Download or read book The Sabbatean Prophets written by Matt GOLDISH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-seventeenth century, Shabbatai Zvi, a rabbi from Izmir, claimed to be the Jewish messiah, and convinced a great many Jews to believe him. The movement surrounding this messianic pretender was enormous, and Shabbatai's mission seemed to be affirmed by the numerous supporting prophecies of believers. The story of Shabbatai and his prophets has mainly been explored by specialists in Jewish mysticism. Only a few scholars have placed this large-scale movement in its social and historical context. Matt Goldish shifts the focus of Sabbatean studies from the theology of Lurianic Kabbalah to the widespread seventeenth-century belief in latter-day prophecy. The intense expectations of the messiah in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam form the necessary backdrop for understanding the success of Sabbateanism. The seventeenth century was a time of deep intellectual and political ferment as Europe moved into the modern era. The strains of the Jewish mysticism, Christian millenarianism, scientific innovation, and political transformation all contributed to the development of the Sabbatean movement. By placing Sabbateanism in this broad cultural context, Goldish integrates this Jewish messianic movement into the early modern world, making its story accessible to scholars and students alike. Table of Contents: Preface Prologue 1. Messianic Prophecy in the Early Modern Context 2. Nathan of Gaza and the Roots of Sabbatean Prophecy 3. From Mystical Vision to Prophetic Explosion 4. Opponents and Observers Respond 5. Prophecy after Shabbatais Apostasy Notes Index Reviews of this book: Goldish looks at the Jewish messianic surge of the 17th century, which culminated with the Sabbatean movement, and places it in a broader multidimensional context...He has produced a well-written, scholarly addition and modification to the literature. --Paul Kaplan, Library Journal

Download or read book Masks in the Mirror written by Norman Toby Simms and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2006 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sephardic Jews who voluntarily or forcibly converted to Catholicism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to avoid persecution or expulsion were known as conversos or New Christians. Some tried to live the double life of a Crypto-Jew, outwardly embracing Christianity while secretly maintaining Jewish practices. Others were in a state that was neither Jewish nor Christian, and, as painful and humiliating as it was, these Marranos (a term for conversos that became abusive), actually created a new kind of modern personality. By tracing the usage of this disparaging term, Masks in the Mirror also explores the nature of the historical circumstances as it becomes evident that anyone living under these circumstances - constantly threatened and persecuted by the Inquisition and suspected of being heretics and untrustworthy by their Christian colleagues and neighbors - could be driven to a state of madness. Focusing on families and childrearing, this book attempts to grasp the structures of feeling that created such madness, which while debilitating could often be creative and exciting, especially among poets, playwrights, and novelists. It looks at the play of masks, the secrecy and the illusion, that Marranos experienced daily, which some attempted to exorcise in their writings, and it explores the possibility of applying the concept of Marranism generically.

Download or read book Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth Century Discourse written by Gary K. Waite and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse explores for the first time the extent to which the unusual religious diversity and tolerance of the Dutch Republic affected how its residents regarded Jews and Muslims. Analyzing an array of vernacular publications, this book reveals how Dutch writers, especially those within the nonconformist and spiritualist camps, expressed positive attitudes toward religious diversity in general, and Jews and Muslims in particular. Through covering the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) and the post-war era, it also highlights how the Dutch search for allies against Spain led them to approach Muslim rulers. The Dutch were assisted in this by their positive relations with Jews, and were thus able to shape a more affirmative portrayal of Islam. Revealing noticeable differences in language and tone between English and Dutch publications and exploring societal attitudes and culture, Jews and Muslims in Seventeenth-Century Discourse is ideal for students of British and Dutch early-modern cultural, intellectual, and religious history.

Download or read book The Burden of Silence written by Cengiz Sisman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the first comprehensive social, intellectual and religious history of the wide-spread Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century, claiming that they owed their survival to the internalization of the Kabbalistic "burden of silence"--

Download or read book Sabbatian Heresy written by Pawel Maciejko and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Key writings on Sabbatianism and its legacy and afterlife in Jewish culture, memory, and religion

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume 7 The Early Modern World 1500 1815 written by Jonathan Karp and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 1154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This seventh volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism provides an authoritative and detailed overview of early modern Jewish history, from 1500 to 1815. The essays, written by an international team of scholars, situate the Jewish experience in relation to the multiple political, intellectual and cultural currents of the period. They also explore and problematize the 'modernization' of world Jewry over this period from a global perspective, covering Jews in the Islamic world and in the Americas, as well as in Europe, with many chapters straddling the conventional lines of division between Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Mizrahi history. The most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative work in this field currently available, this volume will serve as an essential reference tool and ideal point of entry for advanced students and scholars of early modern Jewish history.

