non-Jewish Sources Research Articles

The New Testament and the Qur'an as Depicted in Abraham Silveira's ‘Telling’ Mute Book

Abstract Interfaith controversies and disputes regarding the role of reason in interpreting the Scriptures characterised scholarly discussion in the Low Countries between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jewish author Abraham Gómez Silveira contributed to this discussion with an eclectic body of literature. This article focuses on his Libro Mudo (Mute Book), which embodies his efforts to present the Jewish religion as the only rational one and the Christian dogma as irrational. In order to corroborate his reading, Silveira mostly bases his argumentation on non-Jewish texts. By selecting passages from the New Testaments, Christian religious commentaries as well as Qur'anic excerpts, Silveira aims to demonstrate that even non-Jewish sources prove the rationality of the Jewish theological system. The novelty of Silveira's approach consists in confuting Christian dogma by accepting the Gospels as reliable historical sources. In this argumentative structure, the Qur'an has a similar although not identical function.

The Spanish Expulsion and the Portuguese Persecution through the Eyes of the Historian R. Gedalya Ibn Yahya

Gedalya (1526-1587), considerado por muchos estudiosos como un autor simplistamente ecléctico que seleccionaba un material muy común de crónicas ya conocidas, no era un simple copista, sino que, como se ve especialmente en los ejemplos tomados de la parte de su trabajo sobre la persecución los judíos de la Península Ibérica, Gedalya intenta complementar y enriquecer los meros hechos con nueva información basada en fuentes adicionales judías y no judías. La finalidad de Gedalya era proporcionar información partiendo de su comprensión de las situaciones y de su observación personal. Estos aspectos son determinantes del lugar que se le asigna en la historiografía judía del siglo XVI.

Making Jews: Race, Gender and Identity in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation

Making Jews: Race, Gender and Identity in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation Laura Arnold Leibman (bio) and Sam May (bio) From the 1810s through the 1830s, calls for Jewish emancipation swept the Americas. In addition to Maryland’s so-called “Jew Bill” (1819–1826)—a move to allow Jews to hold public office by modifying the state constitution’s requirement that public officials take a Christian oath—Canada, Jamaica, Suriname, Curaçao and Barbados all experienced legislative attempts in the first three decades of the nineteenth century to change the status and rights of Jewish residents. Jewish reactions to the drive for emancipation varied. In Canada, the United States and Jamaica, Jews tended to respond positively to the proposed changes. Yet, in the Dutch Caribbean, Jews resented the fact that the Dutch government had tied emancipation to the elimination of Jews’ previous privileges. In Barbados, the Jewish community’s response to emancipation was mixed. Emancipation became a lightning rod for defining Jewish communal identity, and it threatened to rip the community apart. Class tensions ran beneath discussions of race and gender, and class was the greatest factor in encouraging the Jews of Barbados to argue against emancipation. Our analysis differs from many previous discussions of Jewish emancipation in early America that have relied upon non-Jewish sources—most commonly, the minutes from various state legislatures or letters exchanged with colonial governments. In this article, we turn instead to the records of the Congregation Nidhe Israel of Barbados and look at how Jews presented their own path to emancipation, both internally and to outsiders. In doing so, we reveal the important role Jews played in defining who and what is a Jew, even in an era in which Jewish identity was increasingly racialized. By focusing on Jewish perceptions of the emancipation, we challenge the way scholars have previously understood the construction of Jews as a “race” during this era. Previous histories of the racialization of early American Jews by historians Matthew Jacobson, Leonard Rogoff and Aron Rodrigue have tended to [End Page 1] see antisemitism as something done to Jews.1 In contrast, we argue that Jews played an important role in creating their own identities. To be sure, Jews did not construct these identities in a vacuum, nor were they immune to the attempts made by others to posit who and what is a Jew. As author Michele Elam puts it, “Autonomy is always limited.”2 Yet, Barbados’ Jews were not helpless victims of the machinations of others. Rather, Barbadian Jewish identity was the dynamic product of social transactions among Jews and a wide range of people and institutions, some of whom were Jewish, some of whom were not. Poor Jews had more to lose from the blurring of boundaries between Jews and people of African descent; hence, they were more protective of white privilege. Our Barbados example has wide implications for the study of the relationship between Jewishness and the rise of nations more generally. Since emancipation marks the point at which nations debated whether Jews—and other minorities—were deemed capable of becoming fully assimilated into the body politic, the nature of the bodies to be assimilated was often highly contested. In Barbados, Jewish emancipation was tied to the synagogue. Jews sought emancipation through the Jewish Vestry Bill of Barbados, which sought to provide them with access to civil rights previously held only by members of the island’s vestries. Prior to the bill only Anglican churches had vestries (legislative assemblies of parishioners), but the Jewish Vestry Bill of Barbados changed this by relabeling the legislative meetings of the island’s synagogue as vestries. This subtle change allowed Jews to participate in island politics more fully without having to convert first. Jewish emancipation in Barbados reflected the larger changes throughout the Americas in the status of Jews, women, and people of African [End Page 2] descent. When the bill appeared, the Jewish community of Barbados had recently undergone radical changes, and the debates surrounding emancipation reveal internal dissent about whether to redefine or retain the Jewish community’s previous hierarchical structure. As a consequence whiteness, manhood, and class were key factors in the emancipation debate. Rather than...

Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation (review)

Reviewed by: Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation Miriam Ben Zeev Leonard V. Rutgers Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation Leuven: Peeters, 2009 Pp. 151. This fascinating and innovative work by Leonard Rutgers focuses on the role of the Jews in early Christian identity formation. In order to distinguish themselves from their historical background, Christians had to redefine the theological and socio-political position of the Jews. For this purpose, a series of myths was created, designed to dislodge the Jews theologically in such a way as also to affect their societal position. The first case study takes us to Antioch in the fourth century C.E. Here the local church authorities systematically appropriated the Jewish literary tradition about the Maccabees, then developed the liturgical means to turn these traditions into a cult—the veneration of the bones of the martyrs—and finally appropriated [End Page 332] the synagogue that was associated with their memory, turning it into a church that soon became the center of the cult. Scriptural exegesis was a double-edged sword that could be used both to induce violence and to validate its results ideologically once such violence had taken place, a truly ingenious way of having Jewish heroes further a Christian cause. The next case concerns Constantinople in the year 553. Justinian's Novella 146 heavily intervened in the internal affairs of the Jewish community. Jews were allowed (or rather advised) to read their holy Scriptures in the Greek translation of the Septuagint, to do away with the Mishnah, not to believe in certain doctrines, and stop adhering to a "literal interpretation" of the Hebrew Bible. Rutgers puts forward a new interpretation of this law, arguing that it was promulgated in order to eliminate the Jews' knowledge of Hebrew and consequently their access to the Hebrew Bible: otherwise it remained difficult for Christians to win the exegetical war they had been waging against Jewish contemporaries. With the Mishnah gone, Jewish commentators eliminated, Scriptures read in Greek, and severe penalties instituted, Christians would no longer fear that what went on in the synagogues was beyond their control. Rutgers highlights an additional important point. The Jews mentioned in Justinian's law are not real-life Jews, but rather "hermeneutic Jews" like those we find in the writings of the early Church: people whose life was characterized by means of inferences drawn from scriptural exegesis. Novella 146, therefore, is important in that it attests the extension of the notion of "hermeneutic Jews" from patristic to Roman legal literature, which in turn translated these views into actual policies. The third case study focuses on the background of the synagogue destructions advocated in legal material and carried on physically in different part of the empire in the fifth and sixth centuries. The starting point of this phenomenon is identified by Rutgers with a semantic shift occurring in the ways Christian theologians viewed "the synagogue." While in previous Jewish and non-Jewish sources the term synagogue meant a specific building and/or community, Christian writings, from the second century C.E. onwards, took it to mean, generally, the entire people of Israel. By this expansion, the term came to have a stereotypical and atemporal meaning, whose negative character is exemplified by Augustine's equation of the Jewish synagogue with the Latin congregatio, a gathering of cattle, as opposed to ecclesia, convocatio, a gathering of people—the church. The generalization of the term allowed church leaders to make an additional move: to infuse it with a whole repertoire of generic and often hermeneutically constructed prejudices against the Jews. These negative views show up in all parts of the Roman Empire in commentaries on books of the Hebrew Bible, in sermons, and in letters. The consequences for the Jews were lethal, transforming early Christian communities from passive listeners into active rabble-rousers. The abstracted negative notions of "the synagogue" collided with the ongoing reality of the actual buildings, and thinking was translated into practice. In addition to theologically displacing Judaism, Christians had also to physically replace the Jews. Social psychology confirms: when self-confidence is low, physical proximity in inter-group settings often leads to aggressive boundary maintenance. This...

