Download or read book Building Blocks of Rabbinic Tradition written by Jacob Neusner and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book responds to a question that came to the author from Professor Maren Niehoff of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: 'Have you written a simple introduction to your documentary theory and method, which can serve as a starting point for my students?' In this book are gathered eight of the more fundamental items of documentary theory and practice_three in theory, five in practice_for Professor Neihoff's students and anyone else who takes an interest in the formative history of Judaism. The documentary thesis of Rabbinic literature holds that the document_the Mishnah, Sifra, Lamentations, Rabbah, the Bavli, for example_forms the basic building block of the Rabbinic tradition. Excluded by that definition are sayings attributed to, and stories told about, named sages. These cannot serve in the reconstruction of the Rabbinic tradition, its literature, history, religion, and theology.
Download or read book Rabbinic Judaism written by David Kraemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the conquest of the Holy Land by the Romans and their destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos—both they and their God were rendered homeless. In a religious tradition that had equated Divine approval with peaceful dwelling on the Land, this situation was intolerable. So the rabbis, aspirants for leadership of the post-destruction Jewish community, appropriated inherited traditions and used them as building blocks for a new religious structure. Not unexpectedly, given the circumstances, this new rabbinic formation devoted considerable attention to matters of space and place. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place offers the first comprehensive study of spatiality in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, exploring how the rabbis reoriented the Jewish relationship with space and place following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Tuan and LeFebvre, who define the crisis that "homelessness" represents and argue for the deep relationship of human societies to their places, the book examines the compositions of the rabbis and discovers both a surprisingly aggressive rabbinic spatial imagination as well as places, most notably the synagogue, where rabbinic attention to space and place is suppressed or absent. It concludes that these represent two different but simultaneous rabbinic strategies for re-placing God and Israel—strategies that at the same time allow God and Israel to find a place anywhere. This study offers new insight into the centrality of space and place to rabbinic religion after the destruction of the Temple, and as such would be a key resource to students and scholars interested in rabbinic and ancient Judaism, as well as providing a major new case study for anthropologists interested in the study of space.
Download or read book Rabbinic Judaism written by David Charles Kraemer and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the conquest of the Holy Land by the Romans and their destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos--both they and their God were rendered homeless. In a religious tradition that had equated Divine approval with peaceful dwelling on the Land, this situation was intolerable. So the rabbis, aspirants for leadership of the post-destruction Jewish community, appropriated inherited traditions and used them as building blocks for a new religious structure. Not unexpectedly, given the circumstances, this new rabbinic formation devoted considerable attention to matters of space and place. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place offers the first comprehensive study of spatiality in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, exploring how the rabbis reoriented the Jewish relationship with space and place following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Tuan and LeFebvre, who define the crisis that "homelessness" represents and argue for the deep relationship of human societies to their places, the book examines the compositions of the rabbis and discovers both a surprisingly aggressive rabbinic spatial imagination as well as places, most notably the synagogue, where rabbinic attention to space and place is suppressed or absent. It concludes that these represent two different but simultaneous rabbinic strategies for re-placing God and Israel--strategies that at the same time allow God and Israel to find a place anywhere. This study offers new insight into the centrality of space and place to rabbinic religion after the destruction of the Temple, and as such would be a key resource to students and scholars interested in rabbinic and ancient Judaism, as well as providing a major new case study for anthropologists interested in the study of space.
Download or read book Rabbinic Judaism written by and published by Routledge Jewish Studies Series. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the conquest of the Holy Land by the Romans and their destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos--both they and their God were rendered homeless. In a religious tradition that had equated Divine approval with peaceful dwelling on the Land, this situation was intolerable. So the rabbis, aspirants for leadership of the post-destruction Jewish community, appropriated inherited traditions and used them as building blocks for a new religious structure. Not unexpectedly, given the circumstances, this new rabbinic formation devoted considerable attention to matters of space and place. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place offers the first comprehensive study of spatiality in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, exploring how the rabbis reoriented the Jewish relationship with space and place following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Tuan and LeFebvre, who define the crisis that "homelessness" represents and argue for the deep relationship of human societies to their places, the book examines the compositions of the rabbis and discovers both a surprisingly aggressive rabbinic spatial imagination as well as places, most notably the synagogue, where rabbinic attention to space and place is suppressed or absent. It concludes that these represent two different but simultaneous rabbinic strategies for re-placing God and Israel--strategies that at the same time allow God and Israel to find a place anywhere. This study offers new insight into the centrality of space and place to rabbinic religion after the destruction of the Temple, and as such would be a key resource to students and scholars interested in rabbinic and ancient Judaism, as well as providing a major new case study for anthropologists interested in the study of space.
