Download or read book Heavenly Torah written by Abraham Joshua Heschel and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: his most ambitious scholarly achievement, his three-volume study of Rabbinic Judaism, is only now appearing in English.
Download or read book The Talmud written by Ben Zion Bokser and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume sheds light on the early rabbis as the shapers of religion and uncovers for the modern reader the early Sages' fundamental beliefs concerning God, the world and the human condition.
Download or read book The Faces of the Chariot written by David Joel Halperin and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 1988 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Akiva written by Reuven Hammer and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legendary Akiva ben Yosef has fascinated Jews for centuries. Arguably the most important of the Tannaim, or early Jewish sages, Akiva lived during a crucial era in the development of Judaism as we know it today, and his theology played a major part in the development of Rabbinic Judaism. Reuven Hammer details Akiva's life as it led to a martyr's death and he delves into the rich legacy Akiva left us. That legacy played an extraordinarily important role in helping the Jewish people survive difficult challenges to forge a vibrant religious life anew, and it continues to influence Jewish law, ethics, and theology even today. Akiva's contribution to the development of Oral Torah cannot be overestimated, and in this first book written in English about the sage since 1936 Hammer reassesses Akiva's role from the period before the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE until the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE. He also assesses new findings about the growth of early Judaism, the reasons why Akiva was so outspoken about "Christian Jews," the influence of Hellenism, the Septuagint, and the canonization of the Hebrew Bible. Ultimately Hammer shows that Judaism without Akiva would be a very different religion.
Download or read book The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture written by Rachel Neis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the power of sight for ancient rabbis across the realms of divinity, sexuality, idolatry and rabbinic subjectivity.
Download or read book The JPS Commentary on the Haggadah written by Joseph Tabory and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Passover haggadah enjoys an unrivaled place in Jewish culture, both religious and secular. And of all the classic Jewish books, the haggadah is the one most "alive" today. Jews continue to rewrite, revise, and add to its text, recasting it so that it remains relevant to their lives. In this new volume in the JPS Commentary collection, Joseph Tabory, one of the world's leading authorities on the history of the haggadah, traces the development of the seder and the haggadah through the ages. The book features an extended introduction by Tabory, the classic Hebrew haggadah text side by side with its English translation, and Tabory's clear and insightful critical-historical commentary.
Download or read book Knowledge and Profanation written by Martin Mulsow and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge and Profanation offers numerous instances of learned profanation, committed by scholars ranging from the Italian Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, as well as several antique predecessors.
Download or read book Reflections on the Evolution of Jewish Mysticism written by Dr. Martin Sicker and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2021-12-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been asserted that monotheism, in the Jewish tradition, has long been understood both exoterically and esoterically. In the exoteric Scripture-based rabbinic tradition, monotheism is the belief in a one and only God, a belief which goes hand in hand with the affirmation of distinct individual and divine existences, so that there is a dualism between humanity and God. In the esoteric or mystic tradition, this dualism is overcome by a conception of monotheism in which God is One, not only in his ‘Lordship’ but also in his universal reality. That is, God is the only reality, so that everything which exists is in essence an aspect of divinity. Jewish mysticism has both a devotional or practical and an intellectual or speculative side. On its devotional side it emphasizes those aspects of the biblical precepts which serve to promote direct communion between the worshipper and God. On its speculative side it is especially concerned with outlining and bringing into relief the link or links between God and man, or more generally between the Creator and the universe. The focus of this study is on the questions of how and why Jewish mysticism arose and underwent a variegated evolution throughout much of the history of the Jewish people from remote antiquity to the present day.
Download or read book In This Hour Heschel s Writings in Nazi Germany and London Exile written by Abraham Joshua Heschel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In This Hour offers the first English translations of selected German writings by Abraham Joshua Heschel from his tumultuous years in Nazi-ruled Germany and months in London exile, before he found refuge in the United States. Moreover, several of the works have never been published in any language. Composed during a time of intense crisis for European Jewry, these writings both argue for and exemplify a powerful vision of spiritually rich Jewish learning and its redemptive role in the past and the future of the Jewish people. The collection opens with the text of a speech in which Heschel laid out with passion his vision for Jewish education. Then it goes on to present his teachings: a set of essays about the rabbis of the Mishnaic period, whose struggles paralleled those of his own time; the biography of the medieval Jewish scholar and leader Don Yitzhak Abravanel; reflections on the power and meaning of repentance, written for the High Holidays in 1936; and a short story on Jewish exile, written for Hanukkah 1937. The collection closes with a set of four recently discovered meditations—on suffering, prayer, spirituality, and God—in which Heschel grapples with the horrors unfolding around him. Taken together, these essays and story fill a significant void in Heschel’s bibliography: his Nazi Germany and London exile years. These translations convey the spare elegance of Heschel’s prose, and the introduction and detailed notes make the volume accessible to readers of all knowledge levels. As Heschel teaches history, his voice is more than that of a historian: the old becomes new, and the struggles of one era shed light on another. Even as Heschel quotes ancient sources, his words address the issues of his own time and speak urgently to ours.
Download or read book The Enlightened Will Shine written by Pinchas Giller and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the use of symbolism and theurgy in two sections of the Zohar, the central text of the kabbalah. These compositions, Tiqqunei ha-Zohar and Ra'aya Meheimna have been particularly loved by kabbalists. Giller demonstrates the significance of their contributions to theosophical kabbalah.
