This is the first biography in English of Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), based upon the new critical edition of his correspondence. Reuchlin became most famous as the Catholic defender of Jewish books at the beginning of the 16th century, clarifying the Catholic Church's position toward the Jews. The book contributes to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration on Relations with the Jews of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Franz Posset, PhD, Dipl.-Theol., is internationally known as Catholic Luther scholar, specializing in the theology and history of the Renaissance and Reformation, author of Pater Bernhardus: Martin Luther and Bernard of Clairvaux (1999), The Front-Runner of the Catholic Reformation (on Johann von Staupitz) (2003), Renaissance Monks (2005), The Real Luther (2011), Marcus Marulus and the Biblia Latina of 1489 (2013), and a book in German, Unser Martin. Martin Luther aus der Sicht katholischer Sympathisanten (2015).

A Truly All-American Renaissance ProphetEven without any actual historical references, Lamah contends that the contents of this narrative is a true story in reality. And after all, what is reality?This poignant book is, in essence, a story that is all about the power and significance of love. It begins at the closing years of the 18th century and has its final installment of inspirational spiritual muse manifested during the early to mid-19th Century. The source of this loving tale is an earthbound disembodied soul of unprecedented spiritual substance, who remained in spirit close to the geographic origins of this prophetic story until the end of the 20th Century. It was then that several conspiring, sometimes tragic circumstances brought together two initiate, spiritually gifted Medicine Men whose lives in this Garden of Eden were necessarily separated by the passage of more than a hundred years. They would dedicate their modest lives to the healing of others' spirits through that immutable power of love, a love that was and should always remain necessarily unconditional, and always boundless.

Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt's indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.

One of the world's experts on classical Jewish history and literature offers an authoritative interpretation of the three major periods of Jewish history from the time of the Bible up to the present. What emerges is a captivating account of the life-forming nature of a dynamic religion in vastly differing historical contexts. Glossary, maps, illustrations, photographs.

Examines dissent from rabbinic Judaism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period to consider it as a category within the history and culture of the Jewish people.

Winner of the 2015 Bibliography Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries! The AJL Judaica Bibliography Award was established to encourage the publication of outstanding Judaica bibliographies. The intellectual legacy of the ancient community of Iranian Jews rests in several large but neglected Judeo-Persian manuscript collections. The largest in the West, and the third largest collection in the world (198 manuscripts), belongs to the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York. Primarily a work of reference, this Catalog informs scholars in the fields of Judaica and Iranica about the range of subjects (history, poetry, medicine, philology, etc.) that engaged Iranian Jews between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. It reflects the intellectual parameters of Iranian Jewry by describing the extent to which they were acquainted with classical Jewish texts while they were deeply enmeshed in the literary and artistic sensibilities of their Iranian environment.

Jessica M. Keady uses insights from social science and gender theory to shed light on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the community at Qumran. Through her analysis Keady shows that it was not only women who could be viewed as an impure problem, but also that men shared these characteristics as well. The first framework adopted by Keady is masculinity studies, specifically Raewyn Connell's hegemonic masculinity, which Keady applies to the Rule of the Community (in its 1QS form) and the War Scroll (in its 1QM form), to demonstrate the vulnerable and uncontrollable aspects of ordinary male impurities. Secondly, the embodied and empowered aspects of impure women are revealed through an application of embodiment theories to selected passages from 4QD (4Q266 and 4Q272) and 4QTohorot A (4Q274). Thirdly, sociological insights from Susie Scott's understanding of the everyday - through the mundane, the routine and the breaking of rules - reveal how impurity disrupts the constructions of daily life. Keady applies Scott's three conceptual features for understanding the everyday to the Temple Scroll (11QTa) and the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa) to demonstrate the changing dynamics between ordinary impure males and impure females. Underlying each of these three points is the premise that gender and purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls communities are performative, dynamic and constantly changing.

This is the first English commentary on Josephus' Against Apion, his apologetic treatise which rebuts Egyptian and Hellenistic slurs on the Judean people. Accompanied by a new translation, the commentary provides full analysis of the historical, literary, and rhetorical features of the treatise, and analyses its engagement with the cultural politics of the ancient world.

This detailed examination of the "Torah" (the first five books of the Bible) lays particular emphasis on the role and character of the Torah's transcendent God, as its central protagonist. Viewing both the 'Torah' and its God as purely human creations, humanist Jordan Jay Hillman seeks in no way to devalue this hugely influential book. His aim instead is to reinterpret it as a still vital text that used theistic means appropriate to its time to inspire people toward their worthiest human purposes. It is thus for its 'timeless themes' rather than its 'dated particularities' (including its model of a transcendent God) that we should honour the 'Torah' in our time as both the wellspring of Judaic culture and a major influence on Christian and Islamic ethics and morals. From his humanist perspective and his background as a lawyer and professor of law at North-western University (now emeritus), Hillman offers many insights into the narrative and wide-ranging legal code of "Genesis", "Exodus", "Leviticus", "Numbers", and "Deuteronomy"- including their many contradictions and anomalies. His analysis draws on a broad scholarly consensus regarding the 'Documentary Theory', as it bears on the identities and periods of the Torah's human sources. This thorough explication of an often misunderstood ancient text will help humanists, and many theists alike, to appreciate the rich moral, ethical, and cultural heritage of the 'Torah' and its enduring relevance to our time.

