This book presents a fresh approach to the question of the historical continuities and discontinuities of Jew-hatred, juxtaposing chapters dealing with the same phenomenon - one in the pre-modern, one in the modern period. How do the circumstances of interreligious violence differ in pre-Reformation Europe, the modern Muslim world, and the modern Western world? In addition to the diachronic comparison, most chapters deal with the significance of religion for the formation of anti-Jewish stereotypes. The direct dialogue of small-scale studies bridging the chronological gap brings out important nuances: anti-Zionist texts appropriating medieval ritual murder accusations; modern-day pogroms triggered by contemporary events but fuelled by medieval prejudices; and contemporary stickers drawing upon long-inherited knowledge about what a "Jew" looks like. These interconnections, however, differ from the often-assumed straightforward continuities between medieval and modern anti-Jewish hatred. The book brings together many of the most distinguished scholars of this field, creating a unique dialogue between historical periods and academic disciplines.

This book offers a creative and accessible exploration of two comic book series: Y: The Last Man and Saga It examines themes pertinent to the 21st century and its challenges, such as those of diversity and religious pluralism, issues of gender and war, heroes and moral failures, and forgiveness and seeking justice Through close interdisciplinary reading and personal narratives, the author delves into the complex worlds of Y and Saga in search of an ethics, meaning, and a path resonant with real world struggles Reading these works side-by-side, the analysis draws parallels and seeks common themes around four central ideas: seeking and making meaning in a meaningless world; love and parenting through oppression and grief; peacefulness when surrounded by violence; and the perils and hopes of diversity and communion This timely, attentive, and thoughtful study will resonate with scholars and students of comic studies, media and cultural studies, philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and popular culture studies

First Published in 1989 London Jewry and London Politics 1889-1986 is a study of the relationship between the London Jewish community, the London County Council, and the Greater London Council. Geoffrey Alderman draws on a wealth of primary and secondary material to illuminate a dialogue that began, a hundred years ago, in a mood of great optimism and co-operation, but which ended, in the early 1980s, in a welter of insults and antagonisms. Alderman adopts a chronological approach, looking first at the Jewish involvement in London government prior to the establishment of the London County Council in 1889. He then analyses the contribution made by London Jewry to the periods of progressive control and conservative rule. With the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe the nature of the Jewish electorate underwent considerable change and Alderman describes how the government exploited prejudice against the Jewish community causing LCC to adopt blatantly antisemitic policies. The Labour victory of 1934 was in part due to the Jewish vote, but the period of Labour rule was a disappointment and an anticlimax. This illuminating account of hundred years is an essential read for scholars and researchers of British history.

This book unpacks the history of British-Israelism in the UK. Remarkably, this subject has had very little attention: remarkable, because at its height in the post-war era, the British-Israelist movement could claim to have tens of thousands of card-carrying adherents and counted amongst its membership admirals, peers, television personalities, MPs and members of the royal family including the King of England. British-Israelism is the belief that the people of Britain are the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. It originated in the writing of a Scottish historian named John Wilson, who toured the country in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Providing a guide to the history of British-Israelism as a movement, including the formation of the British-Israel World Federation, Covenant Publishing, and other institutions, the book explores the complex ways in which British-Israelist thought mirrored developments in ethnic British nationalism during the Twentieth Century. A detailed study on the subject of British-Israelism is necessary, because British-Israelists constitute an essential element of British life during the most violent and consequential century of its history. As such, this will be a vital resource for any scholar of Minority Religions, New Religious Movements, Nationalism and British Religious History.

Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans examines the life, work, and influence of this controversial figure, who remains the most highly visible of the Roman client kings under Augustus. Herod's rule shaped the world in which Christianity arose and his influence can still be seen today. In this expanded second edition, additions to the original text include discussion of the archaeological evidence of Herod's activity, his building program, numismatic evidence, and consideration of the roles and activities of other client kings in relation to Herod. This volume includes new maps and numerous photographs, and these coupled with the new additions to the text make this a valuable tool for those interested in the wider Roman world of the late first century BCE at both under- and postgraduate levels. Herod remains the definitive study of the life and activities of the king known traditionally as Herod the Great.

