Title: Founder of Hasidism: a quest for the historical Baʾal Shem Tov
Author: Rosman, Murray Jay
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Judaism
Publisher's Description: This book goes farther than any previous work in uncovering the historical Israel ben Eliezer - known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, or the Besht - the eighteenth-century Polish-Jewish mystic who profoundly influenced the shape of modern Judaism. As the progenitor of Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov is one of the key figures in Jewish history; to understand him is to understand an essential element of modern Jewish life and religion.Because evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal, the Besht has long eluded historians and biographers. Much of what is believed about him is based on stories compiled more than a generation after his death, many of which serve to mythologize rather than describe their subject. Rosman's study casts a bright new light on the traditional stories about the Besht, confirming and augmenting some, challenging others. By concentrating on accounts attributable directly to the Besht or to contemporary eyewitnesses, Rosman provides a portrait drawn from life rather than myth. In addition, documents in Polish and Hebrew discovered by Rosman during the research for this book enable him to give the first detailed description of the cultural, social, economic, and political context of the Ba'al Shem Tov's life.   [brief]
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Title: Toward a definition of antisemitism
Author: Langmuir, Gavin I
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Medieval History | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Toward a Definition of Antisemitism offers new contributions by Gavin I. Langmuir to the history of antisemitism, together with some that have been published separately. The collection makes Langmuir's innovative work on the subject available to scholars in medieval and Jewish history and religious studies. The underlying question that unites the book is: what is antisemitism, where and when did it emerge, and why? After two chapters that highlight the failure of historians until recently to depict Jews and attitudes toward them fairly, the majority of the chapters are historical studies of crucial developments in the legal status of Jews and in beliefs about them during the Middle Ages. Two concluding chapters provide an overview. In the first, the author summarizes the historical developments, indicating concretely when and where antisemitism as he defines it emerged. In the second, Langmuir criticizes recent theories about prejudice and racism and develops his own general theory about the nature and dynamics of antisemitism.   [brief]
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Title: The life of Judaism
Author: Goldberg, Harvey E
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | Jewish Studies | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Approximately thirteen million people around the world define themselves as Jews, with the majority residing in the United States and Israel. This collection portrays the diversity of Jewish experience as it is practiced and lived in contemporary societies. The book's attention to material culture offers a much-needed addition to more traditional views advanced in the study of Judaism. Through ethnographic and autobiographical perspectives, the essays provide an appreciation of Judaism in daily activities, from domestic food preparation to worshipping; Jewish attachment to the cultures of specific communities, be they in Russia or Morocco; the impact of the Holocaust; the place of the State of Israel in Jewish life; and the role of women. Harvey E. Goldberg, a leading scholar in the anthropology of Judaism, provides an introduction to each chapter that demonstrates the links among the various themes. Ease of communication and travel has resulted in frequent contact--and at times, conflict--between Jews of similar and diverging backgrounds around the world. Visiting distinctive Jewish spaces has become a way of cultivating specific identities and senses of a Jewish past. As ritual, prayers, and attitudes toward authority undergo new constructions and interpretation, Judaism of "the book" also takes on new forms. These essays go a long way in helping us understand a contemporary and multifaceted Judaism, along with its history and texts.   [brief]
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Title: The invention and decline of Israeliness: state, society, and the military
Author: Kimmerling, Baruch
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Politics | Jewish Studies | Sociology | Judaism
Publisher's Description: This thought-provoking book, the first of its kind in the English language, reexamines the fifty-year-old nation of Israel in terms of its origins as a haven for a persecuted people and its evolution into a multi- cultural society. Arguing that the mono-cultural regime built during the 1950s is over, Baruch Kimmerling suggests that the Israeli state has divided into seven major cultures. These seven groups, he contends, have been challenging one other for control over resource distribution and the identity of the polity. Kimmerling, one of the most prominent social scientists and political analysts of Israel today, relies on a large body of sociological work on the state, civil society, and ethnicity to present an overview of the construction and deconstruction of the secular-Zionist national identity. He shows how Israeliness is becoming a prefix for other identities as well as a legal and political concept of citizen rights granted by the state, though not necessarily equally to different segments of society.   [brief]
