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In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—this book considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it. It takes as a starting point the fact that the postbiblical Jewish world lost its geographical center with the destruction of the temple and so was left with a textual center, the Holy Book. The author argues that a text-oriented religion produced language-centered forms of mysticism. Against this background, he demonstrates how various Jewish mystics amplified the content of the Scriptures so as to include everything: the world, or God, for example. Thus the text becomes a major realm for contemplation, and the interpretation of the text frequently becomes an encounter with the deepest realms of reality. The author delineates the particular hermeneutics belonging to Jewish mysticism, investigates the progressive filling of the text with secrets and hidden levels of meaning, and considers in detail the various interpretive strategies needed to decodify the arcane dimensions of the text.

This book tells the story of the earliest Jewish diaspora in Egypt in a way it has never been told before. In the fifth century BCE there was a Jewish community on Elephantine Island. Why they spoke Aramaic, venerated Aramean gods besides Yaho, and identified as Arameans is a mystery, but a previously little explored papyrus from Egypt sheds new light on their history. The papyrus shows that the ancestors of the Elephantine Jews came originally from Samaria. Due to political circumstances, they left Israel and lived for a century in an Aramean environment. Around 600 BCE, they moved to Egypt. These migrants to Egypt did not claim a Jewish identity when they arrived, but after the destruction of their temple on the island they chose to deploy their Jewish identity to raise sympathy for their cause. Their story—a typical diaspora tale—is not about remaining Jews in the diaspora, but rather about becoming Jews through the diaspora.

The popularity of Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical movement at least 900 years old, has grown astonishingly within the context of the vast and ever-expanding social movement commonly referred to as the New Age. This book provides a broad overview of the major trends in contemporary Kabbalah together with in-depth discussions of major figures and schools. It places the “kabbalistic Renaissance” within the global context of the rise of other forms of spirituality, including Sufism and Tibetan Buddhism. The book shows how Kabbalah has been transformed by the events of the Holocaust and, following the establishment of Israel, by aliyah.

This book reevaluates the place of converts from Judaism in the narrative of Jewish history. Long considered beyond the pale of Jewish historiography, converts played a central role in shaping both noxious and positive images of Jews and Judaism for Christian readers. Focusing on German Jews who converted to Christianity in the sixteenth through mid-eighteenth centuries, it explores an extensive trove of their memoirs and other writings. These original sources illuminate the Jewish communities that the converts left, the Christian society they entered, and the unabating tensions between the two worlds in early modern German history. The book begins with the medieval images of converts from Judaism and traces the hurdles to social acceptance that they encountered in Germany through early modern times. The author examines the converts' complicated search for community, a quest that was to characterize much of Jewish modernity, and concludes with a consideration of the converts' painful legacies to the Jewish experience in German lands.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provides unprecedented insight into the nature of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament before its fixation. This book presents a complete account of the formation of the canon in Ancient Judaism from the emergence of the Torah in the Persian period to the final acceptance of the list of twenty-two/twenty-four books in the Rabbinic period. Using the Hebrew Bible, the Scrolls, the Apocrypha, the Letter of Aristeas, the writings of Philo, Josephus, the New Testament, and Rabbinic literature as primary evidence the book argues that throughout the post-exilic period up to around 100 ce, there was not one official “canon” accepted by all Jews; rather, there existed a plurality of collections of scriptures that were authoritative for different communities. Examining the literary sources and historical circumstances that led to the emergence of authoritative scriptures in ancient Judaism, the book proposes a theory of the majority canon that posits that the Pharisaic canon became the canon of Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.

Friendship, though a topic of considerable humanistic and cross disciplinary interest in the contemporary academy, has mainly been ignored by scholars of the Hebrew Bible, possibly on account of its complexity and elusiveness. Yet friendship in the Hebrew Bible warrants the kind of thorough, detailed exploration that friendship has received from specialists in neighboring fields such as Classics and New Testament and in any number of other fields. The author of this book provides an in-depth, theoretically engaged, philologically grounded, and contextually sensitive study of friendship in the Hebrew Bible. It is the first book-length study of its kind, filling in a significant gap in our knowledge and understanding of the constellation of social relationships represented in biblical texts and contributing to contemporary, incipient cross-disciplinary theorizing of friendship. Topics covered include how the expectations of friends and family members overlap and differ, including what makes the friend a distinct social actor; failed friendship; friendships in narrative such as those of Ruth and Naomi, Jonathan and David, and Job and his three comforters; and friendship in the second century BCE Hebrew wisdom text Ben Sira, including how Ben Sira’s notions of friendship relate to ideas expressed in earlier biblical texts and in Greek sources.

