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Author: Isabelle Levy Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253060168 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
In Jewish Literary Eros, Isabelle Levy explores the originality and complexity of medieval Jewish writings. Examining medieval prosimetra (texts composed of alternating prose and verse), Levy demonstrates that secular love is the common theme across Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Italian texts. At the crossroads of these spheres of intellectual activity, Jews of the medieval Mediterranean composed texts that combined dominant cultures' literary stylings with biblical Hebrew and other elements from Jewish cultures. Levy explores Jewish authors' treatments of love in prosimetra and finds them creative, complex, and innovative. Jewish Literary Eros compares the mixed-form compositions by Jewish authors of the medieval Mediterranean with their Arabic and European counterparts to find the particular moments of innovation among textual practices by Jewish authors. When viewed in the comparative context of the medieval Mediterranean, the evolving relationship between the mixed form and the theme of love in secular Jewish compositions refines our understanding of the ways in which the Jewish literature of the period negotiates the hermeneutic and theological underpinnings of Islamicate and Christian literary traditions.
Author: Isabelle Levy Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253060168 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 210
Book Description
In Jewish Literary Eros, Isabelle Levy explores the originality and complexity of medieval Jewish writings. Examining medieval prosimetra (texts composed of alternating prose and verse), Levy demonstrates that secular love is the common theme across Arabic, Hebrew, French, and Italian texts. At the crossroads of these spheres of intellectual activity, Jews of the medieval Mediterranean composed texts that combined dominant cultures' literary stylings with biblical Hebrew and other elements from Jewish cultures. Levy explores Jewish authors' treatments of love in prosimetra and finds them creative, complex, and innovative. Jewish Literary Eros compares the mixed-form compositions by Jewish authors of the medieval Mediterranean with their Arabic and European counterparts to find the particular moments of innovation among textual practices by Jewish authors. When viewed in the comparative context of the medieval Mediterranean, the evolving relationship between the mixed form and the theme of love in secular Jewish compositions refines our understanding of the ways in which the Jewish literature of the period negotiates the hermeneutic and theological underpinnings of Islamicate and Christian literary traditions.
Author: Moshe Idel Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 030010832X Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 381
Book Description
In this book, the world's foremost scholar of Kabbalah explores the understanding of erotic love in Jewish mystical thought. Encompassing Jewish mystical literatures from those of late antiquity to works of Polish Hasidism, Moshe Idel highlights the diversity of Kabbalistic views on eros and distinguishes between the major forms of eroticism. The author traces the main developments of a religious formula that reflects the union between a masculine divine attribute and a feminine divine attribute, and he asks why such an "erotic formula" was incorporated into the Jewish prayer book. Idel shows how Kabbalistic literature was influenced not only by rabbinic literature but also by Greek thought that helped introduce a wider understanding of eros. Addressing topics ranging from cosmic eros and androgyneity to the affinity between C. J. Jung and Kabbalah to feminist thought, Idel's deeply learned study will be of consuming interest to scholars of religion, Judaism, and feminism.
Author: David Biale Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520920066 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 334
Book Description
Contradictory stereotypes about Jewish sexuality pervade modern culture, from Lenny Bruce's hip eroticism to Woody Allen's little man with the big libido (and even bigger sexual neurosis). Does Judaism in fact liberate or repress sexual desire? David Biale does much more than answer that question as he traces Judaism's evolving position on sexuality, from the Bible and Talmud to Zionism up through American attitudes today. What he finds is a persistent conflict between asceticism and gratification, between procreation and pleasure. From the period of the Talmud onward, Biale says, Jewish culture continually struggled with sexual abstinence, attempting to incorporate the virtues of celibacy, as it absorbed them from Greco-Roman and Christian cultures, within a theology of procreation. He explores both the canonical writings of male authorities and the alternative voices of women, drawing from a fascinating range of sources that includes the Book of Ruth, Yiddish literature, the memoirs of the founders of Zionism, and the films of Woody Allen. Biale's historical reconstruction of Jewish sexuality sees the present through the past and the past through the present. He discovers an erotic tradition that is not dogmatic, but a record of real people struggling with questions that have challenged every human culture, and that have relevance for the dilemmas of both Jews and non-Jews today.
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 0823224201 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 1256
Book Description
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
Author: Mark Jay Mirsky Publisher: Syracuse University Press ISBN: 9780815630272 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
Did Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy as a young man in Florence sleep with Beatrice Portinari before and after her marriage? Did the poet travel after her death through Hell to find her again? The clues to this academic detective story, writes Mark Jay Mirsky, lie not only in Dante's earlier poetry, The New Life, or in The Divine Comedy, but in the Zohar of Moses de Leon, a Jewish text written some years before and based on Neoplatonic ideas similar to those that inspired Dante. Purgatorio and Paradiso, the second and third volumes of the Commedia, are inaccessible to most readers unfamiliar with the boldness of Dante's use of the philosophical debate in the Middle Ages. Does Dante's Commedia hint at his hope of intimacy with Beatrice in the Highest Heaven? In this book Mirsky distinctively traces the influence on Dante of Provencal poets, medieval theologians, Dante's personal life, and the sources of his classical education to propose a radical reading of Dante. The text compounds the riddles of dream, poetry, philosophy, and Dante's concealed autobiography in his work. It treats the Commedia in the spirit of its title, as a hopeful and comic vision of the other world.
