with Baron, perhaps, that we recognized that close reading was not only rigorous academic practice, but also a cultural recovery mission, in which a long-undervalued woman’s voice was not only recovered (and translated into English) but also shown to contain complexities diminished by the purely biographical view. Alongside such pitfalls as the biographical and religious, into which I found myself habitually stumbling, we also acquired the sense that there were entire subjects...

Creating Jewish Space: German-Jewish Schools in Moravia

In 1911 malt factory owner Ignatz Briess of Olmütz/Olomouc wrote a memoir to explain the nature of Jewish life in small town Moravia before the Revolution of 1848 to his children and grandchildren. He related that he had attended a German-JewishTrivialschule, a German-language elementary school run by the Jewish community for Jewish children, in his home town of Prerau/Přerov in the late 1830s and early 1840s. At the school, the children had two to three hours of German subjects every morning; and at the end of every year, the state school inspector, a local priest, examined them on their studies. At the same time, Briess learned Hebrew, Bible, and Talmud in thecheder, the traditional Jewish school, for seven more hours every day. Thecheder, he remarked, was just like those inHalbasien, that is, Galicia, or Eastern Europe. Despite his reference to Karl Emil Franzos's negative evaluation of Galician Jewish life, Briess described the chaotic conditions in thechederpositively and with considerable warmth. His father, a grain dealer and manager of a noble estate who had studied at the famous Pressburg yeshiva in Hungary and who read Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Kant in his spare time, made sure that his son received a thorough Jewish education. The memoir, a nostalgic evocation of a vanished world, describes a Jewish community that was deeply pious, enmeshed in the world of Jewish religious tradition yet also influenced by secular, German-language culture, much of it expressed in Jewish terms. At his bar mitzvah in 1846, Briess gave adroschoh(a traditional learned discourse) for which the traditional rabbi helped him prepare, and a “German sermon,” on which he worked with hisTrivialschuleteacher.

Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities (review)

Reviewed by: Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities Anna Sapir Abulafia Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities, by Kirsten A. Fudeman. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 254 pp. $59.95. Recent books on the history of medieval Europe have paid increasing attention to non-Christian elements of society in an attempt to move away from a christo-centric interpretation of the Latin Middle Ages and to move towards [End Page 180] a subtler understanding of the many different components which forged medieval culture. At the same time students of medieval Jewish history are increasingly realizing the importance of interpreting their material within the full context of the history of the lands in which medieval Jews found themselves. Kirsten Fudeman's book is an excellent example of these new trends. Combining her expertise in medieval French literature and linguistics with her knowledge of medieval Hebrew, she has produced a work which brings to life the Jewish men, women, and children of northern France (Zarfat) as they communicated with each other, interacted with their Christian neighbors and negotiated their interests with the Christian lords under whose jurisdiction they fell. Fudeman examines the French used by medieval Jews in Zarfat in order to find out what it can teach us about the ways Jews thought about themselves and their environment in the twelfth to early fourteenth centuries. In the Introduction and Chapter One she explores the languages medieval French Jews used: Hebrew and Aramaic for learned and religious purposes; French for daily oral communication amongst themselves and with Christians. In Fudeman's terminology Hebrew was their father tongue, French their mother tongue. Women had far less access to Hebrew than men. Eschewing emotive judgments on the quality of Jewish versions of vernacular languages which have bedevilled the historiography of Yiddish, Fudeman avoids terms like Judeo-French. Very sensibly, Fudeman prefers the concept of a flexible Jewish register in spoken French which was adapted according to circumstance. With fellow Jews Jews could use Hebrew words for specifically Jewish terms; with Christians they would obviously have to adapt their vocabulary to be understood. Interesting is the linguistic evidence that Jewish use of French followed the same regional variations as Christian French. In Chapter Two Fudeman offers a close reading of the rich material concerning the massacre of around thirty Jews in Blois on a trumped-up ritual murder charge in 1171. This material is in Hebrew, but it clearly describes, assesses, and interprets conversations which took place in the vernacular between the Jews of Blois, between Jews of different communities, between Jews and Christian lords, including King Louis VII, and between Christians themselves. Here one sees clearly how Fudeman's linguistic expertise encourages a fresh approach to texts that have been studied so thoroughly by other scholars. Fudeman carefully decodes the interweaving biblical models later redactors of the material incorporated to uncover subtle variations of speech which were determined by place and circumstance. Particularly interesting is how she explores the voices of men and women and the arenas in which they were heard. Pucellina with her close connections to Count Theobald played an essential role in the drama; Countess Alix with her [End Page 181] strong anti-Jewish feelings was influential through her position as the wife of Theobald. But the arena of these women was private, not public. This is not to say this made them any less influential, but as Fudeman suggests it did make their role more transient, if only because it was through male manipulation of language that the texts describing the events were handed down to posterity. It seems that Jewish women in Zarfat did not possess good enough Hebrew to author scholarly or literary texts. Fudeman thinks they were, in fact, more at a disadvantage than their Christian counterparts in this respect. We lack Jewish examples in France to match the writings of women such as Marie de France and Heloise, just to name two of the most famous. The following two chapters are more technical. Chapter Three analyzes the extant examples of Hebraico-French, i.e,. French written in Hebrew characters. These texts are listed in Appendix One. Fudeman argues...