As a post-Holocaust Jewish thinker, Marc Ellis inhabits the land between homes that we call exile. In this intensely personal work he explores how the religious landscape looks from the perspective of an exile -- and how religious searching continually leads away from the domestic comforts of received Jewish and Christian platitudes and into new struggles for religious authenticity.

At once a memoir and an examination of conscience, Ellis' autobiographical starting points spark reflections on Jewish-Christian relations, liberation theology, religion and politics, and issues of justice in Israel and Palestine. His experiences also occasion meditations on solitude and solidarity, gratitude and alienation, memory and responsibilty. They exemplify how religiously committed persons, though exiled forever from yesterday's certitudes, can yet practice covenantal fidelity.

First Order: Zeraim / Tractate Peah and Demay is the second volume in the edition of the Jerusalem Talmud, a basic work in Jewish Patristic. It presents basic Jewish texts on the organization of private and public charity, and on the modalities of coexistence of the ritually observant and the non-observant. This part of the Jerusalem Talmud has almost no counterpart in the Babylonian Talmud. Its study is prerequisite for an understanding of the relevant rules of Jewish tradition.

Throughout their history, the affliction of the Jewish people has been central to Jewish self-understanding. In the modern world, however, this paradigm of adversity is challenged by the success of the Jewish state of Israel and by the auspicious circumstances of Jews in the United States. Will this very success prove fatal to the survival of Judaism? Can the trends of assimilation and secularization be resisted? Why do certain Jewish groups, especially the Orthodox, continue to thrive in the face of these challenges? These are the questions that Bernard Susser and Charles Liebman ponder in this thoughtfuly and provocative work. They identify aspects of Orthodoxy - such as its reverence for study and its ability to set and maintain boundaries-that can be emulated by non-Orthodox jews, and suggest that these aspects may hold out the best hope for meaninful Jewish survival.

A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity. Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time:" I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.

This volume collects papers written during the past two decades that explore various aspects of late Second Temple period Jewish literature and the figurative art of the Late Antique synagogues. Most of the papers have a special emphasis on the reinterpretation of biblical figures in early Judaism or demonstrate how various biblical traditions converged into early Jewish theologies. The structure of the volume reflects the main directions of the author's scholarly interest, examining the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and Late Antique synagogues. The book is edited for the interest of scholars of Second Temple Judaism, biblical interpretation, synagogue studies and the effective history of Scripture.

This volume examines the development of the non-liturgical parts of the Central Conference of American Rabbis' Haggadot. Through an understanding of the changes in American Jewish educational patterns and the CCAR's theology, it explores how the CCAR Haggadah was changed over time to address the needs of the constituency. While there have been many studies of the Haggadah and its development over the course of Jewish history, there has been no such study of the non-liturgical parts of the Haggadah that reflect the needs of the audience it reaches. How the CCAR, the first and largest of American-born Judaisms, addressed the changing needs of its members through its literature for the Passover Seder reveals much about the development of the movement. This in turn provides for the readers of this book an understanding of how American Judaism has developed.

The opening sections of some exegetical Midrashim deal with the same type of material that is found in introductions to medieval rabbinic Bible commentaries. The application of Goldberg's form analysis to these sections reveals the new form "Inner-Midrashic Introduction" (IMI) as a thematic discourse on introductory issues to biblical books. By its very nature the IMI is embedded within the comments on the first biblical verse (1:1). Further analysis of medieval rabbinic Bible commentary introductions in terms of their formal, thematic, and material characteristics, reveals that a high degree of continuity exists between them and the IMIs, including another newly discovered form, the "Inner-Commentary Introduction". These new discoveries challenge the current view that traces the origin of Bible introduction in Judaism exclusively to non-Jewish models. They also point to another important link between the Midrashim and the commentaries, i.e., the decomposition of the functional form midrash in the new discoursive context of the commentaries. Finally, the form analysis demonstrates how larger discourses are formed in the exegetical Midrashim.

