Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Judaism - History

This sweeping and highly informative work presents the major geographical, cultural, and political forces that have...

In Execution and Invention, Beth A. Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient...

In recent years, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the relationship between culture and the body. Hair plays an integral role in the way we...

Now in paperback
Taking Hold of Torah
Jewish Commitment and Community in America
Arnold M. Eisen

A personal meditation on the meaning of Judaism today and a vision for revitalizing Jewish community and tradition in America.

"Arnold M. Eisen offers a personal plea for and a vision of the revitalizing of American Judaism through a renewed relationship to Jewish tradition and the strengthening of Jewish communities." Jewish Book News

..".required reading for Jewish communal professionals, Taking Hold of Torah] spells out the discontents and dreams of the baby...

Confronting the challenges of the 20th century, from modernity and the Great War to the Holocaust and postmodern culture, Jewish thinkers have wrestled with such fundamental issues as redemption and revelation, eternity and history, messianism and politics. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, European Jewish intellectuals confronted alienation and the challenges of modernity by seeking secure grounds for a meaningful life. After the Holocaust and the fall of Nazism, the rich results of their thinking--on topics such as transcendence, redemption, revelation, and politics--were...

In Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic, Alexandra Cuffel analyzes medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim uses of gendered bodily imagery and metaphors of impurity in their visual and verbal polemic against one another. Drawing from a rich array of sources including medical texts, bestiaries, Muslim apocalyptic texts, midrash, biblical commentaries, kabbalistic literature, Hebrew liturgical poetry, and theological tracts from late antiquity to the mid-fourteenth century Cuffel examines attitudes toward the corporeal body and its relationship to divinity. She shows that...

Philo's Portrayal of Moses in the Context of Ancient Judaism presents the most comprehensive study of Philo's De Vita Mosis that exists in any language. Feldman, well known for his work on Josephus and ancient Judaism, here paves new ground using rabbinic material with philological precision to illuminate important parallels and differences between Philo's writing on Moses and rabbinic literature.

Although Jews constituted the largest minority in medieval Europe, they tend to be largely ignored in general studies of the Middle Ages, with the result that their history and culture are both overlooked and misunderstood. "Jews and Judaism in the Middle Ages" attempts to correct that situation by presenting, in clear and accessible language, an introduction to Jewish thought as well as to medieval Jewish history and texts.

This volume examines the everyday life of medieval Jews in both Christian and Muslim environments, looks at the causes of medieval anti-Semititism and anti-Judaism,...