Download or read book Old Worlds New Mirrors written by Moshe Idel and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Moshe Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a cosmopolitan, mostly European, context.

Download or read book Transmitting Jewish Traditions written by Yaakov Elman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the impact of changing modes of cultural transmission on Jewish and Western cultures over the past two thousand years. The contributors to the volume survey some of the ways -- conscious and subconscious -- in which cultural elements arc selected, shaped, and transmitted, and some of the ways they in turn shape the future of their cultures. Focusing on a range of Jewish cultures from late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern period, the authors consider both the transformation of traditions in their travels from one contemporaneous cultural context to another and their transformation within a single culture overtime. Some of the studies in the book deal with the transition from mixed oral-written cultures to ones in which written-print is nearly exclusive. Other chapters deal with the processes of transmission such as anthologizing, translating, teaching, and sermonizing. By contextualizing Jewish culture within Western culture and including a comparative perspective, the book makes an important contribution to Judaic studies as well as to other areas of the humanities concerned with questions of textuality and culture.

Download or read book Jewish History and Jewish Memory written by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and published by UPNE. This book was released on 1998 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publication of Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor in 1982 inspired a generation of scholarly inquiry into historical images and myths, the construction of the Jewish past, and the making and meaning of collective memory. Here, eminent scholars in their respective fields extend the lines of his seminal study into topics that range from medieval rabbinics, homiletics, kabbalah, and Hasidism to antisemitism, Zionism, and the making of modern Jewish identity. Essays are clustered around four central themes: historical consciousness and the construction of memory; the relationship between time and history in Jewish thought; the demise of traditional forms of collective memory; and the writing of Jewish history in modern times.

Download or read book The Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism written by Israel Gutwirth and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative study of the Kabbalah celebrates the history and wisdom of Jewish mysticism while dispelling popular misconceptions. In recent decades, the Kabbalah has aroused widespread interest well beyond the realm of Jewish scholarship. Unfortunately, this popularization has also led to numerous distortions of Jewish mystical doctrine, with some alleged experts drawing on material other than original Jewish sources. In The Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism, acclaimed Torah scholar Israel Gutwirth provides an essential corrective to this trend. Here is a retrospective look at the major figures of Jewish mysticism and the parts they played in shaping the Jewish religion. Divided into three parts, this volume examines the significance of the Zohar and the great Jewish mystics, Hasidic leaders who were distinguished exponents of the Kabbalah, and notable figures of the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain.

Download or read book Kabbalah in Italy 1280 1510 written by Moshe Idel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy represents a major contribution from one of the world's foremost Kabbalah scholars. Idel charts the ways that Kabbalistic thought and literature developed in Italy and how its unique geographical situation facilitated the arrival of both Spanish and Byzantine Kabbalah.

Download or read book Like Angels on Jacob s Ladder written by Harvey J. Hames and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the career of Abraham Abulafia (ca. 1240–1291), self-proclaimed Messiah and founder of the school of ecstatic Kabbalah. Active in southern Italy and Sicily where Franciscans had adopted the apocalyptic teachings of Joachim of Fiore, Abulafia believed the end of days was approaching and saw himself as chosen by God to reveal the Divine truth. He appropriated Joachite ideas, fusing them with his own revelations, to create an apocalyptic and messianic scenario that he was certain would attract his Jewish contemporaries and hoped would also convince Christians. From his focus on the centrality of the Tetragrammaton (the four letter ineffable Divine name) to the date of the expected redemption in 1290 and the coming together of Jews and Gentiles in the inclusiveness of the new age, Abulafia's engagement with the apocalyptic teachings of some of his Franciscan contemporaries enriched his own worldview. Though his messianic claims were a result of his revelatory experiences and hermeneutical reading of the Torah, they were, to no small extent, dependent on his historical circumstances and acculturation.