Medieval Hanukkah Traditions: Jewish Festive Foods in their European Contexts

Evidence for foods eaten on the festival of Hanukkah by Jews in the Middle Ages is found in a poem called Even Bohan, written in Provence in the fourteenth century, which includes real medieval foods, together with food names from the Talmud. The anonymous story Megillat Yehudit, copied in 1402 probably in Provence, also includes details of both allegorical and real foods. These Hebrew documents are discussed here, together with collateral evidence from medieval rabbinic commentaries, which interpret Talmudic food words using terms from their own European vernaculars. We can thus identify some Jewish festive foods with foods from contemporaneous non-Jewish sources.

Democracy and The New Haggadah

Democracy and The New Haggadah* Deborah Dash Moore (bio) On Friday, February 16, 1940, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, American philosopher and founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, confided to his diary: “Utilizing in part Sun Yat Sen’s words in his famous will, I would say: Our one end in view should be the elevation of the Jewish people to a place of freedom and equality among the nations.” Kaplan’s comparison of the Jewish people with the nations of the world avoided any mention of states, the predominant political form adopted by nations in 1940. As he continued to contemplate Sun Yat Sen’s political testament first articulated in a 1923 speech as “Three Principles of the People,” Kaplan moved deftly from questions of power toward religious aims. “To attain this goal” of freedom and equality, he wrote, “we must bring about a thorough awakening of our own people and ally ourselves in a common struggle with all individuals and groups that labor to bring self-determination and self-fulfillment within reach of all human beings.”1 Kaplan’s reflection on the famous Chinese nationalist leader’s ideas occurred at a moment when Nazis were rounding up Jews in Poland and forcing them into ghettos. The Nazi assault on Jews had just begun (the German conquest of western Europe would not start until the spring), but Kaplan was well aware of Nazism’s identification of democracy as a degenerate political form with Jews as a degenerate race. At this vulnerable moment for Jews, Kaplan pondered the importance of allies in a struggle for self-determination and self-fulfillment—the first a national political goal and the second an individual religious one—for all men and women. While his political consciousness remained firmly wedded to his religious commitment, Kaplan was no parochial Jewish thinker. He was always willing to seek inspiration from diverse non-Jewish sources and to adapt ideas to fulfill his goals of reviving Judaism and the Jewish people in the modern world. [End Page 323] On that cold February day, Kaplan continued to mull over Sun Yat Sen’s goals: “I would even adopt his ‘three Principles of the People’ as applying to us,” Kaplan wrote. Nationhood, Democracy, and Livelihood all addressed Jews as well as Chinese. “Nationhood calls for the establishment of a center in Palestine where Jews can live entirely by their own civilization and the fostering of Judaism as a secondary civilization in countries where they constitute minorities.”2 Kaplan succinctly summarized both his interpretation of Zionism and his program of Judaism as a civilization. More than a religion, Judaism involved all aspects of human culture, including, of course, politics. Nationhood, an aspect of Jewish civilization, embraced political dimensions of self-governance, although Kaplan avoided language linking nation and state, in part because of the havoc European nation states were wreaking on Jews.3 As a spiritual Zionist who was opposed to what historian Noam Pianko has called “the sovereign mold,” Kaplan championed the establishment a Jewish national home, not a Jewish state, in the land of Israel, where Jews would be a majority free to shape their own culture.4 Where Jews lived as minorities, as Kaplan anticipated they would continue to do, they perforce had to participate in two civilizations, the majority non- Jewish one as well as their own Jewish one. In the United States, Jews were fortunate to live in a democratic society.5 “Democracy,” Kaplan wrote, “calls for the application of the ideals of freedom, justice and peace in all human relationships from those of the family to those between nations.”6 This was a tall order in 1940. Not only did Germany’s Nazi Reich and Italy’s fascist government malign democracy as a political system and social ideal, but Stalin’s dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union also derogated democratic values as bourgeois and antirevolutionary. Kaplan, however, sought to identify Jews with democracy because he understood it as a moral ordering of [End Page 324] human relations as well as a political system. He aimed, in addition, to “make space for minority national groups” within American democracy.7 Kaplan also adopted Livelihood, Sun-Yat Sen’s third...