From “What the Thunder Said” to “Hebrew Lessons” and Other Jewish Poems

From “What the Thunder Said” to “Hebrew Lessons” and Other Jewish Poems

‘A splinter in the Flesh’: Levinas and the Resignification of Jewish Suffering, 1928–1947

This essay traces the development of Levinas’s conception of Judaism from 1928 to1947 with an aim to reveal how Levinas’s postwar conceptions of Jewish election and anti-historicism derive from his early treatments of the Heideggerian themes of Geworfenheit (thrownness) and historicality. In the process, I show how the similarities that Levinas perceived between Heidegger and Rosenzweig allowed him to recast Heideggerian categories in Jewish terms. Finally the essay considers the potential political implications and tensions that follow from Levinas’s concern after World War II to maintain Rosenzweig’s contention that Judaism stands outside of History.

Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (review)

Reviewed by: Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker Kenneth Seeskin Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker, by Sarah Stroumsa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 222 pp. $39.50. Writing on Maimonides is difficult for several reasons: first there is the depth and breadth of his thought, second the vast literature that already exists, third the esoteric nature of his philosophic writing, and fourth the need to say something new. In the past five years, three leading scholars have come out with intellectual biographies that merit attention: Herbert Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Work (2005), Joel L. Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (2008), and Stroumsa’s [End Page 204] Maimonides in His World. It is a pity that Kraemer and Stroumsa did not have access to each other’s books prior to publication. Stroumsa is an intellectual historian whose mastery of her material is impressive on many levels. She discusses all aspects of Maimonides’ thought including legal, philosophic, and scientific. What is new in her approach is the idea that we need to do a better job of presenting Maimonides as a product of the culture that produced him: a Judeo-Arabic culture that had reached a high degree of philosophic and scientific sophistication. Jewish audiences are often surprised to hear that Maimonides does not mention other Jewish thinkers in the Guide of the Perplexed and thought of himself as a disciple of Alfarabi. The problem is that many of those who focus on his Talmudic writings overlook the Islamic influences on his thought, while many of those who work on medieval Islam give short schrift to Maimonides on the grounds that he was a Jew. One has to hope that Stroumsa’s book will change this. How much depends on what one thinks about Maimonides’ relation to the Almohads. According to the standard view, the Almohads were a fundamentalist sect of Islam whose intolerance to anything that did not follow a strict interpretation of the Koran was legendary both for its dogmatism and asceticism. It was the Almohad invasion of Andalusia that forced Maimonides’ family to flee. According to some accounts, the Almohads destroyed synagogues and may have massacred Jews. Against this background, Stroumsa argues that Maimonides spent nearly twenty years of his life (1148–1165) under Almohad rule, wrote what is in effect a Jewish creed, was deeply immersed in Islamic law, produced a systematic study of Jewish law, was often as “puritanical” in his views about music and women as the Almohads, insisted that a strict denial of anything that smacked of anthropomorphism be taught to all Jews, and followed many Islamic thinkers in Almohad lands in preferring Aristotelian astronomy to Ptolemaic. All this is true. But does it follow that (p. 83) “Maimonides closely followed the Almohad paradigm” so that his ability to cast the Almohad revolution in Jewish terms allowed him to incorporate this paradigm seamlessly into his work? According to the dates Stroumsa gives, Maimonides lived under Almohad rule from the ages 10 to 27. The Mishneh Torah was written when he was in his thirties and not completed until he was 39. Having spent 17 years under Almohad rule in a formative period of his life, it is hard to imagine that he did not absorb significant parts of its culture. But it is equally hard to imagine that he was unaware of its harsh treatment of Jews. Aside from historical data, there is the fact that all great thinkers not only borrow from their surroundings but at some point go beyond them. That is a large part of what makes them great. This is certainly true of the Guide, which [End Page 205] was completed in 1190, when Maimonides was 52. No one doubts that there are many Islamic influences at work. In addition to the thought of Alfarabi, one does not have to read very far to see that Maimonides is thinking about the problems raised by Averroes’ “Decisive Treatise.” If my reading of his account of creation is accurate, then despite a firm rejection of the mutakallimun in Book One, he is indebted to Alghazali...