Download or read book The Heresy of Jacob Frank written by Jay Michaelson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Heresy of Jacob Frank is the first monograph length study on the religious philosophy of Jacob Frank (1726-1791), who, in the wake of false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank's late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, this book challenges scholarly presentations of Frank that depict him as a sex-crazed "degenerate," and presents Frank as an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism. Frank's worldview combines a skeptical rejection of religious law as ineffectual and repressive with a supernatural, esoteric myth of immortal beings, material magic, and worldly power. With close readings of the theological and narrative passages of Frank's teachings, Michaelson shows how the Frankist sect evolved from its Sabbatean roots and the infamous 1757-59 disputations before the Catholic Church, into a Western Esoteric society based on alchemy, secrecy, and sexual liberation. Sexual ritual, apparently tightly limited and controlled by the sect, was not a libertine bacchanal but an enactment of the messianic reality, a corporealization of what would later become known as spirituality. While Frank was undoubtedly a manipulative, even abusive leader whose sect mostly disappeared from history, Michaelson suggests that his ideology anticipated themes that would become predominant in the Haskalah, Early Hasidism, and even contemporary 'New Age' Judaism. In an inversion of traditional religious values, Frank's antinomian theology held personal flourishing to be a religious virtue, affirmed only the material, and transferred messianic eros into social, sexual, and political reality.

Download or read book Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah written by Frederick E. Greenspahn and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title describes recent discoveries and insights into the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the modern day. From mystical outpourings in ancient Palestine to the Kabbalah Centre, this volume explores the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present day.

Download or read book The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth Century Europe written by Shmuel Feiner and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and other alternatives emerged and a long, circuitous search for identity began, it was no longer evident that the definition of Jewishness would be based on the beliefs and practices surrounding the study of the Torah. In The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe Shmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in the process and by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings. On the one hand, a great majority of observant Jews still accepted the authority of the Talmud and the leadership of the rabbis; on the other, there was a gradually more conspicuous minority of "Epicureans" and "freethinkers." As the ground shifted, each individual was marked according to his or her place on the path between faith and heresy, between devoutness and permissiveness or indifference. Building on his award-winning Jewish Enlightenment, Feiner unfolds the story of critics of religion, mostly Ashkenazic Jews, who did not take active part in the secular intellectual revival known as the Haskalah. In open or concealed rebellion, Feiner's subjects lived primarily in the cities of western and central Europe—Altona-Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Breslau, and Prague. They participated as "fashionable" Jews adopting the habits and clothing of the surrounding Gentile society. Several also adopted the deist worldview of Enlightenment Europe, rejecting faith in revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the obligation to observe the commandments. Peering into the synagogue, observing individuals in the coffeehouse or strolling the boulevards, and peeking into the bedroom, Feiner recovers forgotten critics of religion from both the margins and the center of Jewish discourse. His is a pioneering work on the origins of one of the most significant transformations of modern Jewish history.

Download or read book Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism written by Michael L. Morgan and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-28 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the centuries, the messianic tradition has provided the language through which modern Jewish philosophers, socialists, and Zionists envisioned a utopian future. Michael L. Morgan, Steven Weitzman, and an international group of leading scholars ask new questions and provide new ways of thinking about this enduring Jewish idea. Using the writings of Gershom Scholem, which ranged over the history of messianic belief and its conflicted role in the Jewish imagination, these essays put aside the boundaries that divide history from philosophy and religion to offer new perspectives on the role and relevance of messianism today.

Download or read book Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities written by Stephen Sharot and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Comparative Perspectives on Judaisms and Jewish Identities makes a unique contribution, building on but not duplicating Sharot's earlier work. There is no comparable work that covers all of these periods and particular cases."---Harriet Hartman, professor of sociology at Rowan University --

Download or read book Transnational Networks and Cross Religious Exchange in the Seventeenth Century Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds written by Brandon Marriott and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1644, the news that Antonio de Montezinos claimed to have discovered the Lost Tribes of Israel in the jungles of South America spread across Europe fuelling an already febrile atmosphere of messianic and millenarian expectation. By tracing the process in which one set of apocalyptic ideas was transmitted across the Christian and Islamic worlds, this book provides fresh insight into the origin and transmission of eschatological constructs, and the resulting beliefs that blurred traditional religious boundaries and identities. Beginning with an investigation of the impact of Montezinos’s narrative, the next chapter follows the story to England, examining how the Quaker messiah James Nayler was viewed in Europe. The third chapter presents the history of the widely reported - but wholly fictitious - story of the sack of Mecca, a rumour that was spread alongside news of Sabbatai Sevi. The final chapter looks at Christian responses to the Sabbatian movement, providing a detailed discussion of the cross-religious and international representations of the messiah. The conclusion brings these case studies together, arguing that the evolving beliefs in the messiah and the Lost Tribes between 1648 and 1666 can only be properly understood by taking into account the multitude of narrative threads that moved between networks of Jews, Conversos, Catholics and Protestants from one side of the Atlantic to the far side of the Mediterranean and back again. By situating this transmission in a broader historical context, the book reveals the importance of early-modern crises, diasporas and newsgathering networks in generating the eschatological constructs, disseminating them on an international scale, and transforming them through this process of intercultural dissemination into complex new hybrid religious conceptions, expectations, and identities.