Download or read book Lost Documents of Rabbinic Judaism written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The canonical documents of Rabbinic Judaism impose upon most of their components fixed patterns of rhetoric, recurrent logic of coherent discourse, and a well-defined topic or program, for example, a commentary on a biblical book or on a legal topic. But some few compositions and composites of the Rabbinic canon of late antiquity diverge from the formal norms of the compilations in which they occur. In these pages, Neusner assembles anomalous compositions that occur in the Mishnah, Tosefta, four Tannaite Midrashim, and Genesis Rabbah, and he further tests the uniformity of the forms that govern in a familiar chapter of the Bavli. Neusner's surveys show for the documents probed here that some small segment of the composites and compositions of the surveyed documents does not conform to the indicative rules of rhetoric, topic, and logic. Consequently, we face the challenge of constructing models of lost documents of the Rabbinic canon, conforming to the models governing anomalous compositions. These follow other topical and rhetorical norms and therefore belong in other, different types of documents from those in which they now are located. These anomalous writings in topic, logic, or rhetoric (or all three) in theory reveal indicative characteristics other than the ones defining the compositions and composites of the documents in which they are now located.
Download or read book Rabbinic Judaism written by David Kraemer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-07 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of the conquest of the Holy Land by the Romans and their destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos—both they and their God were rendered homeless. In a religious tradition that had equated Divine approval with peaceful dwelling on the Land, this situation was intolerable. So the rabbis, aspirants for leadership of the post-destruction Jewish community, appropriated inherited traditions and used them as building blocks for a new religious structure. Not unexpectedly, given the circumstances, this new rabbinic formation devoted considerable attention to matters of space and place. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place offers the first comprehensive study of spatiality in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, exploring how the rabbis reoriented the Jewish relationship with space and place following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Tuan and LeFebvre, who define the crisis that "homelessness" represents and argue for the deep relationship of human societies to their places, the book examines the compositions of the rabbis and discovers both a surprisingly aggressive rabbinic spatial imagination as well as places, most notably the synagogue, where rabbinic attention to space and place is suppressed or absent. It concludes that these represent two different but simultaneous rabbinic strategies for re-placing God and Israel—strategies that at the same time allow God and Israel to find a place anywhere. This study offers new insight into the centrality of space and place to rabbinic religion after the destruction of the Temple, and as such would be a key resource to students and scholars interested in rabbinic and ancient Judaism, as well as providing a major new case study for anthropologists interested in the study of space.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Judaism written by William David Davies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 1178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ntroduction Steven J. Katz; 1. Social, political and economic life in the land of Israel, 70-c.235 Seth Schwartz; 2. The Diaspora from 66-c.235: (a) The Jews in Egypt and Cyrenaica, 66-c.235 Allen Kerkeslager; (b) Jews in Carthage and western north Africa, 70-c.235 Claudia Setzer; (c) The Jews in Asia Minor, 70-c.235 Paul Trebilco; (d) The Jews in Babylonia, 70-c.235 David Goldblatt; 3. The uprising in the Jewish Diaspora, 115-117 Miriam Pucci Ben Zeev; 4. The Bar Kochba Revolt, 132-135 Hanan Eshel; 5. The legal status of Jews in the Roman empire Amnon Linder; 6. Jewish art and architecture in the land of Israel, 70-c.235 Eric M. Meyers; 7. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple: its meaning and its consequences Robert Goldenberg; 8. The origins and development of the rabbinic movement in the land of Israel Hayim Lapin; 9. The canonical process James A. Sanders; 10. The beginnings of Christian anti-Judaism, 70-c.235 Peter Richardson; 11. The rabbinic response to Christianity Steven T. Katz; 12. The Mishnah David Kraemer; 13. The Tosefta Paul Mandel; 14. Midrash Halachah Jay M. Harris; 15. Mishnaic Hebrew Moshe Bar-Asher; 16. The political and social history of the Jewish community in the land of Israel, c.235-638 David Goldblatt; 17. The material realities of Jewish life in the land of Israel, 235-c.638 Joshua J. Schwartz; 18. Aramaic in late antiquity Yochanan Breuer; 19. The Diaspora c.235-638: (a) The Jews of Italy, c.235-638 Leonard Victor Rutgers; (b) The Jews of Spain, c.235-638 Scott Bradbury; 20. Jewish archaeology in late antiquity: art, architecture and inscriptions Lee Levine; 21. Jewish festivals in late antiquity Joseph Tabory; 22. Rabbinic prayer in late antiquity Reuven Kimelman; 23. Rabbinic views on marriage, sexuality and the family Michael L. Satlow; 24. Women in Jewish life and law Tal Ilan; 25. Gentiles in rabbinic thought David Novak; 26. The formation and character of the Jerusalem Talmud Leib Moscovitz; 27. Late Midrashic Paytanic and Targumic literature Avigdor Shinan; 28. Jewish magic in late antiquity Michael D. Swartz; 29. Jewish folk literature in late antiquity Eli Yassif; 30. Early forms of Jewish mysticism Rachel Elior; 31. The political, social and economic history of Babylonian Jewry, c.235-638 Isaiah M. Gafni; 32. The history of Babylonian academics David Goldblatt; 33. The formation and character of the Babylonian Talmud Richard Kalmin; 34. Talmudic law: a jurisprudential perspective Hanina Ben Menahem; 35. Torah in rabbinic thought: the theology of learning Marc Hirshman; 36. Man, sin and redemption in rabbinic thought Steven T. Katz; 37. The rabbinic theology of the physical: blessings, body and soul, resurrection, covenant and election Reuven Kimelman; 38. Christian anti-Judaism: polemics and politics Paula Fredriksen and Oded Irshai; 39. Jews in Byzantium Steven Bowman; Appendix A: Justinian and the revision of Jewish legal status Alfredo Mordechai Rabello; 40. Messianism and apocalypticism in rabbinic texts Lawrence H. Schiffma.