Mary—The Jewish Mother

Christians have re-awoken to the Jewishness of Jesus and rediscovered a respect for Judaism. Is it not time to reconsider Mary, in Jewish terms? Mary was an observant Jewish woman and she even carried on worshipping at the Temple in Jerusalem after the Christ Event. Although on the cusp of the divide between Judaism and Christianity, within a few centuries the Church was playing down her Jewishness and soon applied anti-Jewish teaching. By the early Middle Ages, Jews had responded with their own polemic, notably against the belief that Christ was born of a virgin. The Jewish rejection of the Virgin Birth resulted in a view of Jews as particular enemies of Mary, an understanding which was explored in medieval art and miracle tales. Today Catholics and Jews can redeem this antiquated understanding of Mary by portraying her positively—as a first-century Jewish mother.

For the Sake of Heaven & Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism & Christianity. By Irving Greenberg

Pp. xiv, 274 , Philadelphia , The Jewish Publication Society , 2004 , £14.95, $20.00, €23.50. Irving Greenberg's For the Sake of Heaven & Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism & Christianity, is written by the distinguished scholar, Jewish leader and Orthodox Rabbi, Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, it is a volume that represents a lifetime's study, reflection and perception on inter Jewish-Christian dialogue-relations. He comments, ‘I hope that … this book will help those who labour to overcome past enmity between the two faiths and thus open the door to cooperation and partnership for the sake of perfecting the world - the original and unfinished mission of both faiths’ (p.xi) - is this not an essentially a sociological as distinct from eschatological perspective? Jewish-Christian relations have long occupied Greenberg; transcending differences within the Jewish community and in what started as a collection of essays from his life's work he investigates what he defines as corresponding covenant communities operating towards the realisation of God's Kingdom. Greenberg's work is in two parts. Part one, entitled ‘Looking Forward’, consists of two new in-depth essays: ‘On the Road to a New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity: A Personal Journey’ (p.3f) and ‘Covenantal Partners in a Post-modern World’ (p.49f). The first of these essays opens with Greenberg considering the separation of Judaism and the early proto-Church, which leads into Greenberg recounting his own personal journey and his confrontation with the holocaust, further how he saw Christianity's problems as his own, which was the beginning of dialogue on covenant, freedom and pluralism, which led to a rethinking of theology and community: covenantal pluralisms, covenants in partnership. The second of these essays, ‘Covenantal Partners in a Post-modern World’, opens with a consideration of creation, redemption and the good life, which leads into Greenberg's consideration of covenant - the process of Tikun Olam, the Noahide covenant, the covenant with Abraham and Sarah, and the covenantal process in history. Inevitably Greenberg looks at Judaism and Christianity in confrontation: the birth and separation of a new covenant, and the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, resulting in conflict and exile; he then looks at how the two encounter modernity. Greenberg then faces the holocaust: towards a new understanding, Judaism and Christianity in partnership, which concludes with a consideration of how both communities wrestle with God and their differences. Part two, entitled ‘Looking Back’, consists of seven previously published essays/articles, which - arranged chronologically - chart Greenberg's developing understanding and public pronouncements, so to speak, on Judaism and Christianity, inter Jewish-Christian relations: first, ‘The New Encounter of Judaism and Christianity’ (from Barat Review, vol. 3 no. 2, 1967); second, ‘New Revelations and New Patterns’ (from Journal of Ecumenical Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, Spring 1979); third, ‘Toward an Organic Model of the Relationship’ (from Twenty Years of Jewish/Catholic Relations, eds. Eugene Fisher, James Rudin & Marc Tanenbaum, NY: Paulist Press, 1986); fourth, ‘The Respective Roles of the Two Faiths in the Strategy of Redemption’ (from Visions Of The Other: Jewish and Christian Theologians Assess the Dialogue, ed. Eugene J. Fisher, NY: Paulist Press, 1994); fifth, ‘Covenantal Pluralism’ (from, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, Summer 1997); sixth, ‘Pluralism and Partnership’ (from Unity without Uniformity: The Challenge of Pluralism, Martin Buber House Publication No. 26, International Council of Christians and Jews, Spring 1999); seventh, ‘Covenants of Redemption’ (from, Christianity in Jewish Terms, eds. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel and Michael A. Signer, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). The work concludes with a section of essays/responses by James Carroll, David Novak, Michael Novak, Mary C. Boys, and Krister Stendahl. Greenberg's work is a volume of essays representing a lifetime's experience of one rabbi/scholar in attempting reconciliation between Christians and Jews. Greenberg is clearly a religionist, not a theologian or philosopher: his only foray into dogmatics is a brief wrestle with how to dismiss the incarnation and resurrection and thereby to regard Christianity as something of a Schleiermachian pseudo-psychological off-shoot from Judaism (p. 66–67). Methodologically Greenberg concentrates on inter Jewish-Christian relations, conceding no points of doctrine with Christians, so as a volume about religion it essentially works with a post-modernist understanding of the relativity of truth in that it ring-fences on the one hand orthodox Jewish non-Christian doctrine-beliefs and on the other orthodox Christian doctrine-beliefs and refuses to wrestle with these doctrinal differences. This notwithstanding and as a volume charting rapprochement of sorts between Jews and Christians during the second half of the twentieth-century in the West, and representing a life-time's work, this is a valuable compilation.

Felix Mendelssohn’s Oratorio St Paul and the Question of Jewish Self-Definition

How, precisely, should one understand the term ‘Jewish’? When it comes to defining Jewish identity or ‘Jewishness’ in a systematic way, ideological assumptions are everything. The tendency, especially among theologians, is to essentialize by classifying people and phenomena as Jewish only in so far as they conform to an assumed essence of a normative Jewishness. This essence may or may not be related to theologically derived criteria such as matrilineal descent, conversion to a particular tradition or set of beliefs, adherence to a certain body of law, a role in salvation history, or to non-theological criteria such as racial, national or cultural characteristics. Responsibility for determining Jewish authenticity rests entirely with the observer, irrespective of whether his views originate from within the community or from outside. For the essentialist, anything or anyone who does not correspond to the given definition is to be excluded as marginal at best and deviant at worst. One might imagine a core of authenticity surrounded by concentric circles of ever decreasing legitimacy. The problem, of course, is that observers do not agree on what exactly constitutes the core of authenticity. Whichever definition is to be regarded as authoritative depends upon one’s existing biases. Furthermore, proponents of essentialism do not tend to recognize the historically-conditioned nature of such definitions and often assume that the characteristics of Jewish authenticity have remained fundamentally unchanged down through the ages. An alternative method of categorization is that of ‘self-definition’, the approved method for many social scientists. This non-essentialist approach does not pre-determine the outer limits of Jewishness and so ‘deviancy’ or ‘marginality’ are terms with little or no meaning. The inclusion of those who define themselves Jewishly can lead to political controversies, such as the acceptance of Messianic Jews despite their dismissal as Christians-by-another-name by a broad spectrum of the Jewish community. The advantage of a self-definitional approach is that it largely frees the observer from the responsibility for selection and minimizes the projection onto the subject of his own ideological biases. For some, ‘self-definition’ implies that the individual defines himself primarily in Jewish terms, but this need not be the case. Arguably, an individual Journal of Jewish Identities (2008), 1(1)

