Polemical Writers Research Articles

THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN POLEMIC BETWEEN THE KARAITE SCHOLAR ISAAC BEN ABRAHAM TROKI AND THE PROTESTANT THEOLOGIAN MARCIN CZECHOWIC IN THE BOOK ḤIZZUQ ’EMUNA

Abstract . The aim of the research. The article focuses on the analysis of the polemic between the Karaite Judaism – characterized by the recognition of the written Law of Moses and rejection of the Talmud – and Christianity – the most widely practiced religion in the Polish-Lithuanian territories of Eastern Europe. The research methodology is based on the search and comprehensive study of primary sources on the religious history of Eastern Europe. The Scientific Novelty. The study on the Judeo-Christian polemic between Isaac ben Abraham Troki and Marcin Czechowic is significant for reconstructing the religious life of Karaites and their relations with Christians in Polish-Lithuanian society. The Conclusions . The article confirms that the Karaite scholar and polemical writer Isaac Troki, who was well acquainted with Polish and Latin theological literature, succeeded in demonstrating the author’s creed and exegetic skills in contrast to Catholic and Protestant beliefs. In response to anti-Jewish accusations as a result of strong differences in the understanding of God’s law, the Karaite author managed to disprove the allegations and wrote “Ḥizzuq ’Emuna”, where he questioned Christian dogmas. The analysis of the historical and theological aspects of “Ḥizzuq ’Emuna” through the lens of Polish Protestant reformer Marcin Czechowic’s book “Christian Conversations (Pol. RozmowyChristanskie)” lead to the conclusion that strong critical writing against Jews paradoxically contributed to the spread of Karaite dogmas among Protestant scholars.

From the Editor

From the Editor Andy Cain This issue features an eclectic blend of path-breaking articles which run the topical and methodological gamut and which offer new solutions to age-old problems and invite us to rethink and revise established scholarly orthodoxy. Richard Flower leads off with a study on the fourth-century heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis and his construction of textualized authority. Flower argues that in casting his Panarion as a handbook in the august tradition of Greek medical literature (especially the poetry of Nicander of Colophon), Epiphanius was making a calculated move to represent himself as a skilled clinician capable of identifying and refuting heresy in its countless instantiations. Remaining on the topic of heresy, Evgenïa Moiseeva re-opens the long-running debate about the Manichaean treatment of the Old Testament. Contending that modern scholars tend to be uncritically trusting of early Christian polemical writers in ascribing to Manichaeans en masse a wholesale rejection of the Old Testament as the product of Satan, she demonstrates that this hardline stance reflects later developments in the Manichaean tradition rather than Mani's original teaching. With Craig Gibson's article we pivot to an important elemental dimension of intellectual culture in Late Antiquity: the social dynamics of rhetorical education. Gibson explores progymnasmata and declamations—mainstay exercises in the advanced rhetorical curriculum—as cultural artifacts. He argues that they had an ethical aim in addition to a purely technical one in that they trained (elite) young men how to deploy the art of rhetoric for the public good and to promote wholesome community values. The next two articles are concerned with unmasking identities—in the one case, the authorship of a text, and in the other, the purpose and function of a physical structure. Massimiliano Vitiello takes a new look at a Theodosian law against the practice of male prostitution. He proposes that the civil functionary responsible for drafting it is none other than Virius Nicomachus Flavianus, whose own literary sensibilities bleed over into the text of the law. Turning from matters philological to archaeological, David Walsh argues that a structure excavated at Butt Road, Colchester, which traditionally has been identified as a Christian church, is in all likelihood a late fourth- or early fifth-century mithraeum, one of many such Mithraic sanctuaries that were springing up in Britain and throughout the western provinces during this period. The final two papers take us to late Roman North Africa. In the first one, Jeremiah Coogan revisits the controversy between the Caecilianists and [End Page 249] Donatists with a fresh perspective. Employing recent insights from book studies, Coogan nuances our understanding of this controversy by pinpointing exactly why traditio of the scriptures was viewed by many Christians as such a damnable act: the sacred book was not simply a physical artifact but the avatar of divine truth and presence, and so handing over the Bible really was tantamount to handing over Christ himself. Finally, in his article Paolo Tedesco turns our attention to the dynamics of the economy in North Africa from the fourth century on. Through a meticulous analysis of legal, numismatic, and other evidence he illustrates that elites were able to control the commercialized production of key cash crops by relying on a strategic combination of slave-labor and wage-labor, the latter of which, Tedesco shows, contributed significantly to economic expansion in general. [End Page 250] Copyright © 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference in the Reformation*

AbstractThis study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. Both Catholics and Calvinists utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference in a period of intense confessional conflict. This corporal hermeneutic coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, in which a widespread enthusiasm for anatomy mixed uneasily with time-honored notions of Galenic physiology until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s. In this intellectual milieu, Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.

