Download or read book Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud written by Beth A. Berkowitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers new perspectives on animals and animality from the vantage point of the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud.
Download or read book Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud written by Beth A. Berkowitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud selects key themes in animal studies - animal intelligence, morality, sexuality, suffering, danger, personhood - and explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud. Beth A. Berkowitz demonstrates that distinctive features of the Talmud - the new literary genre, the convergence of Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian cultures, the Talmud's remove from Temple-centered biblical Israel - led to unprecedented possibilities within Jewish culture for conceptualizing animals and animality. She explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud, showing how it is ripe for reading with a critical animal studies perspective. When we do, we find waiting for us a multi-layered, surprisingly self-aware discourse about animals as well as about the anthropocentrism that infuses human relationships with them. For readers of religion, Judaism, and animal studies, her book offers new perspectives on animals from the vantage point of the ancient rabbis.
Download or read book Jews Gentiles and Other Animals written by Mira Wasserman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2017-05-19 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals, Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Babylonian Talmud's most scandalous tractate. According to Wasserman, Avoda Zara is where this Talmud joins the humanities in questioning what it means to be a human.
Download or read book Face to Face with Animals written by Peter Atterton and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first volume of primary and secondary source material dedicated solely to the animal question in Levinas. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including the recent discovery and digitization of the original French recording of an interview with Levinas that took place in 1986, it seeks to give fresh impetus to the debate surrounding the moral status of animals in Levinas's work. The book offers ten essays by leading scholars, along with a general introduction that places Levinas's philosophy in the context of the growing field of animal ethics. The aim of the volume is to encourage dialogue on how we can extend Levinas's ethics beyond its traditional human confines and to spur further research on the opportunities and challenges it raises.
Download or read book A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism written by Gwynn Kessler and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative approach to the study of ten centuries of Jewish culture and history A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism explores the Jewish people, their communities, and various manifestations of their religious and cultural expressions from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Presenting a collection of 30 original essays written by noted scholars in the field, this companion provides an expansive examination of ancient Jewish life, identity, gender, sacred and domestic spaces, literature, language, and theological questions throughout late ancient Jewish history and historiography. Editors Gwynn Kessler and Naomi Koltun-Fromm situate the volume within Late Antiquity, enabling readers to rethink traditional chronological, geographic, and political boundaries. The Companion incorporates a broad methodology, drawing from social history, material history and culture, and literary studies to consider the diverse forms and facets of Jews and Judaism within multiple contexts of place, culture, and history. Divided into five parts, thematically-organized essays discuss topics including the spaces where Jews lived, worked, and worshiped, Jewish languages and literatures, ethnicities and identities, and questions about gender and the body central to Jewish culture and Judaism. Offering original scholarship and fresh insights on late ancient Jewish history and culture, this unique volume: Offers a one-volume exploration of “second temple,” “Greco-Roman,” and “rabbinic” periods and sources Explores Jewish life across most of the geographic places where Jews or Judaeans were known to have lived Features original maps of areas cited in every essay, including maps of Jewish settlement throughout Late Antiquity Includes an outline of major historical events, further readings, and full references A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: 3rd Century BCE - 7th Century CE is a valuable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, literature, and ethnic identity, as well as general readers with interest in Jewish history, world religions, Classics, and Late Antiquity.
Download or read book Execution and Invention written by Beth A. Berkowitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-23 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The death penalty in classical Judaism has been a highly politicized subject in modern scholarship. Enlightenment attacks on the Talmud's legitimacy led scholars to use the Talmud's criminal law as evidence for its elevated morals. But even more pressing was the need to prove Jews' innocence of the charge of killing Christ. The reconstruction of a just Jewish death penalty was a defense against the accusation that a corrupt Jewish court was responsible for the death of Christ. In Execution and Invention, Beth A. Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and offers a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies, cultural criticism, and talmudic source criticism. Against the scholarly consensus, Berkowitz argues that the early Rabbis used the rabbinic laws of the death penalty to establish their power in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. Following recent currents in historiography, Berkowitz sees the Rabbis as an embattled, almost invisible sect within second-century Judaism. The function of their death penalty laws, Berkowitz contends, was to create a complex ritual of execution under rabbinic control, thus bolstering rabbinic claims to authority in the context of Roman political and cultural domination. Understanding rabbinic literature to be in dialogue with the Bible, with the variety of ancient Jews, and with Roman imperialism, Berkowitz shows how the Rabbis tried to create an appealing alternative to the Roman, paganized culture of Palestine's Jews. In their death penalty, the Rabbis substituted Rome's power with their own. Early Christians, on the other hand, used death penalty discourse to critique judicial power. But Berkowitz argues that the Christian critique of execution produced new claims to authority as much as the rabbinic embrace. By comparing rabbinic conversations about the death penalty with Christian ones, Berkowitz reveals death penalty discourse as a significant means of creating authority in second-century western religious cultures. Advancing the death penalty discourse as a discourse of power, Berkowitz sheds light on the central relationship between religious and political authority and the severest form of punishment.