Remaking Israeli Judaism (review)

Reviewed by: Remaking Israeli Judaism Shlomo Deshen Remaking Israeli Judaism: The Challenge of Shas, by David LehmannBatia Siebzehner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 289 pp. $65.00. The growing research literature on the Israeli Shas phenomenon has been moving over the years from a predominantly political perspective to one focused on it as a socio-religious movement. This volume is part of that wave. The authors do not only address their subject from a broad sociological perspective, but also bring with them expertise in research on Latin American Catholicism and Pentecostalism, and they seek to illuminate the Israeli phenomenon through that experience. The book has an informal ethnographic dimension: over a period of three years the authors visited unspecified numbers of Shas-linked schools, yeshivas, synagogues, study groups, etc., and spoke to activists upon whom they came by “networking.” On the basis of this fieldwork and their reading of the pertinent literature, the authors offer a portrait of Shas which emphasizes its being akin to Evangelist movements, in Jewish terms a “teshuva” movement, of a kind with Habad hasidism. The Shas teshuva movement is linked to ethnic and social resentment. But though both secular and orthodox Ashkenazim have discriminated against Sephardim, the resentment of Shas is focused harshly only upon the secular sector. The reason, the authors suggest, interestingly, is that since relatively few Sephardim in the early decades of the State had personal experience [End Page 245] with orthodox Ashkenazim, they remain to this day relatively unaware of the discrimination practiced in that sector. An interesting finding of the book is that some of the Shas schools, despite the vehement anti-intellectualism of the movement, have modern quality programs in secular subjects such as physical education and science. Also, the authors find, the Shas movement is moderate and gradual in the religious demands it poses to new recruits. Further, in contrast to the situation among Ashkenazic haredim, in Shas returnees are acceptable for positions of prominence and leadership. The authors explain this openness as due to the overall expansiveness of Shas and its consequent need for skilled professionals to man administrative and technical positions (such as in the radio stations affiliated with Shas, and in government positions they command). Similarly, in the area of women’s rights, Shas women, while encouraged to high fertility, are invited to be publicly active for the movement, and also to engage in professional work. The movement is involved in private college-level training facilities (separate for men and women). The book offers many arresting theses based on insights on the Israeli situation, supported by Latin American findings. In both cases, Shas and Latin America, the authors claim, the new religious movements entail the recruits’ joining a new community, eventually severing ties with their community of origin, and in time, becoming heavily dependent on the new community. One aspect of this is marriage at a young age (with the support of the religious community) and concomitant parental disempowerment and attrition of kinship. Another thesis is that new religious recruits will be particularly enthusiastic and committed devotees, because of their dependence on their new community. A further thesis is that in common with evangelical movements world-wide, Shas has a marked hierarchical pattern of authority and a centralized system for the interpretation of religious codes. All these assertions are reasonable in theory, but they invite presentation of rigorous evidence, and that we are not offered in this book. The most sweeping thesis of the study is that “conversion-based movements reshape religion everywhere, including evangelical Christianity, Pentecostalism and Islamic renewal. (p. 3). The universal element of this statement need not concern us, but does it apply to the local Israeli scene, and to Shas in particular? In entitling their book “Remaking Israeli Judaism” and subtitling it “The Challenge of Shas,” the authors demonstrate their conviction that the role of Shas in religious change is indeed pivotal. But the issue might have been explored in greater depth. Granting the force of Shas in Israeli religion and politics, the book exaggerates some points and glosses over many reservations. One, the overall Sephardic proportion of Israeli Jews is probably not [End Page 246] much over one-third...

