Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Judaism - History

In February 1945, Israele Zolli, chief rabbi of Rome's ancient Jewish community, shocked his co-religionists in Italy and throughout the Jewish world by converting to Catholicism and taking as his baptismal name, Eugenio, to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) for what Zolli saw as his great humanitarianism toward the Jews during the Holocaust. Almost a half a century after his conversion, Zolli still evokes anger and embarrassment in Italy's Jewish community. This book is the first authoritative treatment of this astonishing story.

What induced Zolli to embrace Catholicism will...

Renaissance Italy is often characterized as a place of unusual tolerance and privilege toward Jews. Unlike England, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, the princely courts of early modern Italy, particularly Urbino, Mantua, and Ferrara, offered economic and social prosperity to Jews. When anti-Jewish hostilities created civic tumult in this region, secular authorities promptly contained the violence.

Yet this written record tells only one part of the story. Pictures tell another. In The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance, Dana E. Katz reveals how Renaissance...

Almost five hundred years after his death, Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) remains a legendary figure of Sephardic history, and above all of the Expulsion of 1492. There are numerous"portraits" that have been painted of him by pre-modern and modern scholars. And still we hesitate and cannot discern which is the true one. This first critical edition of Abravanel's Portuguese and Hebrew letters opens a unique window on a complex cultural process of assimilation and dissimulation of humanism among the fifteenth-century Jewish elite. On the one hand, it establishes Abravanel's assimilation of...

Die editio princeps des bislang lediglich in unvollstandiger koptischer Ubertragung zuganglichen Traktats Vom Mysterium der Buchstaben (Mitte 6. Jh.) erschliet ein einzigartiges Dokument fruhbyzantinischen monastischen Schrifttums. Aufbauend auf und gleichzeitig in Abgrenzung von judischen Traditionen zur geheimen Bedeutung der hebraischen Buchstaben, entwickelt der Autor des Werkes - angeblich Sabas von Jerusalem, vermutlich jedoch eher ein kalligraphisch interessierter Anhanger dieses Heiligen - eine christliche Interpretation des griechischen Alphabets, vom Alpha bis...

David A. Brenner examines how Jews in Central Europe developed one of the first "ethnic" or "minority" cultures in modernity. Not exclusively "German" or "Jewish," the experiences of German-speaking Jewry in the decades prior to the Third Reich and the Holocaust were also negotiated in encounters with popular culture, particularly the novel, the drama and mass media.

Despite recent scholarship, the misconception persists that Jewish Germans were bent on assimilation. Although subject to compulsion, they did not become solely "German," much less "European." Yet their behavior and...

Die Reihe Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZNW) ist eine der altesten undrenommiertesten internationalen Buchreihen zur neutestamentlichen Wissenschaft. Seit 1923 publiziert sie wegweisende Forschungsarbeiten zum fruhen Christentum und angrenzenden Themengebieten. Die Reihe ist historisch-kritisch verankert und steht neuen methodischen Ansatzen, die unser Verstandnis des Neuen Testaments befordern, gleichfalls offen gegenuber.

Although in Second Temple literature we find a variety of songs concerned with the future of Jerusalem, little attempt has been made to analyse these comparatively as a generic group. In this study, three songshave been selected on the basis of their similarity in style, ideas and their apparent original composition in Hebrew.The texts have been subjected to a literary analysis both individually and then comparatively.