How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms by Marc Caplan (review)

Reviewed by: How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms by Marc Caplan Amelia Glaser Marc Caplan . How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. 360, Cloth, $60.00. ISBN 9780804774765. Every so often in the field of comparative literature a work comes along that is truly comparative. Marc Caplan's How Strange the Change is such a book. Caplan does a great service to the field of modernism studies and to the literatures under comparison: pan-African modernism and Yiddish fiction. How Strange the Change is about writers from "minor literatures" who encounter modernity. Borrowing the useful concept of a "minor literature" from Deleuze and Guattari, Caplan levies a strong critique of what he calls their "monologic humanism." The broad and malleable concept of Enlightenment is a protagonist in each of the stories Caplan tells. Yet aside from a few references to James Joyce (a marginal figure in his own right), the book resists synchronic comparison to a canon of European modernism. In this sense, Caplan's book also critiques past studies of modern literature and the periphery, such as Chana Kronfeld's On the Margins of Modernism (1995) as well as studies of the Jewish relationship to the canon like Ruth Wisse's Modern Jewish Canon (2000), which, as Caplan puts it, "articulate the peripherality of Jews in relation to the experience of Western modernity." (249) In three sections (each comprised of two chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion), Caplan examines three stages in the development of modern literature from the margins. His case studies are works by a handful of nineteenth century Yiddish writers, including Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Isaak Meyer Dik, Y. Y. Linetsky, and S. Y. Abramovitsh (better known as Mendele Moykher Sforim), and twentieth century pan-African writers, including Amos Tutuola, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Camara Laye, Ahmadou Karouma, and Wole Soyinka. Section one introduces two innovators who use folklore and fables to respond to modernity (as manifested in European Enlightenment or the colonial project), Reb Nakhman (1772-1810) and the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1920-1997): "never again in the subsequent history of African and Yiddish writing will two writers single-handedly represent so fully the challenges facing the creation of modern literature from these cultures." (71) Tutuola was, economically and politically, an urban intellectual but not a member of the elite—a Gramscian organic intellectual. Nakhman, an early Hasidic leader, [End Page 79] was similarly an intellectual of his own design. Caplan stresses the "radical inconclusiveness" of Tutuola's and Nakhman's folk-inspired narratives. Section two finds "intellectuals writing about intellectuals." Here Caplan compares two urban and diaspora literary phenomena: the Haskole, the nineteenth century Jewish Enlightenment movement, and Negritude, a movement in France in the 1930s among black intellectuals from the Caribbean and West Africa. Both groups were modernizers who nonetheless maintained a distinct culture, a duality Caplan considers "characteristic of 'minor' cultures generally." (84) Caplan observes a changing poetics that accompanies the transition toward intellectual polemics. Whereas the fantastic writers treated in the previous section treat metaphors literally, the polemical writer "depends on the transparency of his or her metaphors, the symmetry of allegory." (79) Language and mimicry become important tools in the hands of the maskilim and Negritude writers. Caplan inspects devices such as Daytshmerism, the introduction of German terms into Yiddish, under the lens of Fanon's notion of "imitation" of a dominant culture. In Negritude, translation facilitates literary artifice. Kane, for example, writes about non-francophone Africans in French without referencing the African language in question. Section three considers responses to failed ideologies—that is to say, frustration with former distinctions between the old and the new. Readings of S.Y. Abramovitsh's Yiddish fiction alongside the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and the Ivoirian writer Ahmadou Kourouma allow for a comparison of the "awakening" of the post-independence writers of Africa to the Yiddish writers of the 1870s who were "dismantling...a previous decade's ideological convictions." (161) An additional point of historical comparison in this final section lies in the writers' critique of empire: as Yiddish literature in...

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the rise of Buddhist scholasticism in Republican China (1911–1949) through the career of one of its most outspoken leaders, Ouyang Jingwu (1871–1943). Ouyang Jingwu, a lay Buddhist intellectual, charismatic teacher and polemical writer, is most recognized for his critique of the East Asian Buddhist tradition, and this critique stands at the heart of the dissertation. In addition to presenting this critique, this dissertation explores one of the most innovative hermeneutical alternatives offered by this influential and creative thinker. To date, scholars have overlooked the importance of Ouyang for later intellectual developments. I argue here that understanding Ouyang's critique is crucial for later developments in Chinese intellectual history both within and outside of Buddhism.

