Ma'aseh Book

Ma'aseh Book PDF Author: Moses Gaster
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 754

Book Description


Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism

Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism PDF Author: Michael D. Swartz
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161456794
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Includes text of Maaseh merkavah in English translation.

"Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe

Author: Ivan G. Marcus
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295005
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben Samuel he-hasid, Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," is a compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah's messages advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for centuries. In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive, yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into medieval European Jewish culture.

The Jewish Fairy Book

The Jewish Fairy Book PDF Author: Gerald Friedlander
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fairy tales
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
Presents twenty-three tales from various Jewish writings retold in a modern setting.

A Popular Dictionary of Judaism

A Popular Dictionary of Judaism PDF Author: Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135797668
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
This concise dictionary of Judaism contains over a thousand entries describing all the key aspects of religion, culture and history in the Jewish faith. Designed for the student as well as the general reader, it deserves a place in every library and every Jewish home.

The Classic Tales

The Classic Tales PDF Author: Ellen Frankel
Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated
ISBN: 1461662419
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 702

Book Description
Three hundred Jewish tales in this extraordinary volume span three continents and four millennia. Culled from traditional sources—the Bible, Talmud, Midrash, hasidic texts, and oral folklore—and retold in modern English by Ellen Frankel, these stories represent the brightest jewels in the vast treasure chest of Jewish lore. Beautifully clothed in contemporary language, these classic tales sparkle with the gentle and insightful humor of the Jewish folk imagination. And like so much of Jewish literature, these stories abound in allusions to classic Jewish texts. Biblical cadences, phrases from the prayer book, and ideas from Jewish proverbs and heroic legends resonate in the air when these tales are read or told aloud. In The Classic Tales, history sheds its dust to become as intimate as family memory. While the breadth and depth of this book make it completely unique, three special features also help distinguish it: God appears without gender (though certainly not without personality); women characters, so often nameless in the original biblical text, wear their midrashic names (e.g., Noah's wife Naamah, Abraham's mother Amitlai, Lot's wife Edith); and many tales of Sephardic origin have been included to correct the common American bias toward Eastern European sources. What's more, this volume has been uniquely designed to be of use to educators, rabbis, parents, and students. It features a chronological table of contents as well as six separate indexes?arranged by Jewish holidays, Torah and Haftorah readings, character types, symbols, topics, and proper names and places—to make the tales easily referenced in a wide variety of ways. Anyone who needs a story to inspire a child, to illustrate a point, to develop a sermon, or just to uplift his or her own thirsting soul will find just the right one in The Classic Tales.

The Midrashic Imagination

The Midrashic Imagination PDF Author: Michael Fishbane
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438402872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
This innovative and original book examines the broad range of Jewish interpretation from antiquity through the medieval and renaissance periods. Its primary focus is on Midrash and midrashic creativity, including the entire range of nonlegal interpretations of the Bible. Considering Midrash as a literary and cultural form, the book explores aspects of classical Midrash from various angles including mythmaking and parables. The relationship between this exoteric mode and more esoteric forms in late antiquity is also examined. This work also focuses on some of the major genres of medieval biblical exegesis: plain sense, allegory, and mystical.

Piety and Society

Piety and Society PDF Author: I.G. Marcus
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004497811
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description


Lilith's Cave

Lilith's Cave PDF Author: Howard Schwartz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195067266
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
Tales of terror and the supernatural hold an honored position in the Jewish folkloric tradition. Howard Schwartz has superbly translated and retold fifty of the best of these folktales. Gathered from countless sources ranging from the ancient Middle East to twelfth-century Germany and later Eastern European oral tradition, these captivating stories include Jewish variants of the Pandora and Persephone myths.

The Sabbath

The Sabbath PDF Author: Abraham Joshua Heschel
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466800097
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 127

Book Description
Elegant, passionate, and filled with the love of God's creation, Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath has been hailed as a classic of Jewish spirituality ever since its original publication--and has been read by thousands of people seeking meaning in modern life. In this brief yet profound meditation on the meaning of the Seventh Day, Heschel, one of the most widely respected religious leaders of the twentieth century, introduced the influential idea of an 'architecture of holiness" that appears not in space but in time. Judaism, he argues, is a religion of time: it finds meaning not in space and the materials things that fill it but in time and the eternity that imbues it, so that 'the Sabbaths are our great catherdrals.' Featuring black-and-white illustrations by Ilya Schor