Download or read book The Burden of Silence written by Cengiz Sisman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Burden of Silence is the first monograph on Sabbateanism, an early modern Ottoman-Jewish messianic movement, tracing it from its beginnings during the seventeenth century up to the present day. Initiated by the Jewish rabbi Sabbatai Sevi, the movement combined Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religious and social elements and became a transnational phenomenon, spreading througout Afro-Euroasia. When Ottoman authorities forced Sevi to convert to Islam in 1666, his followers formed messianic crypto-Judeo-Islamic sects, Dönmes, which played an important role in the modernization and secularization of Ottoman and Turkish society and, by extension, Middle Eastern society as a whole. Using Ottoman, Jewish, and European sources, Sisman examines the dissemination and evolution of Sabbeateanism in engagement with broader topics such as global histories, messianism, mysticism, conversion, crypto-identities, modernity, nationalism, and memory. By using flexible and multiple identities to stymie external interference, the crypto-Jewish Dönmes were able to survive despite persecution from Ottoman authorities, internalizing the Kabbalistic principle of a "burden of silence" according to which believers keep their secret on pain of spiritual and material punishment, in order to sustain their overtly Muslim and covertly Jewish identities. Although Dönmes have been increasingly abandoning their religious identities and embracing (and enhancing) secularism, individualism, and other modern ideas in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey since the nineteenth century, Sisman asserts that, throughout this entire period, religious and cultural Dönmes continued to adopt the "burden of silence" in order to cope with the challenges of messianism, modernity, and memory.

Download or read book Invisible Enlighteners written by Federica Francesconi and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-06-04 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Federica Francesconi writes the history of the Jewish merchants who lived and prospered in the northern Italian city of Modena, capital city of the Este Duchy, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her protagonists are men and women who stood out within their communities but who, despite their cultural and economic prominence, were ghettoized after 1638. Their sociocultural transformation and eventual legal and political integration evolved through a complex dialogue between their Italian and Jewish identities, and without the traumatic ruptures or dramatic divides that led to the assimilation and conversion of many Jews elsewhere in Europe. In Modena, male and female Jewish identities were contoured by both cultural developments internal to the community and engagement with the broader society. The study of Lurianic and Cordoverian Kabbalah, liturgical and nondevotional Hebrew poetry, and Sabbateanism existed alongside interactions with Jesuits, converts, and inquisitors. If Modenese Jewish merchants were absent from the public discourse of the Estes, their businesses lives were nevertheless located at the very geographical and economic center of the city. They lived in an environment that gave rise to unique forms of Renaissance culture, early modern female agency, and Enlightenment practice. New Jewish ways of performing gender emerged in the seventeenth century, giving rise to what could be called an entrepreneurial female community devoted to assisting, employing, and socializing in the ghetto. Indeed, the ghetto leadership prepared both Jewish men and women for the political and legal emancipation they would eventually obtain under Napoleon. It was the cultured Modenese merchants who combined active participation in the political struggle for Italian Jewish emancipation with the creation of a special form of the Enlightenment embedded in scholarly and French-oriented lay culture that emerged within the European context.

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Download or read book Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah written by Jonathan Garb and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing to light a hidden chapter in the history of modern Judaism, Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah explores the shamanic dimensions of Jewish mysticism. Jonathan Garb integrates methods and models from the social sciences, comparative religion, and Jewish studies to offer a fresh view of the early modern kabbalists and their social and psychological contexts. Through close readings of numerous texts—some translated here for the first time—Garb draws a more complete picture of the kabbalists than previous depictions, revealing them to be as concerned with deeper states of consciousness as they were with study and ritual. Garb discovers that they developed physical and mental methods to induce trance states, visions of heavenly mountains, and transformations into animals or bodies of light. To gain a deeper understanding of the kabbalists’ shamanic practices, Garb compares their experiences with those of mystics from other traditions as well as with those recorded by psychologists such as Milton Erickson and Carl Jung. Finally, Garb examines the kabbalists’ relations with the wider Jewish community, uncovering the role of kabbalistic shamanism in the renewal of Jewish tradition as it contended with modernity.

Download or read book The Scandal of Kabbalah written by Yaacob Dweck and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-26 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Scandal of Kabbalah is the first book about the origins of a culture war that began in early modern Europe and continues to this day: the debate between kabbalists and their critics on the nature of Judaism and the meaning of religious tradition. From its medieval beginnings as an esoteric form of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah spread throughout the early modern world and became a central feature of Jewish life. Scholars have long studied the revolutionary impact of Kabbalah, but, as Yaacob Dweck argues, they have misunderstood the character and timing of opposition to it. Drawing on a rang.