This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian-born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879-1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitatsreligion. He draws upon a great variety of intellectual currents, among them, Max Scheler's philosophy of values, the historical sociology of Max Weber, the sociology of religion of Emile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel and American pragmatism. Influenced by his personal experience of marginality in German academia yet the same time unconstrained by the dictates of the German Jewish discourse, Koigen shapes these theoretical strands into an original argument which unfolds along two trajectories: theodicy of culture and ethos. Distinguished from ethics, ethos identifies the non-formal factors that foster a group's sense of collective identity as it adapts to continuous change. From a Jewish perspective, ethos is grounded in the biblical covenant as the paradigm of a social contract and corporate liability. Although the normative content of the covenantal ethos is subject to gradual secularization, its metaphysical and existential assumptions, Koigen argues, continue to inform Jewish self-understanding. The concept of ethos identifies the dialectic of tradition as it shapes Jewish religious consciousness, and, in turn, is shaped by the evolving cultural and axiological sensibilities. In consonance, Jewish identity cannot be reduced to ethnicity or a purely secular culture. Urban develops these fragmentary and inchoate theories into a sociology of religious knowledge and suggests to read Koigen not just as a Jewish sociologist but as the first sociologist of Judaism who proposes to overcome the dogmatic anti-metaphysical stance of European sociology.

Opening with the prophet Elijah's ascent into heaven and closing with the people of Judah's descent to Babylonia, 2 Kings charts the story of the two Israelite kingdoms until their destruction. This commentary unfolds the literary dimensions of 2 Kings, analyzes the strategies through which its words create a world of meaning, and examines the book's tales of prophets, political intrigue, royal apostasy, and religious reform as components of larger patterns.

2 Kings pays attention to the writers' methods of representing human character and of twisting chronological time for literary purposes. It also shows how the contests between kings and prophets are mirrored in the competing structures of regnal synchronization and prophecy-fulfillment. Much more than a common chronicle of royal achievements and disasters, 2 Kings emerges as a powerful history that creates memories and forges identities for its Jewish readers.

"2 Kings" is divided into four parts including Part One The Story of Elisha: 2 Kings 1:1-8:6"; Part Two "Revolutions in Aram, Israel, and Judah: 2 Kings 8:7-13:25"; Part Three "Turmoil and Tragedy for Israel: 2 Kings 14-17"; and Part Four "Renewal and Catastrophe for Judah: 2 Kings 18-25."

"Robert L. Cohn is professor of religion and holds the Philip and Muriel Berman Chair in Jewish studies at Lafayette College. Under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee, he lectured on Jewish interpretations of the Bible as the first American Jewish-scholar-in-residence at four Roman Catholic seminaries in Poland.""

This volume concludes the edition, translation, and commentary of the third order of the Jerusalem Talmud. The pentateuchal expression lqkh 'AAh a oeto take as wifea is more correctly translated either as a oeto acquire as wifea or a oeto select as wifea . The Tractate QidduAin deals with all aspects of acquisition as well as the permissible selections of wives and the consequences of illicit relations.

Blech argues that both Christianity and Judaism are responsible for anti-Semitism in claiming divine revelation as the source of their scriptures.

In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch, and thereafter composed and published poems about it. Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin's regime increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky's principal Shoah poems.

The scholarly study of the texts traditionally regarded as sacred in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has been an important aspect of Wissenschaft des Judentums and was often conceptualized as part of Jewish theology. Featuring studies on Isaak Markus Jost's Jewish children's Bible, Samson Raphael Hirsch's complex position on the question whether or not the Hebrew Bible is to be understood within the context of the Ancient Orient, Isaac Mayer Wise's "The Origin of Christianity," Ignaz Goldziher's Scholarship on the Qur'an, modern translators of the Qur'an into Hebrew, and the German translation of the Talmud, the volume attempts to shed light on some aspects of this phenomenon, which as a whole seems to have received few scholarly attention, and to contextualize it within the contemporary intellectual currents.

The pace of scholarly research and academic publication in fields of Judaica has quickened dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. The major consumers and producers of this new scholarship are found in Jewish Studies programs that have proliferated at institutions of higher learning around the world since the 1960s. From the vantage point of the nineties, it is difficult to fathom that until thirty years ago, Jewish studies courses were mainly limited to a few elite universities, rabbinical seminaries, and Hebrew teachers' colleges. Today there are few colleges at public or private insitutions of higher learning that do not sponsor at least some courses on aspects of Jewish study.

In light of this explosion of research on Jewish topics, non-specialists and educators can benefit from guidance through the thicket of new monographs, source anthologies, textbooks and scholarly essays. The Modern Jewish Experience, the result of a multi-year collaboration between the International Center for the University Teaching of Jewish Civilization and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, offers just such guidance on a range of issues pertaining to modern Jewish history, culture, religion, and society.