Download or read book Suffering Time Philosophical Kabbalistic and asidic Reflections on Temporality written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No one theory of time is pursued in the essays of this volume, but a major theme that threads them together is Wolfson’s signature idea of the timeswerve as a linear circularity or a circular linearity, expressions that are meant to avoid the conventional split between the two temporal modalities of the line and the circle.

Download or read book Educating People of Faith written by John H. Van Engen and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2004-02-13 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A much-needed addition to the emerging literature on the formative power of religious practices, Educating People of Faith creates a vivid portrait of the lived practices that shaped the faith of Jews and Christians in synagogues and churches from antiquity up to the seventeenth century. This significant book is the work of Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant scholars who wished to discover and describe how Jews and Christians through history have been formed in religious ways of thinking and acting. Rather than focusing solely on either intellectual or social life, the authors all use the concept of "practices" as they attend to the embodied, contextual character of religious formation. Their studies of religious figures, community life, and traditional practices such as preaching, sacraments, and catechesis are colorful, detailed, and revealing. The authors are also careful to cover the nature of religious education across all social levels, from the textual formation of highly literate rabbis and monks engaged in Scripture study to the local formation of illiterate medieval Christians for whom the veneration of saints' shrines, street performances of religious dramas, and public preaching by wandering preachers were profoundly formative. Educating People of Faith will benefit scholars and teachers desiring a fuller perspective on how lived practices have historically formed people in religious faith. It will also be useful to practical theologians and pastors who wish to make the resources of the past available to practitioners in the present.

Download or read book Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism written by Alfred L. Ivry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-28 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1998. This is the proceedings of the International Conference held by The Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London, 1994, in Celebration of its Fortieth Anniversary. Dedicated to the memory and academic legacy of its Founder Alexander Altmann.

Download or read book The Serpent Kills or the Serpent Gives Life written by Robert J. Sagerman and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abraham Abulafia (1240 – c. 1291) founded an enormously influential branch of Jewish mysticism, referred to as the prophetic or ecstatic kabbalah. This book, from several perspectives, explores the impact of Christianity upon Abulafia. His copious writings evince an intense fascination with Christian themes, yet Abulafia’s frequent diatribes against Jesus and Christianity reveal him to be deeply conflicted in his relationship to his southern European religious neighbors. This book undertakes a careful study of Abulafia’s writings, suggesting that the recognition of an inner dynamic of attraction and revulsion toward the forbidden other provides a crucial key to understanding Abulafia’s mystical hermeneutic and his meditative practice. It also demonstrates that Abulafia's uneasy relationship to Christianity shaped the very core of his mystical doctrine.

Download or read book The Art of Conversion written by Harvey J. Hames and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2000 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), the Christian missionary, philosopher and mystic, his relations with Jewish contemporaries, and how he integrated Jewish mystical teachings (Kabbalah) into his thought system so as to persuade the Jews to convert. Issues dealt with include Llull's attitude towards the Jews, his knowledge of Kabbalah, his theories regarding the Trinity and Incarnation (the Art), and the impact of his ideas on the Jewish community. The book challenges conventional scholarly opinion regarding Christian knowledge of contemporary Jewish thought and questions the assumption that Christians did not know or use Kabbalah before the Renaissance. Further, it suggests that Lull was well aware of ongoing intellectual and religious controversies within the Jewish community, as well as being the first Christian to acknowledge and appreciate Kabbalah as a tool for conversion.

Download or read book Folktales of the Jews Volume 2 written by Dan Ben-Amos and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2006 with total page 667 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Folktales from Eastern Europe presents 71 tales from Ashkenasic culture in the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. It is the second volume in Folktales of the Jews, the five-volume series to be released over the next several years, in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg's classic, Legends of the Jews. The tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives at The University of Haifa, Israel (IFA), a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the Ashkenasic culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This volume and the others to come will be monuments to a rich but vanishing oral tradition

