Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Judaism - General

This is a study of the great, and curiously underappreciated, engagement of a medieval European Jewish community with the philosophic tradition. The lucid description of southern French Jewry's multigenerational cultivation of - and acculturation to - scientific and philosophic teachings fulfills a major desideratum in Jewish cultural history.

Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East provides a window for readers of English around the world into hitherto almost inaccessible halakhic and ideational writings expressing major aspects of the cultural intellectual creativity of Sephardic-Oriental rabbis in modern times. The text has three sections: Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and each section discusses a range of original sources that reflect and represent the creativity of major rabbinic figures in these countries. The contents of the writings of these Sephardic rabbis challenge many commonly held views regarding Judaism's...

The twenty-six essays in this volume represent the papers read at the international Conference on the Aramiac Bible held in Dublin (1992). The purpose of the Conference was to bring together leading specialists on the Targums and related topics to discuss issues in the light of recent developments, for instance Second Temple interpretation of the Scriptures, Qumran Literature, targumic and Palestinian Aramaic, new Genizah manuscripts, Jewish tradition, Origen's Hexapla, Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha and the Christian West. The papers are arranged under seven headings: Targum Texts and...

This is the second volume of the projected four-volume history of the Second Temple period. It is axiomatic that there are large gaps in the history of the Persian period, but the early Greek period is possibly even less known. This volume brings together all we know about the Jews during the period from Alexander's conquest to the eve of the Maccabaean revolt, including the Jews in Egypt as well as the situation in Judah. Based directly on the primary sources, which are surveyed, the study addresses questions such as administration, society, religion, economy, jurisprudence, Hellenism...

The term 'rabbi' predominantly denotes Jewish men qualified to interpret the Torah and apply halacha, or those entrusted with the religious leadership of a Jewish community. However, the role of the rabbi has been understood differently across the Jewish world. While in Israel they control legally powerful rabbinical courts and major religious political parties, in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora this role is often limited by legal regulations of individual countries. However, the significance of past and present rabbis and their religious and political influence endures across the...

For many, the Holocaust made thinking about ethics in traditional ways impossible. It called into question the predominance of speculative ontology in Western thought, and left many arguing that Western political, cultural and philosophical inattention to universal ethics were both a cause and an effect of European civilization's collapse in the twentieth century.

Emmanuel Levinas, Elie Wiesel and Richard Rubenstein respond to this problem by insisting that ethics must be Western thought's first concern. Unlike previous thinkers, they locate humanity's source of universal ethical...