With contributions from two dozen leading scholars, The Modern Jewish Experience presents practical information and guidelines intended to expand the teaching repertoire for undergraduate courses on modern Jewish life, as well as a means for college professors to enrich and diversify their courses with discussions on otherwise neglected Jewish communities, social and political issues, religious and ideological movements, and interdisciplinary perspectives. Sample syllabi are also included for survey courses set in diverse linguistic settings. An indispensible resource for undergraduate instruction, this volume may also be used to great profit by educators of adults in synagogue and Jewish communal settings, as well as by individual students engaged in private study.

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 is the first full-scale assessment of the theological, social and ideational implications of our new understandings of ancient Israel's social and religious development. Scholars now stress the gradual emergence of Israel out of the culture of ancient Palestine and the surrounding ancient Near East rather than contrast Israel with the ancient world. Our new paradigms stress the ongoing and unfinished nature of the monotheistic 'revolution', which is indeed still in process today. Gnuse takes a further bold step in setting the emergence of monotheism in a wider intellectual context: he argues brilliantly that the interpretation of Israel's development as both an evolutionary and revolutionary process corresponds to categories of contemporary evolutionary thought in the biological and palaeontological sciences (Punctuated Equilibrium).

Gellman presents a new theology of the Jews as the Chosen People, addressing self-serving ethnocentric supremacy, cultural isolation, and defamation of religions other than Judaism. This book is traditional in taking chosenness and the truth of Judaism seriously, and in eschewing a theology of multiple covenants. At the same time, it is critical, rejecting previous concepts of chosenness, and innovative, offering for the twenty-first century a fresh way of seeing the Jews' place in the world. On this foundation, Gellman suggests a new approach to inter-religious understanding from a Jewish point of view, and examines the impact of his proposal on traditional Jewish liturgy.

This monograph discusses the Zohar, the most important book of the Kabbalah, as a late strata of the Midrashic literature. The author concentrates on the 'expanded' biblical stories in the Zohar and on its relationship to the ancient Talmudic Aggadah. The analytical and critical examination of these biblical themes reveals aspects of continuity and change in the history of the old Aggadic story and its way into the Zoharic corpus. The detailed description of this literary process also reveals the world of the authors of the Zohar, their spiritual distress, mystical orientations, and self-consciousness.

This study identifies and explores texts of restoration in a wide selection of Early Jewish Literature in order to assess the variety of ways in which Jews envisioned Israel's future restoration. Particular attention is given to the expression of restoration in what is identified in the present study as the exilic model of restoration. In this model, Israel's restoration is characterized by the features of (a) a future re-gathering, (b) the fate of the nations, and (c) the establishment of a new Temple. The present work focuses primarily on the first two features. Through this framework Jews in the Greco-Roman period could draw on Israel's history and legacy, but re-appropriate 'exile and return' in new and creative ways. Finally, the writing of Luke-Acts is investigated for its ideas of restoration and its indebtedness to Early Jewish traditions.

Irving Howe. Saul Bellow. Lionel Trilling. These are names that immediately come to mind when one thinks of the New York Jewish intellectuals of the late thirties and forties.

And yet the New York Jewish intellectual community was far larger and more diverse than is commonly thought. In "The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals" we find a group of thinkers who may not have had widespread celebrity status but who fostered a real sense of community within the Jewish world in these troubled times. What unified these men and women was their commitment and allegiance to the Jewish people.

Here we find Hayim Greenberg, Henry Hurwitz, Marie Syrkin, Maurice Samuel, Ben Halperin, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Morris Raphael Cohen, Ludwig Lewisohn, Milton Steinberg, Will Herberg, A. M. Klein, and Mordecai Kaplan, and many others. Divided into 3 sections--Opinion Makers, Men of Letters, and Spiritual Leaders--the book will be of particular interest to students and others interested in Jewish studies, American intellectual history, as well as history of the 30s and 40s.

Comprehensive overview of the entire Near East, including Egypt and ancient Israel, allowing students to work comparatively across cultures. New edition incorporates new insights from recent technological advances, and recent interest in subject territories and imperialism in the Near East. Incorporates archaeological and art historical evidence, encouraging students to engage with material culture as important evidence of the past. "Debating the evidence" section discusses controversial issues in Near Eastern studies, allowing students to engage with these important topics.

Jewish customs and traditions about death, burial and mourning are numerous, diverse and intriguing. They are considered by many to have a respectable pedigree that goes back to the earliest rabbinic period. In order to examine the accurate historical origins of many of them, an international conference was held at Tel Aviv University in 2010 and experts dealt with many aspects of the topic. This volume includes most of the papers given then, as well as a few added later. What emerges are a wealth of fresh material and perspectives, as well as the realization that the high Middle Ages saw a set of exceptional innovations, some of which later became central to traditional Judaism while others were gradually abandoned. Were these innovations influenced by Christian practice? Which prayers and poems reflect these innovations? What do the sources tell us about changing attitudes to death and life-after death? Are tombstones an important guide to historical developments? Answers to these questions are to be found in this unusual, illuminating and readable collection of essays that have been well documented, carefully edited and well indexed.