Download or read book The Rabbis and the Prophets written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2011 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how the Rabbis of late antiquity took over writings from what they recognized as ancient times and of divine origin and they re-presented selections of those writings in accord with their own project's requirements, glossing clauses of the prophetic Scriptures but not whole, propositional discourses.
Download or read book Narrative and Document in the Rabbinic Canon written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author states in his preface: For a thousand years, from its earliest documents of the second century to the High Middle Ages, Rabbinic Judaism preferred to compose and collect anecdotes, not to construct of them sustained and connected biographies. This is a study of the inclusion of biographical narratives about sages in some of the components of the unfolding canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the formative age, the documents of the first six centuries C.E., exclusive of the two Talmuds. A sage here is defined as a man who embodies the Rabbinic system. A sage-story, then, is an anecdote about the life and deeds of a Rabbinic sage. A biographical narrative in general is the record of things done on a concrete and specific past-tense occasion by named individuals. The stories are not told as part of a sustained biographical account of those individuals' lives, birth to death. I am able in this way to correlate the unfolding of the authorized biography in the counterpart-Christian one. The documentary hypothesis yields the correlation between the advent of the Christian authorized biography and the advent of the sage-story in the later documents of the Rabbinic canon.
Download or read book Rabbi David written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2012-04-05 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rabbinic documents of David, progenitor of the Messiah, carry forward the scriptural narrative of David the king. But he also is turned by Rabbinic writings of late antiquity—from the Mishnah through the Yerushalmi and the Bavli—into a sage. Consequently, the Rabbis’ Messiah is a rabbi. How did this transformation come about? Of what kinds of writings does it consist? What sequence of writings conveyed the transformation? And most important: what do we learn about the movement from one set of Israelite writings to take over, or submit to the values of, another set of writings? These are the questions answered here for David, king of Israel. Rabbi David proves that the first exposition of the figure of Rabbi David in a program of elaboration and of protracted exposition of law and Scripture is found in the Bavli. Prior to the closure of that document, that is, in the Rabbinic documents that came to closure before the Bavli, we do not find an elaborate exposition of the figure of David as a rabbi. By contrast, in the Bavli, ample canonical evidence attests to the sages’ transformation of David, king of Israel, into a rabbi. So while bits and pieces of Rabbi David find their way into most of the canonical documents, we find the elaborately spelled out Rabbi David to begin with in the Bavli, now represented as a disciple of sages and a devotee of study of the Torah. That usage attracts attention because when we encounter David in Rabbinic literature—as in all other Judaic canons, not only Rabbinic—this signals we are meeting the embodiment of the Messiah. The representation of the kings of Israel in the Davidic line as heirs of David forms a chapter in exposing the Messianic message of Rabbinic Judaism.
Download or read book A Rabbi and His Dream written by Irving J. Block and published by Ktav Publishing House. This book was released on 1999 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rabbi Moses written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exercise in the systematic recourse to anachronism as a theological-exegetical mode of apologetics. Specifically, Neusner demonstrates the capacity of the Rabbinic sages to read ideas attested in their own day as authoritative testaments to — to them — ancient times. Thus, Scripture was read as integral testimony to the contemporary scene. About a millennium — 750 B.C. E. to 350 C. E. — separates Scripture’s prophets from the later sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud. It is quite natural to recognize evidence for differences over a long period of time. Yet Judaism sees itself as a continuum and overcomes difference. The latecomers portray the ancients like themselves. “In our image, after our likeness” captures the current aspiration. The sages accommodated the later documents in their canon by finding the traits of their own time in the record of the remote past. They met the challenges to perfection that the sages brought about. Of what does the process of harmonization consist? To answer that question the author surveys the presentation of the prophets by the rabbis, beginning with Moses. To overcome the gap, Rabbinic sages turn Moses into a sage like themselves. The prophet performs wonders. The sage sets forth reasonable rulings. The conclusion expands on this account of matters to show the categorical solution that the sages adopted for themselves, and that is the happy outcome of the study.