Author: Menachem Fisch Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
" . . . a fascinating and thought-provoking book . . . " —The Jewish Quarterly "The best introduction to the talmudic literature that is available. . . . An extraordinarily important book, brilliant, and lucid." —Daniel Boyarin "Menachem Fisch has written a rich, thoughtful book. One will come away from Rational Rabbis with a deeper understanding of just what the Talmud is." —Hilary Putnam Talmudic culture is often viewed as bound by its traditions. Menachem Fisch maintains that a close reading of talmudic texts frequently reveals their authors as rabbis who, rather than conform uncritically to tradition, knowingly set out to expose and resolve problems inherent in the received traditions.
Author: Ronnie Perelis Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253024099 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 193
Book Description
Identity, family, and community unite three autobiographical texts by New World crypto-Jews, or descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in 17th-century Iberia and Spanish America. Ronnie Perelis presents the fascinating stories of three men who were caught within the matrix of inquisitorial persecution, expanding global trade, and the network of crypto-Jewish activity. Each text, reflects the unique experiences of the author and illuminates their shared, deeply rooted attachment to Iberian culture, their Atlantic peregrinations, and their hunger for spiritual enlightenment. Through these writings, Perelis focuses on the social history of transatlantic travel, the economies of trade that linked Europe to the Americas, and the physical and spiritual journeys that injected broader religious and cultural concerns into this complex historical moment.
Author: Edmée Kingsmill Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: 0191573590 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Modern biblical scholarship interprets the Song as a collection of love lyrics. For Edmée Kingsmill, on the contrary, the essence of the Song is mystical. A principal concern of this study, however, is to uncover the relationship between the 117 verses of the Song and those biblical books to which they point. Beneath the metaphors a network of allusions is being woven, conveying a picture opposite to that we find in the prophets who, confronted with the continual 'adultery' of Israel, poured forth their condemnations with unwearying passion. In dramatic contrast, the Song presents a paradisal picture: 'For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear in the land, and the time of singing is come' (Song 2: 11-12). Thus, in presenting the ideal, the intention of the Song's author is shown to be encouragement. The inclusion of this poem in the biblical canon is understood, therefore, to be central to the purpose of the biblical literature: to bring all people to love the God of love. The book is in two parts. The first and longer part is concerned with themes, including the relationship of the Song to the early Jewish mystical literature. The second part is a short commentary intended for the reader interested in the text as much as in the related questions to which the text gives rise.
Author: Ofri Ilany Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253033853 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 196
Book Description
1. Troglodytes, Hottentots, and Hebrews: the Bible and the genesis of German ethnography -- 2. The law and the people: Mosaic Law and the German Enlightenment -- 3. The eighteenth-century polemic on the extermination of the Canaanites -- 4. "Is Judah indeed the Teutonic fatherland?" the Hebrew model and the birth of German national culture -- 5. "Lovers of Hebrew poetry": the battle over the Bible's relevance at the turn of the nineteenth century
Author: Karen Grumberg Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253042291 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
“Makes a persuasive argument” that gothic ideas “play a vital role in how Hebrew writers have confronted history, culture, and politics.” —Robert Alter, author of Hebrew and Modernity Sinister tales written since the early twentieth century by the foremost Hebrew authors, including S.Y. Agnon, Leah Goldberg, and Amos Oz, reveal a darkness at the foundation of Hebrew culture. The ghosts of a murdered Talmud scholar and his kidnapped bride rise from their graves for a nocturnal dance of death; a girl hidden by a count in a secret chamber of an Eastern European castle emerges to find that, unbeknownst to her, World War II ended years earlier; a man recounts the act of incest that would shape a trajectory of personal and national history. Reading these works together with central British and American gothic texts, Karen Grumberg illustrates that modern Hebrew literature has regularly appropriated key gothic ideas to help conceptualize the Jewish relationship to the past and, more broadly, to time. She explores why these authors were drawn to the gothic, originally a European mode associated with antisemitism, and how they use it to challenge assumptions about power and powerlessness, vulnerability and violence, and to shape modern Hebrew culture. Grumberg provides an original perspective on Hebrew literary engagement with history and sheds new light on the tensions that continue to characterize contemporary Israeli cultural and political rhetoric.
Author: Isabelle Levy
Author: Isabelle Levy
Author: Moshe Idel
Author: David Biale
Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Author: Mark Jay Mirsky
Author: Menachem Fisch
Author: Ronnie Perelis
Author: Edmée Kingsmill
Author: Ofri Ilany
Author: Karen Grumberg