The present study addresses problems of an epistemological nature which hinge on the question of how to define Jewish thought. It will take its start in an ancient question, that of the relationship between Jewish culture, Greek philosophy, and then Greco-Roman (and Christian) thought in connection with the query into the history and genealogy of wisdom and knowledge. Our journey into the history of the denomination 'Jewish philosophy' will include a leg that will lead us to certain declarations of political, moral, and scientific principles, and then on to the birth of what is called philosophia perennis or, in Christian circles, prisca theologia. Our subject of inquiry will thus be the birth of the concept of Jewish philosophy, Jewish theology and Jewish philosophy of religion. A special emphasis will fall on the topic treated in the last part of this study: Jewish scepticism, a theme that involves a philosophical attitude founded on dialectical "enquiry", as the etymology of the Greek word skepsis properly means.

This book offers the first detailed examination of the life and works of biblical commentator Thomas Brightman (1562-1607), analysing his influential eschatological commentaries and their impact on both conservative and radical writers in early modern England. It examines in detail the hermeneutic strategies used by Brightman and argues that his method centred on the dual axes of a Jewish restoration to Palestine and the construction of a strong English national identity. This book suggests that Brightman's use of conservative modes of "literal" exegesis led him to new interpretations which had a major impact on early modern English eschatology.A radically historicised mode of exegesis sought to provide interpretations of the Old Testament that would have made sense to their original readers, leading Brightman and those who followed him to argue for the physical restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. In doing so, the standard Reformed identification of Old Testament Israel with elect Christians was denied. This book traces the evolution of the controversial idea that Israel and the church both had separate unfulfilled scriptural promises in early modern England and shows how early modern exegetes sought to re-construct a distinctly English Christian identity through reading their nation into prophecy. In examining Brightman's hermeneutic strategies and their influence, this book argues for important links between a "literal" hermeneutic, ideas of Jewish restoration and national identity construction in early modern England.Its central arguments will be of interest to all those researching the history of biblical interpretation, the role of religion in constructing national identity and the background to the later development of Christian Zionism.

This important study provides a new examination of Thomas Brightman's hermeneutical method, particularly his ideas on the restoration of the Jews. The author's thorough analysis of Brightman's approach also has more general and wider implications for understanding the development of English apocalyptic interpretation into the later seventeenth-century.' - Dr Warren Johnston, Associate Professor of History, Algoma University.

Andrew Crome's ground-breaking study of Thomas Brightman offers a new and sometimes surprising account of the development of millennial thinking in and beyond early modern England. This masterly account demonstrates the extent to which an emerging Zionism supported an emerging English nationalism, while outlining the historical roots of some of the most important of contemporary geopolitical themes." - Professor Crawford Gribben, Professor of Early Modern British History, Queen's University Belfast.

This important study provides a new examination of Thomas Brightman's hermeneutical method, particularly his ideas on the restoration of the Jews. The author's thorough analysis of Brightman's approach also has more general and wider implications for understanding the development of English apocalyptic interpretation into the later seventeenth-century.' - Dr Warren Johnston, Associate Professor of History, Algoma University."

This edited collection of essays critically examines how diverse religions of the world represent, understand, theologize, theorize and respond to disability and/or chronic illness. Contributors employ a wide variety of methodological approaches including ethnography, historical, cultural, or textual analysis, personal narrative, and theological/philosophical investigation.

The institution of the American synagogue has played a significant role in the history of American Judaism, which remains an incomplete history if it is limited to the lives of individuals and events. This work helps complete the history as it is the first reference book to document the historical development of many individual synagogues in the United States and Canada. It includes over 350 entries of synagogues from among the four main movements, each of which have made an impact on the Jewish community, either locally or beyond. It is an essential tool for researchers, scholars, and students, as well as anyone interested in the historical aspects of American Judaism. An essay on the historical development of the American Synagogue by Frances Weinman Schwartz, introduces the volume. Entries are arranged alphabetically by city within each state. Synagogue descriptions include the date of the congregation's founding, the reason for its founding and its congregational mission, the history of buildings and neighborhood, its local or national historical impact, its significance in the movement to which it belongs, major episodes in the congregation's history, as well as details about the service of its rabbis. A brief bibliography follows each entry, and a general bibliography and index complete the volume.

Recent discussion of biblical law sees it either as a response to socio-economic factors or as an intellectual tradition. In either case it is viewed as the product of elites that form an international community drawing on a common culture. This book takes that fundamental discussion a step further by proposing that 'law' is an inappropriate term for the biblical codes, and that they represent, rather, the 'moral advice' of scribes working independently of the legal framework and appealing to Yahweh as authority. Only by prolonged exegesis and through the transformation of Judaean religion does this 'advice' take the form of divine law binding on Jews.>