The attitude of Jews living in the medieval Christian world to Jews who converted to Christianity or to Christians seeking to join the Jewish faith reflects the central traits that make up Jewish self-identification. The Jews saw themselves as a unique group chosen by God, who expected them to play a specific and unique role in the world. This study researches fully for the first time the vario…
Uzi Leibner aims to provide the most accurate picture possible of the nature and history of the rural settlement in the Lower Galilee during Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods when this region played an important role in the development of both Judaism and Christianity. In an attempt to draw a historical reconstruction based on systematic data, a test case area in the »heart« of ancient…
Israel and Empire introduces students to the history, literature, and theology of the Hebrew Bible and texts of early Judaism, enabling them to read these texts through the lens of postcolonial interpretation. This approach should allow students to recognize not only how cultural and socio-political forces shaped ancient Israel and the worldviews of the early Jews but also the impact of imperia…
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…
Israel and Empire introduces students to the history, literature, and theology of the Hebrew Bible and texts of early Judaism, enabling them to read these texts through the lens of postcolonial interpretation. This approach should allow students to recognize not only how cultural and socio-political forces shaped ancient Israel and the worldviews of the early Jews but also the impact of imperia…
The Mishna Berura is, without a doubt, Rabbi Israel Meir Kagan's greatest and most complex contribution to the canon of Orthodox Jewish Law; it is a singular work that synthesizes Jewish traditions, laws, and mores into a practical halakhic guide to daily religious life. For all of his traditionalism, Rabbi Kagan was an iconoclast, and the Mishna Berura broke from many of the traditional approa…