Volume 20 of The Jewish Law Annual features six detailed studies. The first three articles consider questions which fall under the rubric of halakhic methodology. The final three articles address substantive questions regarding privacy, cohabitation and medical triage. All three 'methodological' articles discuss creative interpretation of legal sources. Two (Cohen and Gilat) consider the positive and forward-thinking aspects of such halakhic creativity. The third (Radzyner) examines tendentious invocation of new halakhic arguments to advance an extraneous interest. Cohen explores positive creativity and surveys the innovative midrashic exegeses of R. Meir Simha Hakohen of Dvinsk, demonstrating his willingness to base rulings intended for implementation on such exegesis. Gilat examines exegetical creativity as to the laws of capital offenses. Midrashic argumentation enables the rabbinical authorities to set aside the literal sense of the harsh biblical laws, and implement more suitable penological policies. On the other hand, Radzyner's article on tendentious innovation focuses on a situation where novel arguments were advanced in the context of a power struggle, namely, Israeli rabbinical court efforts to preserve jurisdiction. Two articles discuss contemporary dilemmas. Spira & Wainberg consider the hypothetical scenario of triage of an HIV vaccine, analyzing both the talmudic sources for resolving issues related to allocating scarce resources, and recent responsa. Warburg discusses the status of civil marriage and cohabitation vis-a-vis payment of spousal maintenance: can rabbinical courts order such payment? Schreiber's article addresses the question of whether privacy is a core value in talmudic law: does it indeed uphold a 'right to privacy,' as recent scholars have claimed? The volume concludes with a review of Yuval Sinai's Application of Jewish Law in the Israeli Courts (Hebrew).

In recent years scholars have re-evaluated the "parting of the ways" between Judaism and Christianity, reaching new understandings of the ways shared origins gave way to two distinct and sometimes inimical religious traditions. But this has been a profoundly textual task, relying on the writings of rabbis, bishops, and other text-producing elites to map the terrain of the "parting." This book takes up the question of the divergence of Judaism and Christianity in terms of material--the stuff made, used, and left behind by the persons that lived in and between these religions as they were developing. Considering the glass, clay, stone, paint, vellum, and papyrus of ancient Jews and Christians, this book maps the "parting" in new ways, and argues for a greater role for material and materialism in our reconstructions of the past.

First published in 1994. This volume, dedicated to Dr David Patterson, founding President of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies, takes as its theme Jewish education and learning throughout the ages. But it is the 'Academy' - interpreted here to mean an institution of Judaic scholarship - which dominates this collection of essays. For almost three thousand years centres of Jewish learning have flourished in many parts of the world. This volume discusses these institutions from biblical times to the present. From the time of the Mishnaic Academy at Yavneh, established in the first century CE, the academies were more than schools of higher religious education. They incorporated rational analysis of the scriptures, the natural sciences and other secular studies. Some of the most celebrated academies, such as those in Cairo and Tunisia, and later in the Iberian Peninsula were of a very high intellectual order, sometimes superior to the great Christian universities. It was at these institutions that the great Jewish legal and literary works were written and completed. This collection of essays has been written by outstanding scholars who have been associated with David Patterson and the Oxford Centre. The essays explore the nature and function of the 'Jewish Academies' in the broadest sense, the leading personalities associated with them and their social, cultural and moral effect on the Jewish communities of their day.

This volume is part of the Changing Perspectives sub-series, which is constituted by anthologies of articles by world-renowned biblical scholars and historians that have made an impact on the field and changed its course during the last decades. This volume offers a collection of seminal essays by Keith Whitelam on the early history of ancient Palestine and the origins and emergence of Israel. Collected together in one volume for the first time, and featuring one unpublished article, this volume will be of interest to biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholars interested in the politics of historical representation but also on critical ways of constructing the history of ancient Palestine.

Agunot (Agunah, sing., meaning anchored in Hebrew) is a Jewish term describing women who cannot remarry because their husband has disappeared. According to Jewish law (Halacha) a woman can get out of the marriage only if the husband releases her by granting a divorce writ (Get), if he dies, or if his whereabouts is not known. Women whose husbands cannot be located, and who have not been granted a Get, are considered Agunot. The Agunah phenomenon was of major concern in East European Jewry and much referred to in Hebrew and Yiddish media and fiction. Most nineteenth-century Agunot cases came from Eastern Europe, where most Jews resided (twentieth-century Agunot were primarily in North America, and will be the subject of a forthcoming book). Seven variations of Agunot have been identified: Deserted wives; women who refused to receive, or were not granted, a Get; widowed women whose brothers-in-law refused to grant them permission to marry someone else (Halitza); women whose husbands remains were not found; improperly or incorrectly written Gets; women whose husbands became mentally ill and were not competent to grant a Get; women refused a Get by husbands who had converted to Christianity or Islam. The book explores the reasons for desertion and the plight of the left-alone wife. Key is the change from a legal issue to a social one, with changing attitudes to philanthropy and public opinion at the fore of explanation. A statistical database of circa 5000 identified Agunot is to be published simultaneously in a separate companion volume (978-1-78976-167-2).