Azariah de' Rossi. The Light of the Eyes. Translated with introduction and annotations by Joanna Weinberg. Yale Judaica Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xlix, 802 pp.

The central dimension of Azariah de' Rossi's complex and diverse treatise, Meءor עeinayim, is undoubtedly what Joanna Weinberg describes as “his real contribution to critical scholarship” (p. xxix), and this is especially evident in his innovative chapters on Philo, rabbinic aggadah and Jewish chronology. De' Rossi's studies are compounded by ponderous Hebrew prose replete with citations, proof-texts, references, and allusions. Nevertheless, Weinberg skillfully makes this classic manageable in English. Her abundant notes clarify the classical Jewish texts he addressed and the innumerable Jewish and non-Jewish sources from antiquity to the sixteenth century integral to his scholarly endeavor. The translation is also complemented by a comprehensive index of sources.

Azariah de' Rossi. The Light of the Eyes. Translated with introduction and annotations by Joanna Weinberg. Yale Judaica Series. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xlix, 802 pp.

The central dimension of Azariah de' Rossi's complex and diverse treatise, Meءor עeinayim, is undoubtedly what Joanna Weinberg describes as “his real contribution to critical scholarship” (p. xxix), and this is especially evident in his innovative chapters on Philo, rabbinic aggadah and Jewish chronology. De' Rossi's studies are compounded by ponderous Hebrew prose replete with citations, proof-texts, references, and allusions. Nevertheless, Weinberg skillfully makes this classic manageable in English. Her abundant notes clarify the classical Jewish texts he addressed and the innumerable Jewish and non-Jewish sources from antiquity to the sixteenth century integral to his scholarly endeavor. The translation is also complemented by a comprehensive index of sources.