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Title: From catastrophe to power: Holocaust survivors and the emergence of Israel
Author: Zertal, Idith
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Judaism | History
Publisher's Description: In a book certain to generate controversy and debate, Idith Zertal boldly interprets a much revered chapter in contemporary Jewish and Zionist history: the clandestine immigration to Palestine of Jewish refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, that was organized by Palestinian Zionists just after World War II. Events that captured the attention of the world, such as the Exodus affair in the summer 1947, are seen here in a strikingly new light.At the center of Zertal's book is the Mossad, a small, unorthodox Zionist organization whose mission beginning in 1938 was to bring Jews to Palestine in order to subvert the British quotas on Jewish immigration. From Catastrophe to Power scrutinizes the Mossad's mode of operation, its ideology and politics, its structure and history, and its collective human profile as never before.Zertal's moving story sweeps across four continents and encompasses a range of political cultures and international forces. But underneath this story another darker and more complex plot unfolds: the special encounter between the Zionist revolutionary collective and the mass of Jewish remnant after the Holocaust. According to Zertal, this psychologically painful yet politically powerful encounter was the Zionists' most effective weapon in their struggle for a sovereign Jewish state. Drawing on primary archival documents and new readings of canonical texts of the period, she analyzes this encounter from all angles - political, social, cultural, and psychological. The outcome is a gripping and troubling human story of a crucial period in Jewish and Israeli history, one that also provides a key to understanding the fundamental tensions between Israel and the Jewish communities and Israel and the world today.   [brief]
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Title: Christian figural reading and the fashioning of identity
Author: Dawson, David 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | Christianity | Judaism | Classical Religions
Publisher's Description: This book makes an illuminating contribution to one of Christianity's central problems: the understanding and interpretation of scripture, and more specifically, the relationship between the Old Testament and the New. John David Dawson analyzes the practice and theory of "figural" reading in the Christian tradition of Biblical interpretation by looking at writings of Jewish and Christian thinkers, both ancient and modern, who have reflected on that form of traditional Christian Biblical interpretation. Dawson argues Christian interpretation of Hebrew scripture originally was, and should be, aimed at not reducing the Jewish meaning or replacing it but rather at building on it or carrying on from it. Dawson closely examines the work of three prominent twentieth-century thinkers who have offered influential variants of figural reading: Biblical scholar Daniel Boyarin, philologist and literary historian Erich Auerbach, and Christian theologianHans Frei. Contrasting the interpretive programs of these modern thinkers to that of Origen of Alexandria, Dawson proposes that Origen exemplifies a kind of Christian reading that can respect Christianity's link to Judaism while also respecting the independent religious identity of Jews. Through a fresh study of Origen's allegorical interpretation, this book challenges the common charge that Christian non-literal reading of scripture necessarily undermines the literal meaning of the text. This highly interdisciplinary work will advance debates about different methods of interpretation and about different types of textual meaning that are relevant for many disciplines, including ancient Christianity, Jewish and Christian thought, literary theory, religious studies, and classical studies.   [brief]
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Title: A radical Jew: Paul and the politics of identity 
Author: Boyarin, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Religion | Judaism | Christianity | Gender Studies | Literature | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Daniel Boyarin turns to the Epistles of Paul as the spiritual autobiography of a first-century Jewish cultural critic. What led Paul - in his dramatic conversion to Christianity - to such a radical critique of Jewish culture?Paul's famous formulation, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, no male and female in Christ," demonstrates the genius of Christianity: its concern for all people. The genius of Judaism is its validation of genealogy and cultural, ethnic difference. But the evils of these two thought systems are the obverse of their geniuses: Christianity has threatened to coerce universality, while ethnic difference is one of the most troubled issues in modern history.Boyarin posits a "diaspora identity" as a way to negotiate the pitfalls inherent in either position. Jewishness disrupts categories of identity because it is not national, genealogical, or even religious, but all of these, in dialectical tension with one another. It is analogous with gender: gender identity makes us different in some ways but not in others.An exploration of these tensions in the Pauline corpus, argues Boyarin, will lead us to a richer appreciation of our own cultural quandaries as male and female, gay and straight, Jew and Palestinian - and as human beings.   [brief]
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Title: The beginnings of Jewishness: boundaries, varieties, uncertainties
Author: Cohen, Shaye J. D
