Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Judaism - History

This monograph discusses the Zohar, the most important book of the Kabbalah, as a late strata of the Midrashic literature. The author concentrates on the 'expanded' biblical stories in the Zohar and on its relationship to the ancient Talmudic Aggadah. The analytical and critical examination of these biblical themes reveals aspects of continuity and change in the history of the old Aggadic story and its way into the Zoharic corpus.

This book, first published in 1925, aims to demonstrate the ultimate roots of the many religious ideas of the Hebrews in Canaanite thought. This book will be of interest to students of theology and religious studies.

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early...

Der Jalkut Schimoni ist ein Sammelwerk rabbinischer Auslegungen zur gesamten hebraischen Bibel. Unerforscht ist, nach welchen Kriterien die Auslegungen ausgewahlt wurden und ob das Werk als umfassendes Nachschlagewerk fur exegetische Fragen, zur Verbindung von Bibelauslegung in Talmud und Midrasch oder zur Reform der rabbinischen Auslegungstradition konzipiert wurde. Die Ubersetzung des Werkes ist ein erster Schritt, diese Fragen zu beantworten.

The seventh-century CE Hebrew work Sefer Zerubbabel (Book of Zerubbabel), composed during the period of conflict between Persia and the Byzantine Empire for control over Palestine, is the first full-fledged messianic narrative in Jewish literature. Martha Himmelfarb offers a comprehensive analysis of this rich but understudied text, illuminating its distinctive literary features and the complex milieu from which it arose.

Sefer Zerubbabel presents itself as an angelic revelation of the end of times to Zerubbabel, a biblical leader of the sixth century BCE, and relates a...

The advent of Islam in the seventh century brought profound economic changes to the Jews living in the Middle East, and Talmudic law, compiled in and for an agrarian society, was ill equipped to address an increasingly mercantile world. In response, and over the course of the seventh through eleventh centuries, the heads of the Jewish yeshivot of Iraq sought precedence in custom to adapt Jewish law to the new economic and social reality.

In Maimonides and the Merchants, Mark R. Cohen reveals the extent of even further pragmatic revisions to the halakha, or body of Jewish law,...

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of Christian interest in the meaning and workings of the natural world a "discovery of nature" that profoundly reshaped the intellectual currents and spiritual contours of European society yet to all appearances, the Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were oblivious to the shifts reshaping their surrounding culture. Scholars have long assumed that rather than exploring or contemplating the natural world, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were preoccupied solely with the supernatural and otherworldly: magic and mysticism,...

The series Jewish Thought, Philosophy, and Religion aims to present a wide spectrum of studies and texts related to Jewish thought, philosophy, and religion - from antiquity to the present. It seeks to highlight the multiplicity of approaches within Judaism and to shed light on the interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish thought. The series includes monographs, collected essays, and editions of sources submitted to or produced by staff and visiting fellows of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, as well as by scholars of the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at...