Judaism in Context
Publisher: Gorgias Press
Series Editorial Board: Rivka Ulmer, Bucknell University (Chair) Phillip Lieberman, Vanderbilt University Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University Jonathan Jacobs, Bar Ilan University Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Haverford University W. David Nelson, Groton School Lieve Teugels, Protestant Theological University of Amsterdam Series Editorial Board: Rivka Ulmer, Bucknell University (Chair) Phillip Lieberman, Vanderbilt University Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University Jonathan Jacobs, Bar Ilan University Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Haverford University W. David Nelson, Groton School Lieve Teugels, Protestant Theological University of Amsterdam Series Editorial Board: Rivka Ulmer, Bucknell University (Chair) Phillip Lieberman, Vanderbilt University Elisheva Carlebach, Columbia University Jonathan Jacobs, Bar Ilan University Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Haverford University W. David Nelson, Groton School Lieve Teugels, Protestant Theological University of Amsterdam
Judaism in Context provides a platform for scholarly research focusing on the relations between Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture and other peoples, religions, and cultures among whom Jews have lived and flourished, from ancient times through the 21st century. The series includes monographs as well as edited collections. Judaism in Context provides a platform for scholarly research focusing on the relations between Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture and other peoples, religions, and cultures among whom Jews have lived and flourished, from ancient times through the 21st century. The series includes monographs as well as edited collections. Judaism in Context provides a platform for scholarly research focusing on the relations between Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture and other peoples, religions, and cultures among whom Jews have lived and flourished, from ancient times through the 21st century. The series includes monographs as well as edited collections.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 354
ISBN: 9781463243760
Pub Date: 15 Jul 2024
Description:
The Passover Haggadah, the quintessential Jewish book, began taking shape in the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud (ca. 100-600 CE). Even by 600, it did not look like it does today.
Major portions were wanting, e.g., the story of eminent sages at a seder in Bene Beraq; the typology of the four sons; the midrashic expansion of the story of the exodus; the song Dayyenu. Those compositions (mostly) or borrowings were incorporated into the Haggadah between ca. 600-900 (the Geonic period). Such selections completed the Haggadah, producing the book used at Passover Seders to the present day. This study shows how the section of the Passover Haggdah known as maggid (“recounting”) achieved its comprehensive structure and contents between ca. 600 and 900 CE (the geonic period).
Format: Hardback
Pages: 284
ISBN: 9781463245795
Pub Date: 31 May 2024
Description:
Male circumcision is one of the oldest and most widespread rituals, it has been practiced for millennia across many parts of the world. Yet this prevalence and long history do not make circumcision self-evident: it has also long been a topic of reflection, discussion, and controversy and continues to be so today. As the cases in this volume show, already in Antiquity, Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians clashed over male circumcision.
Then as now, concerns about identity, ritual, health, masculinity, and sexuality were a factor in these disputes. Very little is known about actual circumcision practices in the ancient world. Apart from depictions in art, the relation of which to daily practice is difficult to ascertain, we have historical access mainly through texts that reveal how the practice was discursively constructed, and that relate circumcision to wider cultural practices and ideas. This book therefore mainly discusses references to circumcision in literary sources, and the way these relate to other known cultural practices and ideas. These sources date from biblical times and Antiquity and their interpretations in medieval Jewish texts and recent scholarship.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 326
ISBN: 9781463244569
Pub Date: 31 Dec 2022
Description:
In this engaging book of commentary on the Talmud, the author upends the long-held theory of the immutability of halakhah, Jewish law. In her detailed analysis of over 80 short halakhic anecdotes in the Babylonian Talmud, the author shows that the Talmud itself promotes halakhic change. She leads the reader through one sugya (discussion unit) after another, accumulating evidence for her rather radical thesis.