Download or read book Beyond a Code of Jewish Law written by Simcha Fishbane and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ḥayei Adam, an abridged code of Jewish law, was written by Rabbi Avraham Danzig (1748-1820) and was first published in 1810. This code spread quickly throughout Europe, and the demand for it required a second publishing which the author printed in 1818. Beyond a Code of Jewish Law attempts to understand the implicit message of its author and discuss various approaches of its writer to both Judaism and Jewish law. While the Ḥayei Adam without any doubt unveils Rabbi Danzig to be a brilliant rabbinic scholar, with a comprehensive knowledge of Jewish law as well as a coherent and concise system of presentation, it also expresses his great concern for the Jewish community and each individual Jew. Aspects of this concern such as Hasidism, musar, kabbalah, are explored.
Download or read book Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud written by Yishai Kiel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores sex and sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud within the context of competing cultural discourses, for students of comparative religion.
Download or read book The Infrahuman written by Noam Pines and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that Jewish writers used depictions of Jews as animals to question prevalent notions of Jewish identity. The Infrahuman explores a little-known aspect in major works of Jewish literature from the period preceding World War II, in which Jewish writers in German, Hebrew, and Yiddish employed figures of animals in pejorative depictions of Jews and Jewish identity. Such depictions are disturbing because they sometimes rival common anti-Semitic stereotypes, and have often been explained away as symptoms of Jewish self-hatred. In this book, Noam Pines shows how animality emerged in Jewish literature not as a biological or conceptual category, but as a theological figure of exclusion from a state of humanity and Christianity alike. By framing the human-animal question in theological terms rather than in racial-biological terms, writers such as Heinrich Heine, S. Y. Abramovitsh, Hayim Nachman Bialik, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, and Paul Celan subjected the pejorative designations of Jewish identity to literary elaboration and to philosophical negotiation. A work of stunning originality. Noam Pines revisits texts across the expanse of European and modern Jewish culture, excavating a preoccupation with Jewish animality that is no less illuminating than it is unsettling. Steven J. Zipperstein, author of Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History In this scrupulous and subtle book, Noam Pines shines new light on how animality, a well-worn theological figure of exclusion, can be seen afresh as a leitmotif of the intimate dialogue Jewish writers conducted with European literary traditions. With an exceptionally sure touch, Pines tracks this motif from Zionist literature through the postwar responses to Kafkas legacy. The Infrahuman is a profound and highly commendable achievement. Vivian Liska, author of When Kafka Says We: Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature and German-Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife: A Tenuous Legacy The Infrahuman starts readers on an important journey from a place where we construct identities out of the cultural material that we would invent if that material had not already been provided: dichotomies (animal/human, Christian/Jew), other forms, images, things. Piness powerful readings of Heine, Abramovitsh, Bialik, Greenberg, Kafka, Agnon, and Celan may not teach us how to remember other alternatives, but they do call us to be attentive to the identificatory incapacities that have helped us forget how to live. David Metzger, coeditor of Chasing Esther: Jewish Expressions of Cultural Difference
Download or read book Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four kingdoms motif enabled writers of various cultures, times, and places, to periodize history as the staged succession of empires barrelling towards an utopian age. The motif provided order to lived experiences under empire (the present), in view of ancestral traditions and cultural heritage (the past), and inspired outlooks assuring hope, deliverance, and restoration (the future). Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel includes thirteen essays that explore the reach and redeployment of the motif in classical and ancient Near Eastern writings, Jewish and Christian scriptures, texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, depictions in European architecture and cartography, as well as patristic, rabbinic, Islamic, and African writings from antiquity through the Mediaeval eras.
Download or read book Animals and the Law in Antiquity written by Saul M. Olyan and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2021-08-06 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animal law has become a topic of growing importance internationally, with animal welfare and animal rights often assuming center stage in contemporary debates about the legal status of animals. While nonspecialists routinely decontextualize ancient texts to support or deny rights to animals, experts in fields such as classics, biblical studies, Assyriology, Egyptology, rabbinics, and late antique Christianity have only just begun to engage the topic of animals and the law in their respective areas. This volume consists of original studies by scholars from a range of Mediterranean and West Asian fields on a variety of topics at the intersection of animals and the law in antiquity. Contributors include Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer, Beth Berkowitz, Andrew McGowan, F. S. Naiden, Saul M. Olyan, Seth Richardson, Jordan D. Rosenblum, Andreas Schüle, Miira Tuominen, and Daniel Ullucci. The volume is essential reading for scholars and students of both the ancient world and contemporary law.