Download or read book Jewish Views of the Afterlife written by Simcha Paull Raphael and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the third edition of Jewish Views of the Afterlife, Rabbi Simcha Paull Raphael walks readers through the Jewish tradition of the afterlife while providing insights into spiritual care with dying and grieving individuals and families.
Download or read book First Steps in the Talmud written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Talmud is a confusing piece of writing. It begins no where and ends no where but it does not move in a circle. It is written in several languages and follows rules that in certain circumstances trigger the use of one language over others. Its components are diverse. To translating it requires elaborate complementary language. It cannot be translated verbatim into any language. So a translation is a commentary in the most decisive way. The Talmud, accordingly, cannot be merely read but only studied. It contains diverse programs of writing, some descriptive and some analytical. A large segment of the writing follows a clear pattern, but the document encompasses vast components of miscellaneous collections of bits and pieces, odds and ends. It is a mishmash and a mess. Yet it defines the program of study of the community of Judaism and governs the articulation of the norms and laws of Judaism, its theology and its hermeneutics, Above all else, the Talmud of Babylonia is comprised of contention and produces conflict and disagreement, with little effort at a resolution No wonder the Talmud confuses its audience. But that does not explain the power of the Talmud to define Judaism and shape its intellect. This book guides those puzzled by the Talmud and shows the system and order that animate the text.
Download or read book Jewish Secularity written by Zachary I. Heller and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A growing number of Jews identify themselves as secular or “somewhat secular.” Is this expansive definition of Jewishness a new phenomenon? What are its roots? What are its implications for the Jewish community, its institutions, and its future? In reflecting on secular forms of Jewishness, the contributors to this book explore the sources of Jewish secularism and its articulation in Jewish thought, belief, literature, and culture. Included in this book are several personal accounts of Jewish journeys, as well as analyses of the extent of the division between secular Jews and others in the Jewish community. In sum, Jewish Secularity: The Search for Roots and the Challenges of Relevant Meaning provides an overview of a profound development in the evolving history of Jewish life in America.
Download or read book Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud written by Moulie Vidas and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud offers a new perspective on perhaps the most important religious text of the Jewish tradition. It is widely recognized that the creators of the Talmud innovatively interpreted and changed the older traditions on which they drew. Nevertheless, it has been assumed that the ancient rabbis were committed to maintaining continuity with the past. Moulie Vidas argues on the contrary that structural features of the Talmud were designed to produce a discontinuity with tradition, and that this discontinuity was part and parcel of the rabbis' self-conception. Both this self-conception and these structural features were part of a debate within and beyond the Jewish community about the transmission of tradition.Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud, produced in the rabbinic academies of late ancient Mesopotamia, Vidas analyzes key passages to show how the Talmud's creators contrasted their own voice with that of their predecessors. He also examines Zoroastrian, Christian, and mystical Jewish sources to reconstruct the debates and wide-ranging conversations that shaped the Talmud's literary and intellectual character.
Download or read book The Transformation of Judaism written by Jacob Neusner and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacob Neusner describes, analyzes, and interprets the transformation of one system of the Israelite social order by a connected but autonomous successor-system. He characterizes the successive systems classifying the one as philosophical and the other as religious. He explains the categorical account of each and sets forth the outcome of a number of topical studies on the category-formations of Rabbinic Judaism with special attention to the social order: politics, philosophy, and economics. These systems emerged as [1] autonomous when viewed synchronically, [2] connected when seen diachronically, and [3] as a continuous construction when seen at the end of their formative age. In their successive stages of categorical autonomy, connection, and finally continuity, the three distinct systems may be classified, respectively, as philosophical, religious, and theological, each one taking over and revising the definitive categories of the former and framing its own fresh, generative categories as well. The formative history of Judaism is the story of the presentations and re-presentations of categorical structures. In method, it is the exegesis of taxonomy and taxic systems. Now, after more than two decades, Neusner has decided to review the initial statement. Since the book summarizes ten years of work, from 1980 to 1990, on the Rabbinic category formations of social science politics, philosophy, and economics in the setting of the law and theology of Rabbinic Judaism from the Mishnah through the Bavli, 200-600 C.E., it seemed well worth the effort to recapitulate the original work. The revised introduction explains the omission of theology in his category-formation philosophy-religion-theology; Neusner's account of the Bavli produced the decade after this title was completed did not make possible the continuous description of the unfolding of the Rabbinic system. The pattern that appealed to Neusner from philosophy to religion to theology has not yet come to a satisfactory account. In the twenty years of work on the third layer of the canon up to the Bavli, a series of monographs clarified the theological system that sustained Rabbinic Judaism.