Loving Mac, Beth, and John: Grace in the Plays and Films of Horton Foote

AbstractHorton Foote is neither a rhetorical nor a polemical writer. He is a story-teller who uses his home place, Wharton, Texas, as the basis of his plays and films. But Foote instinctively uses the point of view of his religious tradition, Christian Science, in the subtext of many of his works. In the film Tender Mercies, for example, God's will is expressed as the peace and order found in shared love, like that of Rosa Lee for Mac. The goal of such divinity is a human community based on passionate, selfless care for others, as imagined in the feelings of the town toward Beth in the play The Carpetbagger's Children. Even when such mutuality is unrealized, grace remains as the spiritual presence which comforts John at the end of the teleplay Alone. Such an interpretation of grace follows the view of Christian Science that God is never manipulative, punishing, or violent. It places Foote in a tradition which emphasizes sanctification rather than justification, as defined by Reinhold Niebuhr. Closest theologically to Paul Tillich, Teilhard de Chardin, and especially Karl Rahner, Foote imagines time as the means by which God expresses infinite love.

John Winthrop's "Model" of American Affiliation

John's Winthrop's "Model" of American Affiliation Ivy Schweitzer (bio) Recently, scholars have begun to question the Age of Reason's idealization of and dedication to dispassionate reason, and to chart what one collection calls, somewhat infelicitously, the "emotional history of the United States" (Stearns and Lewis). In his investigation of early American affect, Peter Coviello argues that the nation emerges in the rhetoric of its important polemical writers, Jefferson, Paine and Wheatley, not from particular "state dictates" or political theories, but through the strategic evocation of potent emotions of loss and separation that enable a quite disparate and widely separated colonial populace to bond together imaginatively as a unified whole (441–42). This "odd civic intimacy" not only precedes and makes possible the political constitution of the new nation but it establishes the capacity for impassioned response as a prerequisite for virtuous republican citizenship. This requires a reconsideration of the standing of women and people of color, who were traditionally excluded from participation in the public realm because of their perceived link with untrammeled emotion (Coviello 457, 443). A "seminal" precursor of this emotional collectivity, according to Coviello, is John Winthrop's famous address, "A Model of Christian Charity," delivered in the spring of 1630, probably at Southampton to a band of Protestant dissenters on the eve of their departure to establish a "purified" commonwealth in the new world.1 What Jefferson "retrieves" from this lay sermon, in Coviello's account, is an early blueprint for American exceptionalism in which affect is central "to the mutuality that defines a civic body" (462). While "exceptionalism" may indeed be a legacy of the visionary Puritan leader, Winthrop does not dwell on the "agonizing affection" Jefferson invokes at the dramatic climax of his initial version of the Declaration of Independence, which Coviello analyzes so adeptly, but on a form of Christian love indissolubly entangled with classical, early Christian, and [End Page 441] Renaissance friendship discourses and the legal language of contract to which these give rise.2 In fact, the multivalent exchange Winthrop recommends to his followers, which he extols as "a most equall and sweet kinde of Commerce,"3 more nearly and unwittingly presages the imperial economic vision Tom Paine vividly painted for indecisive colonists in 1776 in his widely circulated pamphlet "Common Sense." In passionate prose, Paine urges separation from England, so that the colonies can free themselves from a heartless "Parent Country" to become a "continental" nation able to "carry our friendship on a larger scale" and to "claim brotherhood with every European Christian," and whose master "plan is commerce" (19–20). For Paine, and for many an eighteenth-century treaty-writer, "amity" between nations not only indicated the cessation of conflict but was the necessary precursor of America's real purpose: economic development through trade. A close examination of the sources and dynamics of Winthrop's vaunted "charity" reveals the imbrication of friendship as social and spiritual affiliation and commercial relations. It also discloses a strategic slippage characteristic of early Protestant culture between the homo-normative logic of friendship and the heteronormative logic of marriage that produces a curious effect: the oscillation between friendship's "ideal" but masculine egalitarianism and the gendered hierarchy of marriage. What may have been radical in Winthrop's day, as we will see, for later generations ratifies a conservative social agenda in which women are the "equals" of men in neither marriage nor friendship. Contexts for Winthrop's "Charity" Winthrop founded his famous plan or "model" for the "City upon a Hill" he envisioned in New England on an understanding of love, in the original Greek agape, which early Church fathers called Christian brotherhood or fellowship. The Vulgate renders this form of affiliation as caritas, while the Geneva and King James Bibles sometimes translate it as "charity." 4 What emerges from the scholarly debate over nomenclature is an understanding of Christian agape and caritas that is tangled up in the shifting and diverse meanings of the ancient Greek term philotes and the philia and amicitia of later classical philosophers, not to mention the other prominent human affect the Greeks called eros.5 David Konstan argues that [End Page 442] Christian writers generally...