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Religion | Judaism | Classical Religions | Classics | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: In modern times, various Jewish groups have argued whether Jewishness is a function of ethnicity, of nationality, of religion, or of all three. These fundamental conceptions were already in place in antiquity. The peculiar combination of ethnicity, nationality, and religion that would characterize Jewishness through the centuries first took shape in the second century B.C.E. This brilliantly argued, accessible book unravels one of the most complex issues of late antiquity by showing how these elements were understood and applied in the construction of Jewish identity - by Jews, by gentiles, and by the state.Beginning with the intriguing case of Herod the Great's Jewishness, Cohen moves on to discuss what made or did not make Jewish identity during the period, the question of conversion, the prohibition of intermarriage, matrilineal descent, and the place of the convert in the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. His superb study is unique in that it draws on a wide range of sources: Jewish literature written in Greek, classical sources, and rabbinic texts, both ancient and medieval. It also features a detailed discussion of many of the central rabbinic texts dealing with conversion to Judaism.   [brief]
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Title: Tradition in a rootless world: women turn to Orthodox Judaism
Author: Davidman, Lynn 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Religion | Judaism | Jewish Studies | Sociology | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: The past two decades in the United States have seen an immense liberalization and expansion of women's roles in society. Recently, however, some women have turned away from the myriad, complex choices presented by modern life and chosen instead a Jewish orthodox tradition that sets strict and rigid guidelines for women to follow.Lynn Davidman followed the conversion to Orthodoxy of a group of young, secular Jewish women to gain insight into their motives. Living first with a Hasidic community in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then joining an Orthodox synagogue on the upper west side of Manhattan, Davidman pieced together a picture of disparate lives and personal dilemmas. As a participant observer in their religious resocialization and in interviews and conversations with over one hundred women, Davidman also sought a new perspective on the religious institutions that reach out to these women and usher them into the community of Orthodox Judaism.Through vivid and detailed personal portraits, Tradition in a Rootless World explores women's place not only in religious institutions but in contemporary society as a whole. It is a perceptive contribution that unites the study of religion, sociology, and women's studies.   [brief]
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Title: Hidden heritage: the legacy of the Crypto-Jews
Author: Jacobs, Janet Liebman
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Religion | Latin American Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Jewish Studies | Sociology | Judaism
Publisher's Description: This study of contemporary crypto-Jews - descendants of European Jews forced to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition - traces the group's history of clandestinely conducting their faith and their present-day efforts to reclaim their past. Janet Liebman Jacobs masterfully combines h . . . [more]
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Title: History, religion, and antisemitism
Author: Langmuir, Gavin I
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: History | Medieval History | Judaism | Sociology | Medieval Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Gavin I. Langmuir's work on the formation and nature of antisemitism has earned him an international reputation. In History, Religion, and Antisemitism he bravely confronts the problems that arise when historians have to describe and explain religious phenomena, as any historian of antisemitism must. How, and to what extent, can the historian be objective? Is it possible to discuss Christian attitudes toward Jews, for example, without adopting the historical explanations of those whose thoughts and actions one is discussing? What, exactly, does the historian mean by "religion" or "religious"? Langmuir's original and stimulating responses to these questions reflect his inquiry into the approaches of anthropology, sociology, and psychology and into recent empirical research on the functioning of the mind and the nature of thought. His distinction between religiosity, a property of individuals, and religion, a social phenomenon, allows him to place unusual emphasis on the role of religious doubts and tensions and the irrationality they can produce. Defining antisemitism as irrational beliefs about Jews, he distinguishes Christian anti-Judaism from Christian antisemitism, demonstrates that antisemitism emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries because of rising Christian doubts, and sketches how the revolutionary changes in religion and mentality in the modern period brought new faiths, new kinds of religious doubt, and a deadlier expression of antisemitism. Although he developed it in dealing with the difficult question of antisemitism, Langmuir's approach to religious history is important for historians in all areas.   [brief]
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Title: Stalin's forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the making of a Soviet Jewish homeland: an illustrated history, 1928-1996
Author: Weinberg, Robert E