Azariah de' Rossi: The Light of the Eyes (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 299-302 Joanna Weinberg. Azariah de' Rossi: The Light of the Eyes. Translated from the Hebrew with an introduction and annotations by Joanna Weinberg . Yale Judaica Series XXXI. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xlix + 802. The innovative character of Azariah de' Rossi (ca. 151 1-ca. 1577) in the history of Jewish thought and scholarship has often been highlighted, first of all by the maskilim, the champions of the "Jewish Enlightenment" and then by the founders of 19th-century Wissenschaft des Judentums. Therefore it might seem surprising that his landmark work MeDor cEinayim ("Light of the Eyes"), a kind of prolegomena to any further attempt of critical Jewish historiography, still is only (fully) available in the 1866 edition by David Casse] ' and so far has never been completely translated. The latter may be the case since anybody considering the awesome task of rendering MeDor cEinayim in a modern language will not only have felt challenged by the obscure style of the original, but also by the vast erudition needed to explain de' Rossi's numerous allusions, ranging from late antique to 1 6th-century literature. One of the few people equal to the task is Joanna Weinberg, who in a number of highly acclaimed studies has shown deep insights into the work of this outstanding Italian Jewish polymath. Weinberg's annotated translation of Me°or cEinayim is preceded by an introduction, which in its condensed character and relative brevity of sixtyfive pages manages to summarize the scholarship on de' Rossi. After a short discussion of the scanty available data about de' Rossi's life, Weinberg draws attention to the unique place of Me1Or cEinayim in contemporary Jewish literature. In regard to the specific character of 16th-century Jewish historical productions,2 she points out that Light of the Eyes does not follow the literary genre of the chronicle—such as Yosef ha-Kohen's 'Azariah de' Rossi, Me'or cEinayim, ed. David Cassel (Vilna, 1864-66. Repr. Jerusalem, 1970). Several chapters of Me3orcEnayim have also been published and annotated by R. Bonfìl, Azaria de' Rossi: Selected Chaptersfrom Sefer Me^or cEinayim and Matsrefla-Kessef (in Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1991). 2 For some additional bibliography, see A. A. Neuman, "The Shebet Yehuda and Sixteenth Century Historiography," in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, English Section (New York, 1945), pp. 253-273, repr. idem, Landmarks and Goals (Philadelphia , 1953), pp. 82-104; R. Bonfil, "Esiste une storiografia ebraica medioevale?," in Aspetti della storiografia ebraica: Atti del IV Congresso internazionale dell'Associazione Italiana per lo Studio del Guidaismo, S. Miniato, 7-10 Novembre 1983 (Rome, 1987), pp. 227-247; idem, "Jewish Attitudes Toward History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times," Jewish History 11 (1997) 7-40; A. Melamed, "The Perception of Jewish History in Italian Jewish Thought of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth 300THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW Divre ha-Yamim, to mention a contemporary Hebrew chronicle written in Italy. In contrast, de' Rossi does not reflect on history in the form of a narration of events (narrado rerum), but chooses, instead, the genre of the miscellanea used by encyclopaedists, philologists, and antiquarians of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Weinberg provides an overview of the content of Light of the Eyes (pp. xxiii-xxv) which is divided into three essays : a reflection on the earthquake of Ferrara (1570), which has also been described by a number of Christian contemporaries; a Hebrew translation of the Letter of Aristeas; and studies on Jewish history, chronology, and other antiquarian topics, this third part being the main body of the book. Weinberg's pointed discussion of the "cultural context and purpose" of Light ofthe Eyes is especially insightful (pp. xxv-xxxiii). She stresses that while de' Rossi shared many topics of interest with contemporary Christian scholars, he provided a Jewish dimension to these matters. At the same time, he was aware that his critical approach towards rabbinic literature and his use of non-Jewish sources would not find approval among some of his coreligionists, as Weinberg shows. Nonetheless committed to his faith, de' Rossi argued that non-normative matters discussed in the Talmud...

Erzvater und Exodus: Untersuchungen zur doppelten Begrundung der Ursprunge Israels innerhalb der Geschichtsbucher des Alten Testaments

