In this critical exploration of the role of manuscripts in textual scholarship, Liv Ingeborg Lied studies the Syriac manuscript transmission of 2 Baruch. These manuscripts emerge as salient sources to the long life of 2 Baruch among Syriac speaking Christians, not merely witnesses to an early Jewish text. Inspired by the perspective of New Philology, Lied addresses manuscript materiality and pa…
This Special Issue of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism contains a collection of papers that were presented at the International Conference “Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism in the Shadow of the Holocaust”—the midterm conference of the Research Network on Ethnic Relations, Racism and Antisemitism within the European Sociological Association. The network was set up over a decad…
Between the years 1550 and 1650, Italy's Jewish intellectuals created a unique and enduring synthesis of the great literary and philosophical heritage of the Andalusian Jews and the Renaissance`s renewal of perspective. While remaining faithful to the beliefs, behaviors, and language of their tradition, Italian Jews proved themselves open to a rapidly evolving world of great richness. The crisi…
Exemplary Bodies: Constructing the Jew in Russian Culture, 1880s to 2008 explores the construction of the Jew’s physical and ontological body in Russian culture as represented in literature, film, and non-literary texts from the 1880s to the present. With the rise of the dominance of biological and racialist discourse in the 1880s, the depiction of Jewish characters in Russian literary and cu…
Rabbinic tradition has it that 613 commandments were given to Moses on Mount Sinai, but it does not specify those included in the enumeration. Maimonides methodically and artfully crafts a list of 613 commandments in a work that serves as a prolegemenon to the Mishneh Torah, his monumental code of law. This book explores the surprising way Maimonides put this tradition to use and his possible r…
Jewish educational projects and programs are thriving, attracting philanthropic support for exciting and creative approaches in every sector and setting. But underneath that energy, we are not as clear as we ought to be about desired outcomes, the kinds of learning needed to achieve these, and how those kinds of learning actually occur. This volume is the first of its kind to bring together sch…
Moses Wilhelm Shapira's infamous Deuteronomy fragments - long believed to be forgeries - are authentic ancient manuscripts, and they are of far greater significance than ever imagined. The literary work that these manuscripts preserve - which Idan Dershowitz calls "The Valediction of Moses" or "V" - is not based on the book of Deuteronomy. On the contrary, V is a much earlier version of Deutero…
The present volume contains the proceedings of a conference held in October 2018 at Humboldt University Berlin. The articles reflect the different categories of describing Judaism of the Second Temple Period in view of their sustainability in characterising an ancient religious community in different historical situations and discuss relevant (re)constructions of ancient Judaism in the history …
Synesius' essay De insomniis ('On Dreams') inquires into the meaning and importance of dreams for human beings and treats themes - most of all the relationship of humans to higher spheres -, which for religiously- and philosophically-minded people are still important today.
The treatise De mundo offers a cosmology in the Peripatetic tradition which subordinates what happens in the cosmos to the might of an omnipotent god. Thus the work is paradigmatic for the philosophical and religious concepts of the early imperial age, which offer points of contact with nascent Christianity.