Scholars have long noted the prevalence of praise of God in Luke-Acts. This monograph offers the first comprehensive analysis of this important feature of Luke's narrative. It focuses on twenty-six scenes in which praise occurs, studied in light of ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman discourse about praise of deity and in comparison with how praise appears in the narratives of Tobit and Joseph and Aseneth. The book argues that praise of God functions as a literary motif in all three narratives, serving to mark important moments in each plot, particularly in relation to the themes of healing, conversion, and revelation. In Luke-Acts specifically, the plot presents the long-expected visitation of God, which arrives in the person of Jesus, bringing glory to the people of Israel and revelation to the Gentiles. The motif of praise of God aligns closely with the plot's structure, communicating to the reader that varied (and often surprising) events in the story - such as healings in Luke and conversions in Acts - together comprise the plan of God. The praise motif thus demonstrates the author's efforts to combine disparate source material into carefully constructed historiography.

After a survey of recent approaches to the study of Paul's use of Scripture, the four main chapters explore the use of Isa. 54:1 in Gal. 4:27, the catena of scriptural texts in 2 Cor. 6:16-18, Hos. 1:10 and 2:23 in Rom. 9:25-26 and Isa. 57:19 in Eph. 2:17. In each case, the ancienwriter seeks to place the letter in its historical context and rhetorical situation, identify the significance of any conflations or modifications that have taken place in the citation process, analyse the citation's function within its immediate context, compare its use by Paul with the various ways in which the text is interpreted and appropriated by other Second Temple writers, and evaluate the main proposals offered as explanations for the riddle posed by the citation. That done, he offers his own account of the hermeneutic at work, based on an analysis of the explicit and implicit hermeneutical pointers through which the letter guides its readers in their appropriation of Scripture. This book compares the hermeneutical approaches of the four letters and draws conclusionsconcerning the interplay of continuity and discontinuity between Scripture and gospel in Paul's letters and the relationship between grace and Gentile inclusion in his theology.

This collection is about various topics in Jewish Studies by one of the greatest scholars of the previous century. The subjects span the whole length and breadth of Jewish history and literature, from 'A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts in Judaism' to 'The Dogmas of Judaism', and from 'Safed in the Sixteenth Century' to 'Abraham Geiger-Leopold Zunz'. In Encyclopedia Judaica, Meir Ben-Horin says, "Schecter's Studies in Judaism remain indispensable documents of American Jewish religious Conservatism."

On November 10, 1975, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism. The move shocked millions, especially in the United States- the country largely responsible for founding the UN. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American Ambassador to the UN, denounced this attack on Israel as an anti-Semitic assault on democracy and stood up to the Soviet-backed alliance of Communist dictatorships and Third World autocracies that supported the resolution. His eloquent stand brought him celebrity in the U.S., but ultimately shortened his tenure at the UN by alienating American allies, adversaries, and much of the foreign policy establishment-including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Nevertheless, Moynihan's moment was a turning point: a harbinger of a shift in American culture and politics that would culminate in the Reagan Revolution. Moynihan paved the way for a more muscular, idealistic, neoconservative foreign policy and for a new style of defiant "cowboy" diplomacy. In this book, Gil Troy argues that America's idea of itself-still torn, in the mid-'70s, between post-Vietnam and -Watergate defeatism and a growing sense of optimism-changed with Moynihan, altering both the left and the right in ways that continue to play out in the 21st century. Much of the rhetoric of this era survives in domestic foreign policy debates and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, suggesting that Moynihan's struggle has much to reveal about American politics and its position on the world stage.

Many interpreters read John 6 as a contrast between Jesus and Judaism: Jesus repudiates Moses and manna and offers himself as an alternative. In contrast, this monograph argues that John 6 places elements of the Exodus story in a positive and constructive relationship to Jesus. This reading leads to an understanding of John as an interpreter of Exodus who, like other contemporary Jewish interpreters, sees current experiences in light of the Exodus story. This approach to John offers new possibilities for assessing the gospela (TM)s relationship to Jewish scripture, its dualism, and its metaphorical language.

After World War II, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921-2007) published works in English and German by eminent Israeli scholars, in this way introducing them to a wider audience in Europe and North America. The series he founded for that purpose, Studia Judaica, continues to offer a platform for scholarly studies and editions that cover all eras in the history of the Jewish religion.

Thoroughly exploring the history of the conflict between Christians and Jews from medieval to modern times, this wide-ranging volume includes newly uncovered material from the recently opened post-Soviet archives. Anna Sapir Abulafia delineates controversial issues of inter-faith confrontation, and a number of eminent scholars from around the globe discuss openly and objectively the dynamics of Jewish creative response in the face of violence. Through the analysis of the histories of the Christian and Jewish religious traditions, this book provides a valuable understanding of their relationship as a modern day phenomenon.

Volume 12 in the edition of the complete Jerusalem Talmud. Tractates Sanhedrin and Makkot belong together as one tractate, covering procedural law for panels of arbitration, communal rabbinic courts (in bare outline) and an elaborate construction of hypothetical criminal courts supposedly independent of the king's administration. Tractate Horaiot, an elaboration of Lev. 4:1-26, defines the roles of High Priest, rabbinate, and prince in a Commonwealth strictly following biblical rules.