Erzvater and Exodus: Untersuchungen zur doppelten Begrundung der Ursprunge Israels innerhalb der Geschichtsbucher des Alten Testaments, by Konrad Schmid. WMANT 81. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999. Pp. xii +449. DM 138.00. The present volume is a slightly revised Habilitationsschrift presented to the University of Zurich in 1998. It belongs to a second generation of revisionists in pentateuchal studies, often taking the earlier revisions in directions that were hardly anticipated by the reviewer or the author's father. The problem of understanding the relationship of the ancestors tradition of Genesis to the exodus-conquest tradition is not new, but the solution offered here is certainly bold and revolutionary. Schmid begins by looking at the of Genesis-2 Kings for narrative breaks and historical transitions as indicators of separate blocks of tradition. Among the most marked and significant is that between the time of the patriarchs and the story of the exodus. The persistence, in biblical scholarship, of dealing with the problem of the connection of these two blocks of tradition leads him to call into question a continuous pentateuchal source J and the very notion of a Tetrateuch. The break between Genesis and Exodus is for him more significant than that between Numbers and Deuteronomy, with the next major break coming at the end of Joshua. This tripartite division of the primary history likewise calls into question the notion of a distinct Deuteronomistic corpus (Deuteronomy-2 Kings). At the same time, some redactional clues suggest that there is a structural continuity that overcomes these breaks to create a single history in Genesis-2 Kings. These synchronic observations of structure lead him to focus on the diachronic relationship between Genesis and Exodus (and secondarily between Joshua and Judges) to discover the nature of the literary and conceptual interconnections between the two themes of the ancestors and the exodus. Schmid surveys the texts in Genesis that may be viewed as anticipating the exodus tradition, those in Exodus-Deuteronomy that refer back to Genesis and the patriarchs, and those in Joshua to 2 Kings that make reference to either of the two origin traditions. He concludes that only at the latest redactional level of this whole complex are the two origin traditions combined, and this conclusion is confirmed by other indicators throughout the rest of the Old Testament. The patriarchal tradition and the exodus tradition are then set forth as two independent literary compositions that focus on two quite different origin traditions, with the primeval history of Genesis 1-11 as a third independent corpus. The heart of the thesis (part C) lies in a detailed analysis of four basic texts that interconnect the two major origin traditions: Genesis 15; Exodus 3-4; Joshua 24; Gen 50:24-Exodus 1. Schmid argues that all of these texts are post-P and reflect the same extensive redactional layer. This late redaction was anticipated by P, which was the earliest attempt at combining the two origin traditions into one, inspired by their combined treatment in Second Isaiah. Yet it was only with the post-P redaction that the whole of Genesis-Kings was created as a single historical work. Schmid disputes that there ever was a Deuteronomistic History as such and that only with this post-P redaction was the Hexateuch, understood as Heilsgeschichte, combined through the link with Joshua 24 and the time of the Judges with the monarchy, understood by this redactor as an Unheilsgeschichte. Thus the historical corpus of Genesis-2 Kings is dated to the Persian period, the work of a priest in Jerusalem in the mid-fifth century BCE. It was created as a companion to the whole prophetic corpus Isaiah-Malachi, which was already in existence. Part D then surveys the sequence of ancestors and exodus within the rest of the OT and in post-OT and other Jewish and non-Jewish sources down to the NT. …

"Your Voice Like a Ram's Horn": Themes and Texts in Traditional Jewish Preaching (review)