The Puritan Paradox: An Annotated Bibliography of Puritan and Anti-Puritan New Zealand fiction, 1860-1940. Part 2: reactions against Puritanism

This bibliography springs from my examination of the literary, social, and cultural legacy of Puritanism in pre-1940 New Zealand. A brief overview of the aims and methodology of the thesis which embodies that study is provided here as a prelude to the bibliography. The broad contention of my thesis is that Puritanism is a dominant social, cultural, and literary influence in New Zealand. This is supported by statements made by a range of social historians, popular polemical writers, and literary critics writing during the last 50 years. For example, Gordon McLauchlan comments that ‘a strong strain of puritanism runs through the New Zealand character’ (1987: 51), Bill Pearson asserts that ‘we are the most puritan country in the world’ (209), and Lawrence Jones writes that ‘Puritanism has been a consistent concern of New Zealand writers’ (455). Flowing from this general claim are three specific contentions. Firstly, I argue that Puritanism is a complex phenomenon, consisting of antithetical elements. It is an historical force which has enduring influence. It is a body of theological principles, but also a secular code of conduct. It is, in both its theological and secular forms, conservative and authoritarian, yet radical and liberating. Secondly, I assert that the Puritan legacy in New Zealand reflects this complexity. Puritanism was imported to New Zealand in both its theological and its secular forms. The radical/conservative dichotomy is also marked in the New Zealand environment. Finally, I claim that in the literary sphere Puritanism has been a constant influence since the publication of Mrs J. E. Aylmer’s Distant Homes; or The Graham Family in New Zealand in 1862 and has inspired both pro-Puritan eulogies and anti-Puritan reactions. These specific contentions do not meet with the same degree of critical support as the general claim about the Puritan influence. When historians and critics such as McLauchlan and Pearson speak of Puritanism, they do not refer to the theological creed and social vision of the English Puritans or the Pilgrim Fathers, but only to a debased, secularised, conservative form of Puritanism. McLauchlan describes Puritanism as ‘anguished self-flagellation’ (1976: 17), Pearson defines it as ‘a contempt for love, a sour spit, a denial of life itself’ (225), and James K. Baxter regards it as an ‘austere anti-aesthetic angel’ (22). If social historians and literary critics define Puritanism in a

Slavery, Song, and the South: Cather's Refiguration of Stowe and Foster in A Lost Lady

TOMOYUKI ZETTSU Slavery, Song, and the South: Cather's Refiguration of Stowe and Foster in A Lost Lady Weep no more, my lady, Oh! weep no more today! We will sing one song for the old Kentucky Home, For the old Kentucky Home, faraway. Stephen Collins Foster, "My Old Kentucky Home" ine day , when Willa Cather was a little girl in Virginia, an old judge came to visit her home. In a manner typical of a conventional Southern gentleman, he "began stroking her curls and talking to her in the playful platitudes one addressed to little girls." To this, however , Willa returned an unconventional response which "horrified" her respectable mother. "I'se a dang'ous nigger, I is," Willa suddenly exclaimed ,1 as if to play the role—one might say—of little Topsy, the black orphan girl in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), who bluntly declares: "I 's wicked,—I is" (Stowe 360). Although Cathet, as a writer, did not deal squarely with the question of slavery until her last novel, Sapphira and the Shve Girl (1940), it is entirely possible that the Virginia girl who spent her early childhood in the Reconstruction period and its aftermath was instinctively aware of the extent to which the idea of a "nigger"—when adopted by a well-bred white young lady—could be "dang'ous" to the ordered and genteel Southern community in which she lived. Since Cather's life and work are generally associated with the Midwest and its heroic pioneers who struggled for their frontier dreams, her Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer ig Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 Tomoyuki Zettsu critics—except when dealing with Sapphira and the Shve Girl—tend to ignore or forget the fact that she was actually born and brought up in the South until the age ofnine. This paper, then, hopes to argue for the significance of Cather's Southern roots by focusing on A Lost Lady (1923), a novel tracing the symbolic fall of its adulterous heroine, supposedly written in defense of the long-lost days of the pioneer West. In doing so, I shall explore the ways in which the novel may be approached as an implicit response to a famous mid-nineteenth-century plantation song by Stephen Collins Foster, as well as to the song's immediate subtext: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as an influential cultural icon. This inquiry, while probing the interface between popular culture and imaginative literature, offers a fresh vantage from which to observe the nature and extent of Cather's social commitment as it helped define the shape of her artistic achievement. In her lifetime, Cather was often accused ofbeing an escapist, a writer of nostalgia and evasion; and even today, one does encounter a critic like Ann Douglas, who makes a case against what she calls Cather's "lack of social conscience," "her colossal indifference to the crisis ofher own society " (15). True, Cather was not a polemical writer; but it does not follow that she was blind to the multiple ways in which a work ofart could engage social complexities, historical ambiguities, and ideological intricacies . Published at the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance when the history ofrace relations was beginning to attract new cultural attention, A Lost Lady, I argue, is a remarkable representation ofthe land ofCather's birth, giving expression to its racial burden while (trans)muting it in a poetic and allusive mode. This reading, moreover, may open up new avenues of contemplation in the ongoing critical reassessment of the relation between politics and aesthetics in American literature. As a necessary first step, it is important to recall Cather's early remarks on Stowe's controversial novel. In 1894 Cather had an opportunity to review a stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin fot the Nebraska State Journal, a journal for which she was working as a twenty-year-old drama critic. In this review, she denounced Stowe's original book (as well as its stage adaptation) as "exaggerated" and "overdrawn" (Slote 269). In ways that reveal her alliance with those Soutbierners ofthe day Shvery, Song, and the South89 who reacted emotionally...