Along the way, she teases out details of what life was like 1500 years ago for women in their relationships with men and for students in their relationships with mentors. An eye-opening read by one of today’s leading Talmud scholars.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 225
ISBN: 9781463243913
Pub Date: 28 Sep 2022
Description:
Shalom Sadik interrogates the nature of Maimonides’ religious philosophy through examination of secrets in the philosopher’s Guide for the Perplexed, the role of dialectic in his philosophy, the relationship between natural law and God’s commandments, and the question of free will.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 263
ISBN: 9781463206574
Pub Date: 01 Sep 2022
Description:
The Scholastic Culture of the Babylonian Talmud studies how and in what cultural context the Talmud began to take shape in the scholastic centers of rabbinic Babylonia. Bickart tracks the use of the term tistayem ("let it be promulgated") and its analogs, in contexts ranging from Amoraic disciple circles to Geonic texts, and in comparison with literatures of Syriac-speaking Christians. The study demonstrates increasing academization during the talmudic period, and supports a gradual model of the Talmud's redaction.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 159
ISBN: 9781463243654
Pub Date: 30 Oct 2021
Description:
The chapters in Emerging Horizons: 21st Century Approaches to the Study of Midrash pertain to an intriguing midrash that appears in a Masoretic context, the Qur’anic narrative of the red cow, midrashic narratives that rabbinise enemies of Israel, the death of Moses, emotions in rabbinic literature, and yelammedenu units in midrashic works.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 404
ISBN: 9781463243784
Pub Date: 10 Aug 2021
Description:
Perils of Wisdom engages the biblical Solomon narrative that appears in the Book of Kings and its reception by Jewish texts from scriptural sources through the traditional commentaries of the Middle Ages. By systematically following the thread of exegesis through biblical, rabbinic, targumic, and medieval Jewish texts, and by examining their interplay with other ancient, Christian, and Islamic treatments of Solomon, Keiter traces the emergence and ascendance of an apologetic image of Solomon that has colored Jewish perceptions of the biblical king ever since.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 572
ISBN: 9781463207427
Pub Date: 28 Jul 2021
Description:
This monograph explores the nature of the Elijah traditions in rabbinic literature and their connection to the wisdom tradition. By examining the diverse Elijah traditions in connection to the wisdom and apocalyptic traditions, Alouf-Aboody sheds new light on the manner in which Elijah’s role developed in rabbinic literature.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 246
ISBN: 9781463243302
Pub Date: 27 May 2021
Description:
In and Around Maimonides presents eight highly focused studies on Moses Maimonides and those around him.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 251
ISBN: 9781463240264
Pub Date: 22 Oct 2019
Description:
This work is a study of Jewish cultural memory as exemplified by rabbinic midrash of the Amoraic period, the second through fifth centuries of the Common Era, and especially midrash on the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac (Gen. 22:1–19). The Akedah is proposed and analyzed as a model for submission to the divine will through the act of interpretation.
Rabbinic sages constructed a framework for cultural memory that relies on mimetic acts of interpretive substitution that are employed to confront, interpret, and remember ruptures as evidence of divine care, and they found, in the Akedah, a model for this interpretive stance. The form of memory they devised, termed midrashic memory, is proposed as inherent to rabbinic textual interpretation and whose origins are traced to the Akedah narrative itself. Midrashic memory is analyzed in selections from Amoraic midrash, in Shalom Spiegel’s twentieth-century masterwork on the Akedah, The Last Trial, and is proposed as the crux of a theory and taxonomy of Jewish memory. Second Slayings analyzes the Akedah as a metonym for cultural reorientation through the reharmonization of the lived (‘temporal’) and the covenanted ( ‘anamnestic’) planes of experience.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 512
ISBN: 9781463207588
Pub Date: 20 Mar 2018
Description:
This work is volume 2 of Boaz Cohen’s collected articles, with a new introduction by rabbinics scholar Natalie B. Dohrmann.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 440
ISBN: 9781463206604
Pub Date: 19 Mar 2018
Description:
This work is volume 1 of Boaz Cohen’s collected articles, with a new introduction by rabbinics scholar Natalie B. Dohrmann.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 177
ISBN: 9781463207366
Pub Date: 24 Oct 2017
Description:
This volume contains selected proceedings of the Midrash Section sessions convened during the 2015-2016 meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. It is comprised of contributions by both leading and emerging scholars of Midrash whose research shares a common focus on early and medieval rabbinic biblical interpretation. Additionally, the research on Midrash in this volume intersects with a range of related biblical texts, religious themes, and foundational and forward-thinking methodologies and interdisciplinary academic fields of study, including: Gender Studies; Classics; Jewish Studies; Religious Studies; Literary Studies; the Aqedah/Binding of Isaac; biblical parables; and, medieval rabbinic biblical commentary.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 276
ISBN: 9781463205904
Pub Date: 09 Jun 2016
Description:
This volume presents case studies of the phenomena that contributed to group identity in late antique Syria-Mesopotamia, in particular traditions reflecting interactions between Judaism and Christianity, among various Christian groups, and among other religious traditions of late antiquity (such as Zoroastrianism or 'paganism'). By studying Christian, Jewish and other sources that deal with the establishment, modification and deletion of boundaries, the authors seek to create a frame of reference that will in turn explain and contextualise the existing evidence concerning communication and interaction between highly diverse groups in Late Antiquity.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 325
ISBN: 9781463202507
Pub Date: 01 Oct 2015
Description:
The Sasanian Empire was home to many religious communities. It was also a place of meeting and transformation. The studies in this volume encompass a diverse array of topics concerning these religious communities inhabiting the Sasanian Empire.
Some include the Roman East in their deliberations. Most, however, deal with the interaction of one or other religious community based in the Sasanian Empire with the dominant religion of the empire, Zoroastrianism.
Format: Hardback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9781463205607
Pub Date: 31 Aug 2015
Description:
This volume contains selected proceedings of the Midrash Section sessions convened during the 2012-2014 meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature. It is comprised of contributions by leading and emerging scholars that share a common focus on Rabbinic biblical interpretation as it intersects with a range of biblical texts and associated fields of study, including: Jewish legal literature; Hellenistic Judaism; post-biblical interpretation; biblical commentary; liturgical studies; and, cultural studies.