Hebrew Studies 39 (1998) 264 Reviews concludes that both are significant strands within the complex of Hekhalot literature, which developed independently but were linked by a later redactor who understood their goals to be intimately related. Swartz's argument has important implications for the relationship of.ascent and adjuration in Merkabah mysticism, a topic addressed by Scholem (who considered ascent to be at the center of the movement) and other scholars. Scholastic Magic addresses the issues of memory, ritual, and purity by closely examining the Sar-Torah texts and by drawing on rabbinic and nonJewish material. Swartz's analysis of memory raises a number of intriguing issues, including the significance of food in the Sar-Torah texts and its relation to memory, a topic which he fleshes out with comparative examples from rabbinic and Muslim sources. His discussion of ritual and purity is also enlightening although the topic of women and their relation to impurity could have been examined in greater depth. Swartz provides an invaluable service to non-Hebrew readers by translating and critically commenting on the various Sar-Torah texts. His interpretations are lucid and well supported by Jewish and non-Jewish sources alike. Scholastic Magic is an indispensable work for those interested in the role of magic in Judaism and in early Jewish mysticism. Because of its clear writing, cross cultural references. and methodological awareness, it is also accessible to readers outside of Jewish studies with a background in history of religions. Nathaniel Deutsch Swarthmore College Swarthmore. PA 19081 ndeutsch@swarthmore.edu "YOUR VOICE LIKE A RAM'S HORN": THEMES AND TEXTS IN TRADITIONAL JEWISH PREACHING. By Marc Saperstein. Monographs of the Hebrew Union College 18. pp. xix + 522. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1992. Cloth. The study of Hebrew preaching has a long history. The first survey, by Leopold Zunz (Die goltesdienstlichen Vortriige der Jaden historisch entwickelt [Berlin, 1832]), dates back to the previous century and was followed by Israel Bettan's study (Studies in Jewish Preaching [Cincinnati. 1939]), in the beginning of the current century. Despite the significant chronological gap between them, both of these works are representative of older scholarship. More recently, major advances in the study of Jewish Hebrew Studies 39 (1998) 265 Reviews preaching have been made by such modem scholars as Joseph Dan (Sifrut Ha-Musar We-Ha-Derush [Jerusalem, 1975]), Mordechai Pachter (Sijrut Ha-Derush We-Ha-Musar shel Hakhmei Sefat Be-Me'ah Ha-Tet-Zayin UMa 'arekhet Ra'ayonoteha Ha-'/qariyyim [Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University Jerusalem, 1976]), and Jacob Elbaum (Peti/.zut We-Histagrut: Ha-Ye$irah Ha-RuI;zanit Ha-Sifrutit Be-Polin U-Be-Ar$ot Ashkenaz Be-Shalhei HaMe 'ah Ha-Shesh 'Esreh [Jerusalem, 1990]). However, the leading modem scholar of Hebrew preaching is the author of the present volume, Marc Saperstein. Saperstein's studies of Jewish preaching, in his previous book (Jewish Preaching 1200-1800 [New Haven, 1989]) as well as in his numerous articles and the current volume, are devoted exclusively to the study of Hebrew sermons, beginning with the Middle Ages. In all of these works, Saperstein studies Jewish preaching from varied perspectives: historical, literary, and philosophical. He compares Jewish sermons with their Christian counterparts and notes features both common and unique to the two types of sermons. To a certain extent the present volume continues the previous one. However, while the previous volume is devoted to Hebrew preaching in general, the present volume limits itself to specific issues as it deals with two types of sermons: penitential sermons and sermons preached on the High Holidays, which bear a hortatory character; and eulogies. Sermons of the first category are general in nature, as they deal with transgressions of all sorts; only rarely do they discuss a particular sin or relate to a specific place or occasion. By contrast, eulogies deal with a specific person whom the preacher felt himself bound to eulogize, whether out of a sense of personal obligation, due to personal acquaintance or out of professional obligation, as when the preacher served as a rabbi and communal leader. The present volume includes both articles published previously in assorted scholarly journals and new material, which links the earlier studies into a...

Abraham Ibn Daud's Definition of Substance and Accident

The focus of this study is the definitions of substance and accident as expressed and outlined in Ibn Daud's book The Exalted Faith. The original Arabic text of Ibn Daud's book, completed in 1160, is lost. However the work survives through two Hebrew translations (both date from the late 14th century). In this study I suggest a hypothetical reconstruction of the Arabic text based on a wide comparison with Ibn Daud's Muslim predecessors, such as Alfarabi, Avicenna and Alghazali, on the one hand, and the Hebrew translations on the other. By returning to Ibn Daud's direct sources, I hope to shed more light on two subjects: (1) Ibn Daud's dependance on non-Jewish sources in his attempt to establish a philosophical synthesis between Aristotelism and traditional faith; and (2) to clarify the true philosophical meaning embodied in professional terminology, such as the definitions of substance and accident.

The Utilization of Non-Jewish Sources for the Reconstruction of Jewish History

The Utilization of Non-Jewish Sources for the Reconstruction of Jewish History

Primitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish Sources. Carl Clemen

Previous articleNext article FreeBook NoticesPrimitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish Sources. Carl Clemen PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 48, Number 5Nov., 1916 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/475649 Views: 46 Journal History This article was published in The Biblical World (1893-1920), which is continued by The American Journal of Theology (1897-1920). PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Book Review: II.—Church History: Primitive Christianity and its Non-Jewish Sources

Book Review: II.—Church History: Primitive Christianity and its Non-Jewish Sources

Primitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish Sources

Primitive Christianity and Its Non-Jewish Sources