This book argues that the concept of Jewish Christianity represents an enduring legacy of Christian apologetics. Freethinkers of the English Enlightenment created the category of Jewish Christianity as a means of isolating a true and distinctly Christian religion from the Jewish culture of Jesus and the apostles. The book shows how a category that began as a way to reimagine the apologetic notion of an authoritative “original Christianity” continues to cause problems in the contemporary study of Jewish and Christian antiquity.

This book examines the attitudes of various Christian groups in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations towards Jews, the Hebrew language, and Jewish learning. Martin Luther's writings are notorious, but Reformation attitudes were much more varied and nuanced than these might lead us to believe. The book has much to tell us about the Reformation and its priorities, and it has important implications for how we think about religious pluralism more broadly. The book begins by focusing on the impact and various forms of the Reformation on the Jews and pays close attention to the global perspective on Jewish experiences in the early modern period. It highlights the links between Jews in Europe and those in north Africa, Asia Minor, and the Americas, and it looks into the Jews' migrations and reputation as a corollary of Christians' exploration and colonisation of several territories. It seeks to next establish the position Jews occupied in Christian thinking and society by the start of the Reformation era, and then moves on to the first waves of reform in the earliest decades of the sixteenth century in both the Catholic and Protestant realms. The book explores the radical dimension to the Protestant Reformation and talks about identity as the heart of a fundamental issue associated with the Reformation. It analyzes “Counter Reformation” and discusses the various forms of Protestantism that had been accepted by large swathes of the population of many territories in Europe. Later chapters turn attention to relations between Jews and Christians in the first half of the seventeenth century and explore the Sabbatean movement as the most significant messianic movement since the first century BCE. In conclusion, the book summarizes how the Jews of Europe were in a very different position by the end of the seventeenth century compared to where they had been at the start of the sixteenth century. It recounts how Jewish communities sprung up in places which had not traditionally been a home to Jews, especially in Eastern Europe.

The human body and self play a prominent role in mysticism. Various mystics endeavoured to achieve altered bodily states such as a feeling of their body expanding beyond its physical limits, a feeling of “forgetting” their own body or sensing “something” filling it. Some reported perceiving the self as doubled, elevated, or semi-permeable, whereas others have reported a unity between self and object, a splitting of the self, or an experience of themselves in inhabitual positions. These altered states further enabled the mystics to investigate the boundaries of mind, consciousness, and self-consciousness, for it is from these altered states that these obscure mental functions may be newly enlightened. Particularly, ecstatic mysticism developed complicated techniques of mental imagery, transformation, and concentration for experiencing altered conscious states; through them the mystics not only viewed the mystic self or “soul” but also encountered celestial entities and God. In this book we investigate the phenomenology, neurology, and underlying cognitive techniques of ecstatic mystical experiences as described in the writings of mystics of major trends in Jewish Kabbalah, including the prophetic Kabbalah, the Lurianic Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, and Hassidism. These mystics achieved their most prominent mystical experiences by using practical ecstatic techniques that changed their internal mental state. We detail experiences, techniques, reports, and instructions as described by the mystics themselves. These are further compared with similar phenomena found nowadays in healthy individuals and in neurological patients or induced in the laboratory. Using neurological and neuropsychological studies, as well as analyses of brain lesions, experimental psychology, and neuroimaging, we endeavor to decode the brain mechanisms and processes underlying these mystical experiences. This enables further understanding of not only the mystical techniques but also the ecstatic experiences and their various contexts.

This sweeping survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy 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. It analyzes the work of three major Kabbalists—Abraham Abulafia, Menahem Recanati, and Yohanan Alemanno—who represent diverse schools of thought: the ecstatic, the theosophical-theurgical, and the astromagical. Directing special attention to the interactions and tensions among these forms of Jewish Kabbalah and the nascent Christian Kabbalah, the book brings to light the rich history of Kabbalah in Italy, and the powerful influence of this important center on the emergence of Christian Kabbalah and European occultism in general.

This book presents an outstanding new translation of two favorite comic novels by the preeminent Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl portrays a tumultuous marriage through letters exchanged between the title character, an itinerant bumbler seeking his fortune in the cities of Russia before departing alone for the New World, and his scolding wife, who becomes increasingly fearful, jealous, and mystified. Motl, the Cantor's Son is the first-person narrative of a mischievous and keenly observant boy who emigrates with his family from Russia to America. The final third of the story takes place in New York, making this Sholem Aleichem's only major work to be set in the United States. Motl and Menakhem-Mendl are in one sense opposites—the one a clear-eyed child and the other a pathetically deluded adult. Yet both are ideal conveyors of the comic disparity of perception on which humor depends. If Motl sees more than do others around him, Menakhem-Mendl has an almost infinite capacity for seeing less. Sholem Aleichem endows each character with an individual comic voice to tell in his own way the story of the collapse of traditional Jewish life in modern industrial society as well as the journey to America, where a new chapter of Jewish history begins. This book includes a biographical and critical introduction as well as a glossary for English-language readers.