Download or read book Man and His Symbols written by Carl G. Jung and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landmark text about the inner workings of the unconscious mind—from the symbolism that unlocks the meaning of our dreams to their effect on our waking lives and artistic impulses—featuring more than a hundred images that break down Carl Jung’s revolutionary ideas “What emerges with great clarity from the book is that Jung has done immense service both to psychology as a science and to our general understanding of man in society.”—The Guardian “Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless.” Since our inception, humanity has looked to dreams for guidance. But what are they? How can we understand them? And how can we use them to shape our lives? There is perhaps no one more equipped to answer these questions than the legendary psychologist Carl G. Jung. It is in his life’s work that the unconscious mind comes to be understood as an expansive, rich world just as vital and true a part of the mind as the conscious, and it is in our dreams—those personal, integral expressions of our deepest selves—that it communicates itself to us. A seminal text written explicitly for the general reader, Man and His Symbolsis a guide to understanding the symbols in our dreams and using that knowledge to build fuller, more receptive lives. Full of fascinating case studies and examples pulled from philosophy, history, myth, fairy tales, and more, this groundbreaking work—profusely illustrated with hundreds of visual examples—offers invaluable insight into the symbols we dream that demand understanding, why we seek meaning at all, and how these very symbols affect our lives. By illuminating the means to examine our prejudices, interpret psychological meanings, break free of our influences, and recenter our individuality, Man and His Symbols proves to be—decades after its conception—a revelatory, absorbing, and relevant experience.
Download or read book Defining Jewish Difference written by Beth A. Berkowitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berkowitz shows that interpretation of Leviticus 18:3 provides an essential backdrop for today's conversations about Jewish assimilation and minority identity.
Download or read book Into Life Franz Rosenzweig on Knowledge Aesthetics and Politics written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-26 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume collects a series of groundbreaking new studies which delve into the work of Franz Rosenzweig and assess its enduring yet still unacknowledged value for Epistemology, Aesthetics, Moral and Political Philosophy, going far beyond Theology and Philosophy of Religion.
Download or read book Inner Animalities written by Eric D. Meyer and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most theology proceeds under the assumption that divine grace works on human beings at the points of our supposed uniqueness among earth's creatures--our freedom, our self-awareness, our language, or our rationality. Inner Animalities turns this assumption on its head. Arguing that much theological anthropology contains a deeply anti-ecological impulse, the book draws creatively on historical and scriptural texts to imagine an account of human life centered in our creaturely commonality. The tendency to deny our own human animality leaves our self-understanding riven with contradictions, disavowals, and repressions. How are human relationships transformed when God draws us into communion through our instincts, our desires, and our bodily needs? Meyer argues that humanity's exceptional status is not the result of divine endorsement, but a delusion of human sin. Where the work of God knits human beings back into creaturely connections, ecological degradation is no longer just a matter of bodily life and death, but a matter of ultimate significance. Bringing a theological perspective to the growing field of Critical Animal Studies, Inner Animalities puts Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner in conversation with Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Kelly Oliver, and Cary Wolfe. What results is not only a counterintuitive account of human life in relation with nonhuman neighbors, but also a new angle into ecological theology.
Download or read book Animal Rights and the Hebrew Bible written by Saul M. Olyan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-01 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does the Hebrew Bible ascribe an implicit form of legal personhood or legal rights to animals? If so, which animals--domesticated or wild, or both--receive which rights, and for what purpose? Scholars have been slow to consider these questions, and animal-oriented research as a whole, in the field of biblical studies. For the first time, author Saul M. Olyan addresses these questions in detail and explores how the evidence of the Hebrew Bible might contribute to contemporary debates about animal rights in the academy, in the courts, in the public square, and in religious communities. In this book, Olyan demonstrates that seven different biblical texts extend both legal personhood and rights to animals. The rights conferred upon them are mainly specific and situational, and the legal personhood associated them is in most cases best characterized as limited. Nonetheless, he argues that the animal rights described by these texts are genuine because they are not contingent on the needs or demands of others, they do not disappear or give way because of conflict with the interests of another legal person, and they may not be violated with impunity. Finally, Olyan considers how the biblical texts examined in his analyses might be used to extend or strengthen the arguments of those advocating for animals in judicial, academic, political, or religious settings.
Download or read book Animals in the Third Reich written by Boria Sax and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first book to explore the paradox of the Nazi cult of animals and the obsession with the annhilation of "biologically inferior" people." "Animals in the Third Reich begins by contrasting Jewish, Christian, and polytheistic traditions relating to animals in Germany, and examines the ways that the Nazi movement adopted, altered, challenged, or exploited these traditions. This discussion covers several perspectives on the treatment of animals, including those of zoologists, veterinarians, novelists, painters, sculptors, and the general public. Adopting and exploiting such traditions, the Nazis elaborated their own symbolic system of relating certain animals to supporters and antagonists of the movement - Aryan wolves and horses; Jewish pigs and apes."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