This book provides a new reading of the biblical book of Numbers in a commentary form. Mainstream readings have tended to see the book as a haphazard junkyard of material that connects Genesis-Leviticus with Deuteronomy (and Joshua), composed at a late stage in the history of ancient Israel. By contrast, this book reads Numbers as part of a wider work of Genesis-Joshua, a carefully crafted programmatic settler colonial document for a new society in Canaanite highlands in the late second millennium BCE that seeks to replace pre-existing indigenous societies. In the context of the tremendous influence that the biblical documents have had on the world in the last 2,000-3,000 years, the book also offers pointers towards reading these texts today. This volume is a fascinating study of this text, and will be of interest not only to biblical scholars, but to anyone with an interest in the history of the ancient Levant, and colonisation and colonialism in the ancient world more broadly.

Changing the Immutable focuses on how segments of Orthodox society have taken upon themselves to rewrite the past, by covering up and literally cutting out that which does not fit in with their contemporary world-view. For reasons ranging from theological considerations to internal religious politics to changing religious standards, such Jewish self-censorship abounds, and Marc Shapiro discusses examples from each category, In a number of cases the original text is shown alongside how it looked after it was censored, together with an explanation of what made the text problematic and how the issue was resolved. The author considers how some Orthodox historiography sees truth as entirely instrumental. Drawing on the words of leading rabbis, particularly from the haredi world, he shows that what is important is not historical truth, but a 'truth' that leads to observance and faith in the sages. He concludes with a discussion of the concept of truth in the Jewish tradition, and when this truth can be altered. Changing the Immutable also reflects on the paradox of a society that regards itself as traditional, but at the same time is uncomfortable with much of the inherited tradition and thus feels the need to create an idealized view of the past. It considers this practice in context, showing the precedents for this in Jewish history dating back to talmudic times. Since the subjects of censorship have included such figures as Maimonides, Bahya ibn Pakuda, Rashi, Naphtali Herz Wessely, Moses Mendelssohn, the Hatam Sofer, Samson Raphael Hirsch, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, A. I. Kook, and J. B. Soloveitchik, as well as issues such as Zionism, biblical interpretation, and attitudes to women and gentiles, Changing the Immutable also serves as a study in Jewish intellectual history and how the ideas of one era do not always find favour with future generations.

The book brings forth various perspectives on the Israeli "homeland" (moledet) from various known Israeli intellectuals such as Boaz Evron, Menachem Brinker, Jacqueline Kahanoff and more. Binding together various academic fields to deal with the question of the essence of the Israeli homeland: from the examination of the status of the Israeli homeland by such known sociologist as Michael Feige, to the historical analysis of Robert Wistrich of the place Israel occupies in history in relation to historical antisemitism. The study also examines various movements that bear significant importance on the development of the notion of the Israeli homeland in Israeli society: Such movement as "The New Hebrews" and Hebrewism are examined both historically in relation to their place in Zionist history and ideologically in comparison with other prominent movements. Drawing on the work of Jacqueline Kahanoff to provide a unique Mediterranean model for the Israeli homeland, the volume examines prominent models among the Religious Zionist sector of Israeli society regarding the relation of the biblical homeland to the actual homeland of our times. Discussing the various interpretations of the concept of the nation and its land in the discourse of Hebrew and Israeli identity, the book is a key resource for scholars interested in nationalism, philosophy, modern Jewish history and Israeli Studies.

This is a study of the economic, social, legal and religious position of three minorities within the medieval Christian kingdom of Hungary. The book demonstrates that the status of such minorities depended not simply on Christian religious tenets, but on a larger framework--including the legal and social system, economic possibilities, and conflicts between kings and the clergy. It also investigates the situation "at the gate of Christendom"--the frontier with the nomad world--and the way this affected both Christian and non-Christian interaction and Christian ideology.

Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome colour film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community, an entire culture that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the United States to Canada, England, Poland, and Israel. To archives, film preservation laboratories, and an abandoned Luftwaffe airfield. Ultimately, Kurtz locates seven living survivors from this lost town, including an eighty six year old man who appears in the film as a thirteen year old boy. Painstakingly assembled from interviews, photographs, documents, and artifacts, Three Minutes in Poland tells the rich, funny, harrowing, and surprisingly intertwined stories of these seven survivors and their Polish hometown. Originally a travel souvenir, David Kurtz's home movie became the sole remaining record of a vibrant town on the brink of catastrophe. From this brief film, Glenn Kurtz creates a riveting exploration of memory, loss, and improbable survival, a monument to a lost world.