As the Nazis swept across Europe during World War II, Jewish victims wrote diaries in which they grappled with the terror unfolding around them. Some wrote simply to process the contradictory bits of news they received; some wrote so that their children, already safe in another country, might one day understand what had happened to their parents; and some wrote to furnish unknown readers in the outside world with evidence against the Nazi regime. Were these diarists resisters, or did the process of writing make the ravages of the Holocaust even more difficult to bear? Drawing on an array of unpublished and published diaries from all over German-occupied Europe, this book explores the multiple roles that diary writing played in the lives of these ordinary women and men. A story of hope and hopelessness, it offers an examination of the complex interplay of writing and mourning. And in these diaries, we see the first glimpses of a question that would haunt the twentieth century: Can such unimaginable horror be represented at all?

This book is the first major work treating the early history of Hebrew from a sociolinguistic perspective. It chronicles the relationship between language and society and emphasizes the distinction between Hebrew as a writing system and as a vernacular. It begins by tracing precursors known from the writing systems in Canaan during the second millennium BCE and concludes with the Jewish revolts of the first two centuries CE that resulted in the dispersion of the Jewish people and the end of Hebrew as a living language in the land. The book reveals the important role that Egyptian scribal practice played for the initial emergence of Hebrew. It describes the appearance of a distinctively Judean scribal practice in the late eighth century as a nationalistic response to Assyrian imperialism and highlights the spread of writing and literacy outside of the closed circles of scribal elites during the late monarchy. The book exposes the gradual decline of Hebrew scribal practice during the Babylonian exile that resulted in the end of Standard Biblical Hebrew. The book notes the radical decline in Hebrew literary production during the Persian period and describes the emergence of Late Biblical Hebrew shaped by vernacular Hebrew, Aramaic scribal training, and old Hebrew literary texts. Hellenism created even more focus on language ideology as illustrated in Qumran Hebrew and the role of Hebrew in creating group identity in the Second Temple Period. The book concludes with a description of early Rabbinic Hebrew as an ideological textualization of oral tradition.

This book examines changing models of the self in ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism. Although all humans possess certain neurophysiological structures and processes that underlie the sense of “self,” significant cultural variation exists in the ways in which personal experience of the self and the social significance of the self are construed. Many of the assumptions about the self and its agency identifiable during the period of the monarchy persisted into later periods. But strikingly new ways of representing self and agency begin to occur in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, including novel ways of representing inner conflict, introspection, and concern about moral agency. While the causes and motives for these changes were complex and plural, one major factor was the cultural attempt to come to grips with the collective trauma of the destruction of Judah by the Babylonians in 586 and the Exile. The destruction was generally seen as a catastrophic failure of moral agency, and many of the subsequent innovations in models of self and agency began as attempts to reground the possibility of reliable agency. In a variety of creative ways agency was displaced from the person to God, who then transformed the person. What began as a response to trauma, however, seems to have taken on other functions. The changing assumptions about self and agency permitted the development of new and powerful forms of spiritual intimacy with God that are attested particularly in prayers and liturgical poetry.

Born in Warsaw, raised in a Hasidic community, and reaching maturity in secular Jewish Vilna and cosmopolitan Berlin, Abraham Joshua Heschel escaped Nazism and immigrated to the United States in 1940. This book tells the story of his life and work in America, his politics and personality, and how he came to influence not only Jewish debate but also wider religious and cultural debates in the postwar decades. A sequel to his biography of Heschel's early years, this book draws on previously unseen archives, FBI files, interviews with people who knew Heschel, and analyses of his extensive writings. It explores Heschel's shy and private side, his spiritual radicalism, and his vehement defense of the Hebrew prophets' ideal of absolute integrity and truth in ethical and political life. Of special interest are Heschel's interfaith activities, including a secret meeting with Pope Paul VI during Vatican II, his commitment to civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr., his views on the state of Israel, and his opposition to the Vietnam War. A tireless challenger to spiritual and religious complacency, Heschel stands as a dramatically important witness.

Why do we study history? What is the role of the historian in the contemporary world? These questions prompted David N. Myers’s illuminating and poignant call for the relevance of historical research and writing. His inquiry identifies a number of key themes around which modern Jewish historians have wrapped their labors: liberation, consolation, and witnessing. Through these portraits, Myers revisits the chasm between history and memory, revealing the middle space occupied by modern Jewish historians as they work between the poles of empathic storytelling and the critical sifting of sources. In this regard, the book engages in an extended dialogue with the seminal work by his teacher’s teacher Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. History, properly applied, can both destroy ideologically rooted myths that breed group hatred and create new memories that are sustaining of life. Alive in these investigations is Myers’s belief that the historian today can and should attend to questions of political and moral urgency. Historical knowledge is not a luxury to society but an essential requirement for informed civic engagement, as well as a vital tool in policy making, conflict resolution, and restorative justice.