Medieval Jewish Criticism of the Doctrine of Original Sin

With the passage of time the notion of original sin became a matter of increasing concern for medieval Jewish critics of Christianity. The foundation of this criticism was laid by the earlier polemical writers, specifically those of the period from the second half of the twelfth through the early fourteenth centuries. The later authors, from the late fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries, incorporated practically all of the arguments raised by their predecessors and added new criticism reflecting their greater familiarity with Christian beliefs and literature. The earlier polemicists, while approaching their task from a rational, “common sense” perspective, relied heavily on Hebrew biblical and, to a lesser degree, New Testament passages. The later writers reflected a greater intellectual independence of scriptural sources. Because the earlier works are generally structured as running commentaries of scriptural texts relevant to Christianity, their treatment of original sin, and other Christian doctrines for that matter, tends to be unfocused.3 The issues that are raised emerge piecemeal as the salient biblical passages are interpreted. The later works tend to be built on discussions of concepts. Consequently, a number of arguments are coalesced into coherent analyses. Such structural differences are the results of different patterns of inquiry. The earlier textually oriented critiques are, on the whole, products of the Franco-German polemical writers.

THE SALES OF ROYALIST LAND DURING THE INTERREGNUM

tT HE sale by Parliament of crown, church, and delinquents' lands during the Interregnum brought about a redistribution in the ownership of land comparable in scale with that achieved by the sales of dissolved monastic land a century earlier. Of the social changes produced by the latter, some seventeenth-century observers were already dimly aware.' But with the exception of polemical writers with an axe to grind, and Royalists in exile with but meagre first-hand knowledge, there were few who ventured to generalize about the results of the sales of their own generation. Not that the outward resemblance between the old confiscation and the new passed unnoticed. Henry Neville, who explained to the Lower House in February i 659 his theories on the changed balance of property between Lords and Commons, and attributed it to the sales of monastic land, immediately provoked speculation on this score. 'Query', wrote the Parliamentary diarist, Guibon Goddard, in the margin of his diary, 'whether this equality or almost parity hath not more enforced that argument of late by distributing King, Queen, Bishops' and delinquents' lands? '2 A full answer to Goddard's question would require a threefold study of the sales of crown, church and private lands. In this article the scope of the problem has been narrowed to delinquents' lands alone, and the material selected confined to those estates which lay in the twelve southeastern counties, namely, Hampshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex and London. A preliminary survey of the sales in Lancashire suggests that in more pronouncedly Royalist areas the findings would not differ substantially from those appearing here. Contemporary interest in the Parliamentary sales was not confined to those who, like Guibon Goddard, sought a nice balance of power between Lords and Commons. The decision to sell Royalist property overlay the problem of Parliament's long-term policy towards the Royalist partya subject which, no doubt, figured prominently in the debates on the sales themselves, and which agitated the Commons on at least one occasion in the later fifties.3 The disposal of the land raised the hopes of Levellers and