Originally published in 1996 Religious Higher Education in the United States looks at the issue of higher education and a lack of a clearly articulated purpose, an issue particularly challenging to religiously-affiliated institutions. This volume attempts to address the problems currently facing denomination-affiliated institutions of higher education, beginning with an introduction to government aid and the regulation of religious colleges and universities in the US. The greater part of the volume consists of 24 chapters, each of which begins with a historical essay followed by annotated bibliographical entries covering primary and secondary sources dating back to 1986 on various denomination-connected institutions.

This volume locates the contemporary study of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such, it challenges the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates. By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this collection of articles makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits. The collection brings together a range of perspectives on this subject, including a comparison between Islamophobia in early modern Spain and twenty-first century Europe, an examination of the 'new anti-Semitism', and an analysis of online anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic jokes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

The term Ethical Monotheism is an important marker in Judaism's tumultuous transition into the modern era. The term emerged in the context of culture-wars concerning the question of whether or not Jews could or should become emancipated citizens of modern European states. It appeared in arguments whether or not Judaism could be considered a Religion of Reason-a symbolic, motivational representation of a universal morality, and in debates about whether or not Judaism could or should reform itself into a Religion of Reason. This book is both a decisive departure from such discussions and an attempt to add a further, post-modern, statement to their ongoing development. As departure, it refuses to take for granted a philosophical conception of Religion of Reason as the standard for Ethical Monotheism according to which Judaism was to be evaluated or reformed. As continuation, the book undertakes a phenomenology of Jewish modes of ethical religiosity that allows it to inquire what kind of ethical monotheism Judaism might be. Through sophisticated analysis of select "snapshots," or "fragments of a hologram," guided by a robust theory of religion, the author discloses Judaic ethical monotheism as an ongoing wrestling with the meaning of justice. By closely examining five main "snapshots" of this long process-the Bible, rabbinic Judaism, Maimonides, The Zohar, and the modern philosophers, Buber and Levinas-the author offers his own constructive philosophy of Judaism and his own distinctive philosophy of religion. Ethical Monotheism offers a new way to think about Judaism as a religion and as a coherent philosophical debate, and demonstrates the need to integrate philosophy, history, cognitive psychology, anthropology, theology, and history of science in the study of "religion."

This book examines the role of women in Jewish family negotiations, using the setting of Italy from the end of the Renaissance to the Baroque. In ghettos at night and under the scrutiny of inquisitions, Jews flourished. Life and learning were enriched by Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, transalpine Europe, west and east, and Catholic neighbors. Rabbinic discourse represented conflicting customs in family formation and dissolution, especially at moments of crisis for women: forced betrothal; physical, mental and financial abuse; polygamy, and abandonment. In this book, case studies illustrate the ambiguity, drama, and danger to which women were exposed, as well as opportunities to make their voices heard and to extricate themselves from situations by forcing a divorce, collecting or seizing assets, and going to Catholic notaries to bequeath their assets outside traditional inheritance, often to other women. Despite intrusion by rabbis, their ability for coercion was limited, and their threats of punishments reflected the rhetoric of weakness rather than realistic options for implementation. The focus of this text is not what the law says, but rather how it enabled individual Jews, especially women, to speak and to act.

First published in 1947 The Essentials of Liberal Judaism explores the fundamental ideas of liberal Judaism. Rabbi Israel Mattuck explains that liberal Judaism is concerned not only with the question, where shall we find the teachings of Judaism, but also with the question, how shall we find them? He discusses important themes like conception of God in Judaism; grounds for the belief in God; problem of evil; guidance of God in human history; sin, repentance and atonement; Judaism and the social order; liberal Judaism and orthodox Judaism; differences between Judaism and Christianity and what it means to be a Jew, to argue that it is the fundamental principle of liberal Judaism that Judaism is a developing religion. This book is a must read for scholars of Judaism, history of Judaism, and religion.

