Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present

ISBN-13: 9781107013711 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 288 str.

Beth A. Berkowitz

Opis

Berkowitz shows that interpretation of Leviticus 18:3 provides an essential backdrop for today's conversations about Jewish assimilation and minority identity.

Recenzje

'Berkowitz's chapters are a wellspring of information on defining Jewish identity from epochs of Jewish life, culled mainly from scriptural verses as interpreted in traditional rabbinic sources … this volume is a welcome and needed repository of classic rabbinic legal discussion, disputation, and decisions concerning keeping Judaism and maintaining Jewish survival in the proximity of adaptation and assimilation … this book, with its erudite scholarship, is a worthwhile read.' The Catholic Biblical Quarterly

Spis treści

1. Introduction: law, identity, and Leviticus 18:3; 2. The question of Israelite distinctiveness: paradigms of separatism in Leviticus 18:3; 3. Allegory and ambiguity: Jewish identity in Philo's De Congressu; 4. A narrative of neighbors: rethinking universalism and particularism in patristic and rabbinic writings; 5. The limits of 'their laws' in midrash halakhah; 6. A short history of the people of Israel from the patriarchs to the Messiah: constructions of Jewish difference in Leviticus rabbah; 7. Syncretism and anti-syncretism in the Babylonian Talmud; 8. The judaization of reason: the Tosafists, Nissim Gerondi, and Joseph Colon; 9. Women's wear and men's suits: Ovadiah Yosef's and Moshe Feinstein's discourses of Jewishness; 10. Conclusion: an 'upside-down people'?