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Russian and Eastern European Studies | History | Politics | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Robert Weinberg and Bradley Berman's carefully documented and extensively illustrated book explores the Soviet government's failed experiment to create a socialist Jewish homeland. In 1934 an area popularly known as Birobidzhan, a sparsely populated region along the Sino-Soviet border some five thousand miles east of Moscow, was designated the national homeland of Soviet Jewry. Establishing the Jewish Autonomous Region was part of the Kremlin's plan to create an enclave where secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialism could serve as an alternative to Palestine. The Kremlin also considered the region a solution to various perceived problems besetting Soviet Jews. Birobidzhan still exists today, but despite its continued official status Jews are a small minority of the inhabitants of the region. Drawing upon documents from archives in Moscow and Birobidzhan, as well as photograph collections never seen outside Birobidzhan, Weinberg's story of the Soviet Zion sheds new light on a host of important historical and contemporary issues regarding Jewish identity, community, and culture. Given the persistence of the "Jewish question" in Russia, the history of Birobidzhan provides an unusual point of entry into examining the fate of Soviet Jewry under communist rule.   [brief]
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Title: The dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: culture, politics, and the formation of a modern diaspora 
Author: Beinin, Joel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Religion | Judaism | Middle Eastern Studies | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative and wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinin's study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflections on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perspective on the hazards of marginal identities.   [brief]
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Title: Tales of the neighborhood: Jewish narrative dialogues in late antiquity
Author: Hasan-Rokem, Galit
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Folklore and Mythology | Women's Studies | Literature | Judaism
Publisher's Description: In this lively and intellectually engaging book, Galit Hasan-Rokem shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life. Common aspects of human relations offer a major source for the symbols of religious texts and rituals of late antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues, early Christianity, Hasan-Rokem argues. Focusing on the "neighborhood" of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era.   [brief]
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Title: Heritage and hellenism: the reinvention of Jewish tradition
Author: Gruen, Erich S
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Classics | Classical History | Classical Religions | Judaism | Ancient History | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: The interaction of Jew and Greek in antiquity intrigues the imagination. Both civilizations boasted great traditions, their roots stretching back to legendary ancestors and divine sanction. In the wake of Alexander the Great's triumphant successes, Greeks and Macedonians came as conquerors and settled as ruling classes in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. Hellenic culture, the culture of the ascendant classes in many of the cities of the Near East, held widespread attraction and appeal. Jews were certainly not immune. In this thoroughly researched, lucidly written work, Erich Gruen draws on a wide variety of literary and historical texts of the period to explore a central question: How did the Jews accommodate themselves to the larger cultural world of the Mediterranean while at the same time reasserting the character of their own heritage within it? Erich Gruen's work highlights Jewish creativity, ingenuity, and inventiveness, as the Jews engaged actively with the traditions of Hellas, adapting genres and transforming legends to articulate their own legacy in modes congenial to a Hellenistic setting. Drawing on a diverse array of texts composed in Greek by Jews over a broad period of time, Gruen explores works by Jewish historians, epic poets, tragic dramatists, writers of romance and novels, exegetes, philosophers, apocalyptic visionaries, and composers of fanciful fables - not to mention pseudonymous forgers and fabricators. In these works, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us the best insights into Jewish self-perception in that era.   [brief]
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Title: Carnal Israel: reading sex in Talmudic culture
Author: Boyarin, Daniel
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Religion | Judaism | Gender Studies | Comparative Religions | Classical Religions
Publisher's Description: Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism - that it was a "carnal" religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the Church - Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity. The body - specifically, the sexualized body - could not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage.This belief bound men and women together and made impossible the various modes of gender separation practiced by early Christians. The commitment to coupling did not imply a resolution of the unequal distribution of power that characterized relations between the sexes in all late-antique societies. But Boyarin argues strenuously that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body. Thus, without ignoring the currents of sexual domination that course through the Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, different from that of the Hellenistic Judaisms and Pauline Christianity, has something important and empowering to teach us today.   [brief]