Download or read book Surpassing Wonder written by Donald H. Akenson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-09-29 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elegant and inventive, Surpassing Wonder uncovers how the ancient Hebrew scriptures, the Christian New Testament, and the Talmuds of the Rabbis are related and how, collectively, they make up the core of Western consciousness. Donald Harman Akenson provides an incisive critique of how religious scholars have distorted the holy books and argues that it was actually the inventor of the Hebrew scriptures who shaped our concept of narrative history—thereby founding Western culture.
Download or read book The Theology of the Halakhah written by Jacob Neusner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2001 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neusner proves that the law of normative Judaism, the Halakhah, viewed whole, with its category-formations read in logical sequence, tells a coherent story. He demonstrates that details of the law contribute to making a single statement, one that, moreover, complements and corresponds with that of the Aggadah, the lore and scriptural exegesis of Judaism. He has now portrayed for the first time the way in which Aggadah and Halakhah, attitude and action, belief and behavior, join together to set forth normative Judaism, the vast system for holy Israel's social order of the Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash of late antiquity.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature written by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-28 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume introduces students of rabbinic literature to the range of historical and interpretative questions surrounding the rabbinic texts of late antiquity. The editors, themselves well-known interpreters of Rabbinic literature, have gathered an international collection of scholars to support students' initial steps in confronting the enormous and complex rabbinic corpus. Unlike other introductions to Rabbinic writings, the present volume includes approaches shaped by anthropology, gender studies, oral-traditional studies, classics, and folklore studies.
Download or read book The Evolution of Judaism from Ezra to the Present written by Martin Sicker and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pharisaic Judaism, discussed in part 1 of this study, was an inseparable element in the political history of the Second Hebrew Commonwealth. With the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, along with the skeleton of what was once a Jewish state, Judaism entered a period of crisis far more severe than experienced with the destruction of the First Temple, along with the First Hebrew Commonwealth. Pharisaic Judaism, integral to the now nonexistent Jewish state, of necessity gave way to Rabbinic Judaism, which, as a minority religious culture, took root primarily in the enclaves of Jews strewn throughout the diaspora with little or mostly no control over their very existence. And in the absence of a centralized religious authority such as the Sanhedrin in the Temple complex, Jewish communities throughout the Diaspora developed different religious customs, traditions, and in some instances, belief systems, all nominally based on the core teachings of Scripture. Part 2 of this study of the evolution of Judaism from Ezra to the present day will attempt to trace significant developments along that evolutionary path from the transition from Pharisaic to Rabbinic Judaism, that is, Judaism as understood by the different schools of rabbis, as decisors, scholars, and teachers over the past two millennia.
Download or read book The Significance of Yavneh and Other Essays in Jewish Hellenism written by Shaye J. D. Cohen and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2010 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects thirty essays by Shaye J.D. Cohen. First published between 1980 and 2006, these essays deal with a wide variety of themes and texts: Jewish Hellenism; Josephus; the Synagogue; Conversion to Judaism; Blood and Impurity; the boundary between Judaism and Christianity. What unites them is their philological orientation. Many of these essays are close studies of obscure passages in Jewish and Christian texts. The essays are united too by their common assumption that the ancient world was a single cultural continuum; that ancient Judaism, in all its expressions and varieties, was a Hellenism; and that texts written in Hebrew share a world of discourse with those written in Greek. Many of these essays are well-known and have been much discussed in contemporary scholarship. Among these are: The Significance of Yavneh (the title essay), Patriarchs and Scholarchs, Masada: Literary Tradition, Archaeological Remains, and the Credibility of Josephus, Epigraphical Rabbis, The Conversion of Antoninus, Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity, and A Brief History of Jewish Circumcision Blood.
Download or read book Private Households and Public Politics in 3rd 5th Century Jewish Palestine written by Alexei Sivertsev and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2002 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexei Sivertsev examines the nature of the Jewish aristocratic households and their public functions during the later Roman and Byzantine periods (third to fifth centuries C.E.). The author first discusses the nature of the Jewish patriarchate during the third century C.E. He argues that the family of patriarchs ( nesi'im ) is best understood as a local city-based aristocratic clan. It emerged, along with other contemporary clans, as a result of the gradual conversion of the national aristocracy of the once independent Judean state into the municipal aristocracy of the Roman province of Palaestina in the course of the first to second centuries C.E.In the second part of this book Alexei Sivertsev addresses the specific public functions performed by Jewish aristocratic clans, such as judicial, religious, administrative and legislative. He also demonstrates the continuity that existed in this respect between the Second Commonwealth aristocratic clans and those of the rabbinic period. Finally, the third part of this study deals with the process leading to the integration of the local native aristocracies of the Roman Near East into the centralized administrative system created by the Emperors, starting with Constantine the Great. This process is analyzed specifically regarding the example of the Jewish ruling elite. The main question in this section is the degree to which the local administrative apparatus of the newly created Byzantine bureaucracy developed out of the traditional and clan-based public institutions which had existed locally throughout the Roman period.
Download or read book The Apocrypha and Pseudephigrapha of the Old Testament Volume One written by R. H. Charles and published by Apocryphile Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most esteemed body of books left out of the Bible, the Old Testament Apocrypha is of interest to historians, religious scholars, and ordinary laypeople alike. For more than 70 years this version, edited by R.H. Charles, has been the definitive critical edition. Out of print for years, Apocryphile Press is proud to make it available once more to scholars and the curious.