Download or read book Kabbalah written by Perle Besserman and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unraveling the web of ancient traditions hidden in such texts as the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar, this book traces history and offers an accessible introduction to understanding Kabbalah and its practices. Jewish mysticism has flourished—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes darkly—over five thousand years. This pioneering, popular text on Jewish mysticism was the first written for a general audience, and in it, Perle Besserman offers a lively and accessible introduction to the methods, schools, and practitioners of this intriguing world. She traces the history of Kabbalah through the lives of its illustrious scholars and saints and unravels the web of ancient traditions hidden in such texts as Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar. Running through these pages are the words of the outstanding Kabbalists and mystics—including Simeon bar Yohai, Isaac Luria, Abraham Abulafia, and the Baal Shem Tov—giving instructions on practices ranging from contemplation of the Bible’s secret teachings to ritual, ecstatic prayer, and intensive meditation.

Download or read book Kabbalah written by Perle Epstein and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 2001-02-13 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unraveling the web of ancient traditions hidden in such texts as the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar, this book traces history and offers an accessible introduction to understanding Kabbalah and its practices. Jewish mysticism has flourished—sometimes brilliantly, sometimes darkly—over five thousand years. This pioneering, popular text on Jewish mysticism was the first written for a general audience, and in it, Perle Besserman offers a lively and accessible introduction to the methods, schools, and practitioners of this intriguing world. She traces the history of Kabbalah through the lives of its illustrious scholars and saints and unravels the web of ancient traditions hidden in such texts as Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar. Running through these pages are the words of the outstanding Kabbalists and mystics—including Simeon bar Yohai, Isaac Luria, Abraham Abulafia, and the Baal Shem Tov—giving instructions on practices ranging from contemplation of the Bible’s secret teachings to ritual, ecstatic prayer, and intensive meditation.

Download or read book Gershom Scholem s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism 50 Years After written by Peter Schäfer and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 1993 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sponsored by the Gershom Scholem Center for the Study of Jewish Mysticism.

Download or read book Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe written by Scott Wells and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-05-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection builds on the foundational work of Penelope D. Johnson, John Boswell's most influential student outside queer studies, on integration and segregation in medieval Christianity. It documents the multiple strategies by which medieval people constructed identities and, in the process, wove the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion among various individuals and groups. The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing historical, art historical, and literary perpsectives to explore the definition of personal and communal spaces within medieval texts, the complex negotiation of the relationship between devotee and saint in both the early and the later Middle Ages, the forming of partnerships (symbolic, economic, devotional, etc.) between men and women across medieval Europe's considerable gender divide, and the ostracism of individuals and groups through various means including imprisonment, violence, and their identification with pollution. Contributors include: Diane Peters Auslander, Constance Hoffman Berman, Elizabeth A.R. Brown, Alexandra Cuffel, Anne M. Schuchman, Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Katherine Allen Smith, Kathryn A. Smith, Christina Roukis-Stern, Susan Valentine, Susan Wade, and Scott Wells.

Download or read book Language Eros Being written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 1256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This long-awaited, magisterial study-an unparalleled blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology-draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, William Blake, and the very physics of the time-space continuum to establish what will surely be a highwater mark in work on Kabbalah. Not only a study of texts, Language, Eros, Being is perhaps the fullest confrontation of the body in Jewish studies, if not in religious studies as a whole. Elliot R. Wolfson explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, he seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists. He demonstrates that the traditional Kabbalistic view of gender was a monolithic and androcentric one, in which the feminine was conceived as being derived from the masculine. He does not shrink from the negative implications of this doctrine, but seeks to make an honest acknowledgment of it as the first step toward the redemption of an ancient wisdom. Comparisons with other mystical traditions-including those in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam-are a remarkable feature throughout the book. They will make it important well beyond Jewish studies, indeed, a must for historians of comparative religion, in particular of comparative mysticism. Praise for Elliot R. Wolfson: "Through a Speculum That Shines is an important and provocative contribution to the study of Jewish mysticism by one of the major scholars now working in this field."-Speculum