In the aftermath of the conquest of the Holy Land by the Romans and their destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos-both they and their God were rendered homeless. In a religious tradition that had equated Divine approval with peaceful dwelling on the Land, this situation was intolerable. So the rabbis, aspirants for leadership of the post-destruction Jewish community, appropriated inherited traditions and used them as building blocks for a new religious structure. Not unexpectedly, given the circumstances, this new rabbinic formation devoted considerable attention to matters of space and place. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place offers the first comprehensive study of spatiality in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, exploring how the rabbis reoriented the Jewish relationship with space and place following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Tuan and LeFebvre, who define the crisis that "homelessness" represents and argue for the deep relationship of human societies to their places, the book examines the compositions of the rabbis and discovers both a surprisingly aggressive rabbinic spatial imagination as well as places, most notably the synagogue, where rabbinic attention to space and place is suppressed or absent. It concludes that these represent two different but simultaneous rabbinic strategies for re-placing God and Israel-strategies that at the same time allow God and Israel to find a place anywhere. This study offers new insight into the centrality of space and place to rabbinic religion after the destruction of the Temple, and as such would be a key resource to students and scholars interested in rabbinic and ancient Judaism, as well as providing a major new case study for anthropologists interested in the study of space.

Violence and Messianism looks at how some of the figures of the so-called Renaissance of "Jewish" philosophy between the two world wars - Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber - grappled with problems of violence, revolution and war. At once inheriting and breaking with the great historical figures of political philosophy such as Kant and Hegel, they also exerted considerable influence on the next generation of European philosophers, like Levinas, Derrida and others. This book aims to think through the great conflicts in the past century in the context of the theory of catastrophe and the beginning of new messianic time. Firstly, it is a book about means and ends - that is, about whether good ends can be achieved through bad means. Second, it is a book about time: peace time, war time, time it takes to transfer from war to peace, etc. Is a period of peace simply a time that excludes all violence? How long does it take to establish peace (to remove all violence)? Building on this, it then discusses whether there is anything that can be called messianic acting. Can we - are we capable of, or allowed to - act violently in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah and peace? And would we then be in messianic time? Finally, how does this notion of messianism - a name for a sudden and unpredictable event - fit in, for example, with our contemporary understanding of terrorist violence? The book attempts to understand such pressing questions by reconstructing the notions of violence and messianism as they were elaborated by 20th century Jewish political thought. Providing an important contribution to the discussion on terrorism and the relationship between religion and violence, this book will appeal to theorists of terrorism and ethics of war, as well as students and scholars of Philosophy, Jewish studies and religion studies.

A History of Anti-Semitism examines the history, culture and literature of antisemitism from antiquity to the present. With contributions from an international team of scholars, whose essays were specially commissioned for this volume, it covers the long history of antisemitism starting with ancient Greece and Egypt, through the anti-Judaism of early Christianity, and the medieval era in both the Christian and Muslim worlds when Jews were defined as 'outsiders,' especially in Christian Europe. This portrayal often led to violence, notably pogroms that often accompanied Crusades, as well as to libels against Jews. The volume also explores the roles of Luther and the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the debate over Jewish emancipation, Marxism, and the social disruptions after World War 1 that led to the rise of Nazism and genocide. Finally, it considers current issues, including the dissemination of hate on social media and the internet and questions of definition and method.

First published in 1907 and this edition in 1971 with a preface by C. C. Arsonfeld, Israel in Europe outlines the fortunes of the Jews of the Diaspora from the earliest times until the twentieth century. It is indeed no exaggeration to say that the Jews have been in Europe for a longer period than some of the nations which glory in the title European. And yet, despite the length of their sojourn among the peoples of the West, the majority of Jews have remained in many essential respects as Oriental as they were in the time of the Patriarchs. This penetrating study, source material for research into world Jewry, the history of anti-semitism and the consequent ideas of Zionism, is an indispensable reference work for proper understanding of this significant Jewish problem and of the historical roots of the present state of Israel.

This volume examines the relevance of Emmanuel Levinas's work to recent developments in analytic philosophy. Contemporary analytic philosophers working in metaethics, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysic of personal identity have argued for views similar to those espoused by Levinas. Often disparately pursued, Levinas's account of "ethics as first philosophy" affords a way of connecting these respective enterprises and showing how moral normativity enters into the structure of rationality and personal identity. In metaethics, the volume shows how Levinas's moral phenomenology relates to recent work on the normativity of rationality and intentionality, and how it can illuminate a wide range of moral concepts including accountability, moral intuition, respect, conscience, attention, blame, indignity, shame, hatred, dependence, gratitude and guilt. The volume also tests Levinas's innovative claim that ethical relations provide a way of accounting for the irreducibility of personal identity to psychological identity. The essays here contribute to ongoing discussions about the metaphysical significance and sustainability of a naturalistic but nonreductive account of personhood. Finally, the volume connects Levinas's second-person standpoint with analogous developments in moral philosophy.