Dictionary of Jewish usage: a guide to the use of Jewish terms

Dictionary of Jewish Usage: A Guide to the Use of Jewish Terms is a unique and much needed guide to the way many Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic words and meanings are used by English speakers. Sol Steinmetz draws upon his years of dictionary editorial experience, as well as his lifelong study of Jewish history, traditions, and practices, to guide the reader through the essentially uncharted territory of Jewish usage.

Christianity in Jewish Terms

Book Review| April 01 2002 Christianity in Jewish Terms Alick Isaacs Alick Isaacs Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2002) 8 (2): 421–422. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8-2-421-a Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Alick Isaacs; Christianity in Jewish Terms. Common Knowledge 1 April 2002; 8 (2): 421–422. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8-2-421-a Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Problem of Tradition and Reform in Jewish Renaissance and Renaissancism

n recent years, the idea of a has become an increasingly popular concept for much of American as well as EuropeanJewry.' The creation of Israel, the gradual restoration of Jewish life in countries once thought to be judenrein, the reassertion of Jewish consciousness in the midst of ever growing assimilation in the Anglo-American world: these phenomena have often been likened to a or in Jewish terms, a miraculous recovery and regeneration after the rupture of the Holocaust. No Jew lives today, the historian Lionel Kochan wrote in 1992, who has not in some measure been touched by the renaissance of his people during the last four to five decades.2 It is a renaissance that, for Kochan, is still in the making, perhaps even in its germinal stage, but nevertheless one that bears the features of a second emancipation, greater, more complete, and more aware of itself than the first.3 At the turn of a new century, the idea of a 'Jewish renaissance, along with a wide variety of renewal or revival Judaisms, has entered synagogues and many realms of Jewish culture and education, replacing older models of ritualization and continuity with the promise of a new spirit and spirituality.4 Yet, though the concept of or enjoys considerable appeal in proactive circles, it has long come under suspicion among academic specialists in the humanities. To many historians, philosophers, and art historians, the nineteenth-century paradigm of the renaissance-particularly in its Italian manifestation-as a spontaneous rebirth of something new, ushering in the modern period, a

Christianity in Jewish terms

Preface Acknowledgments A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity Abbreviations 1. Introduction: What to Seek and What to Avoid in Jewish-Christian Dialogue, David Novak 2. Christian-Jewish Interactions over the Ages, Robert Chazan 3. The Shoah and the Legacy of Anti-Semitism Judaism, Christianity, and Partnership After the Twentieth Century, Irving Greenberg, Christian Theology After the Shoah, Christopher M. Leighton, 4. God The God of Jews and Christians, Peter Ochs, A Jewish View of the Christian God: Some Cautionary and Hopeful Remarks, David Ellenson, God as Trinitarian: A Christian Response to Peter Ochs, David Tracy, 5. Scripture Searching the Scriptures: Jews, Christians, and the Book, Michael A. Signer, The Writings and Reception of Philo of Alexandria, Hindy Najman, Postmodern Hermeneutics and Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Case Study, George Lindbeck, 6. Commandment Mitsvah, David Novak, Another Jewish View of Ethics, Christian and Jewish, Elliot N. Dorff, Christian Ethics in Jewish Terms: A Response to David Novak, Stanley Hauerwas, 7. Israel Judaism and Christianity: Covenants of Redemption, Irving Greenberg, Israel, Judaism, and Christianity , David Fox Sandmel, Israel and the Church: A Christian Response to Irving Greenberg's Covenantal Pluralism, R. Kendall Soulen, 8. Worship Jewish and Christian Liturgy, Lawrence A. Hoffman, Liturgy and Sensory Experience, Ruth Langer, Christian Worship: An Affair of Things as well as Words, Robert Wilken, 9. Suffering On the Suffering of God's Chosen: Christian Views in Jewish Terms, Leora Batnitzky, Suspicions of Suffering, Robert Gibbs , The Meaning and Value of Suffering: A Christian Response to Leora Batnitzky, John C. Cavadini, 10. Embodiment Judaism and Incarnation: The Imaginal Body of God, Elliot R. Wolfson The Christian Doctrine of the Incarnation, Randi Rashkover, Embodiment and Incarnation: A Response to Elliot Wolfson, Susan A. Ross, 11. Redemption How Ought a Jew View