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Title: Jews in the notarial culture: Latinate wills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250-1350 
Author: Burns, Robert Ignatius
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Medieval Studies | Judaism | Jewish Studies | European History | Law | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: In the rapidly transforming world of thirteenth-century Mediterranean Spain, the all-purpose scribe and contract lawyer known as the notary became a familiar figure. Most legal transactions of the Roman Law Renaissance were framed in this functionary's notoriously hasty shorthand. Notarial archives, then, offer a remarkable window on the daily life of this pluri-ethnic society. Robert I. Burns brings together the testimony of a multitude of documents, and transcribes in full nearly fifty will-related charters prepared by notaries, to give a never-before-seen view of Jewish society in that place and time.Wills can display the religious conscience, ethical institutions, social mobility, and property dynamics of whole groups or regions. Even a single testament allows a glimpse into the testator's family and into the life and times of the living person. Burns devotes special attention to women in wills and to women's wills, extracting rich information on medieval women and gender relationships.While learning much about the role of kings and courts and the dynamics of Christian-Jewish relations, the reader also gains rare insights into a unique Jewish community.   [brief]
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Title: Languages of community: the Jewish experience in the Czech lands
Author: Kieval, Hillel J
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Jewish Studies | European Studies | European History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Judaism
Publisher's Description: With a keen eye for revealing details, Hillel J. Kieval examines the contours and distinctive features of Jewish experience in the lands of Bohemia and Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In the Czech lands, Kieval writes, Jews have felt the need constantly to define and articulate the nature of group identity, cultural loyalty, memory, and social cohesiveness, and the period of "modernizing" absolutism, which began in 1780, brought changes of enormous significance. From that time forward, new relationships with Gentile society and with the culture of the state blurred the traditional outlines of community and individual identity. Kieval navigates skillfully among histories and myths as well as demography, biography, culture, and politics, illuminating the maze of allegiances and alliances that have molded the Jewish experience during these 200 years.   [brief]
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Title: Images of intolerance: the representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée
Author: Lipton, Sara 1962-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Medieval Studies | French Studies | Medieval History | Art History | Judaism
Publisher's Description: Around the year 1225, an illuminated Bible was made for the king of France. That work and a companion volume, the two earliest surviving manuscripts of the Bible moralisée , are remarkable in a number of ways: they are massive in scope; they combine text and image to an unprecedented extent; and their illustrations, almost unique among medieval images in depicting contemporary figures and situations, comprise a vehement visual polemic against the Jews. In Images of Intolerance , Sara Lipton offers a nuanced and insightful reading of these extraordinary sources.Lipton investigates representations of Jews' economic activities, the depiction of Jews' scriptures in relation to Christian learning, the alleged association of Jews with heretics and other malefactors in Christian society, and their position in Christian eschatology. Jews are portrayed as threatening the purity of the Body of Christ, the integrity of the text of scripture, the faith, mores, and study habits of students, and the spiritual health of Christendom itself. Most interesting, however, is that the menacing themes in the Bible moralisée are represented in text and images as aspects of Jewish "perfidy" that are rampant among Christians as well. This innovative interdisciplinary study brings new understanding to the nature and development of social intolerance, and to the role art can play in that development.   [brief]
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Title: Frontiers and ghettos: state violence in Serbia and Israel 
Author: Ron, James
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Sociology | European Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Christianity | Judaism | Islam | Christianity
Publisher's Description: James Ron uses controversial comparisons between Serbia and Israel to present a novel theory of state violence. Formerly a research consultant to Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, Ron witnessed remarkably different patterns of state coercion. Frontiers and Ghettos presents an institutional approach to state violence, drawing on Ron's field research in the Middle East, Balkans, Chechnya, Turkey, and Africa, as well as dozens of rare interviews with military veterans, officials, and political activists on all sides. Studying violence from the ground up, the book develops an exciting new framework for analyzing today's nationalist wars.   [brief]
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