In this volume, Alessandro Grazi offers the first intellectual biography of the Italian Jewish writer and politician David Levi (1816-1898). In this intriguing journey through the mysterious rites of Freemasonry and the bizarre worldviews of Saint-Simonianism, you can discover Levi's innovative interpretation of Judaism and its role in modernity. As a champion of dialogue with Catholic intellectuals, Levi's importance transcends the Jewish world. The second part of the book presents an unpublished document, Levi's comedy "Il Mistero delle Tre Melarancie", a phantasmagorical adventure in search of his Jewish identity, with an English translation of its most relevant excerpt.

Thoroughly updated and revised for 2024, JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY is the history of the Middle East through the lens of the Holy City and the Holy Land, from King David to the wars and chaos of today.

The history of Jerusalem is the story of the world: Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths. The Holy City and Holy Land are the battlefields for today's multifaceted conflicts and, for believers, the setting for Judgement Day and the Apocalypse.

How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the 'centre of the world' and now the key to peace in the Middle East? Why is the Holy Land so important not just to the region and its many new players, but to the wider world too? Drawing on new archives and a lifetime's study, Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city and turbulent region through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the kings, empresses, amirs, sultans, caliphs, presidents, autocrats, imperialists and warlords, poets, prophets, saints and rabbis, conquerors and whores who created, destroyed, chronicled, and believed in Jerusalem and the Holy Land.

A classic of modern literature, this is not only the epic story of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism, co-existence, power and myth, but also a freshly updated, carefully balanced history of the Middle East, from King David to the new players and powers of the twenty-first century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the mayhem of today.

This is how today's Middle East was forged, how the Holy Land became sacred and how Jerusalem became Jerusalem - the only city that exists twice - in heaven and on earth.

In Twelver Shi'a Islam, the wait for the return of the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi, at the end of time, overshadowed the value of actively seeking martyrdom. However, what is the place of martyrdom in Twelver Shi'ism today? This book shows that the Islamic revolution in Iran resulted in the marriage of Shi'i messianism and extreme political activism, changing the mindset of the Shi'a worldwide. Suddenly, each drop of martyrs' blood brought the return of al-Mahdi one step closer, and the Islamic Republic of Iran supposedly became the prelude to the foretold world revolution of al-Mahdi. Adel Hashemi traces the unexplored area of Shi'i discourse on martyrdom from the 1979 revolution-when the Islamic Republic's leaders cultivated the culture of martyrdom to topple the Shah's regime-to the dramatic shift in the understanding of martyrdom today. Also included are the reaction to the Syrian crisis, the region's war with ISIS and other Salafi groups, and the renewed commitment to the defense of shrines. This book shows the striking shifts in the meaning of martyrdom in Shi'ism, revealing the real relevance of the concept to the present-day Muslim world.

Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha are often regarded as antagonistic Indian Buddhist traditions. Paramartha (499-569) is traditionally credited with amalgamating these philosophies by translating one of the most influential Tathagatagarbha texts in East Asia, the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, and introducing Tathagatagarbha notions into his translations of Yogacara texts. Engaging with the digitalized Chinese Buddhist canon, Ching Keng draws on clues from a long-lost Dunhuang fragment and considers its striking similarities with Paramartha's corpus with respect to terminology, style of phrasing, and doctrines. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the concept of jiexing, Keng demystifies the image of Paramartha and makes the case that the fragment holds the key to recover his original teachings.

Shalom Sadik interrogates the nature of Maimonides' religious philosophy through examination of secrets in the philosopher's Guide for the Perplexed, the role of dialectic in his philosophy, the relationship between natural law and God's commandments, and the question of free will.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled "lost tribes of Israel"-Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE-took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America. Some white Protestants, Mormons, American Jews, and Indigenous people constructed nationalist narratives around the then-popular idea of "Israelite Indians." Although these were minority viewpoints, they reveal that the story of religion and nationalism in the early United States was more complicated and wide-ranging than studies of American "chosen-ness" or "manifest destiny" suggest. Telling stories about Israelite Indians, Dougherty argues, allowed members of specific communities to understand the expanding United States, to envision its transformation, and to propose competing forms of sovereignty. In these stories both settler and Indigenous intellectuals found biblical explanations for the American empire and its stark racial hierarchy. Lost Tribes Found goes beyond the legal and political structure of the nineteenth-century U.S. empire. In showing how the trope of the Israelite Indian appealed to the emotions that bound together both nations and religious groups, the book adds a new dimension and complexity to our understanding of the history and underlying narratives of early America.

Although more than half of the world's Muslims live in Asia, most books on contemporary Islam focus on the Middle East, giving short shift to the dynamic and diverse presence of Asian Islam in regional and global politics. The Muslims of Asia constitute the largest Muslim communities in the world - Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Central Asia. In recent years, terrorist bombings in Bali, separatist conflicts in Thailand and the Philippines, and opposition politics in Central Asia, all point to the strategic importance of Asian Islam. In Asian Islam in the 21st Century, terrorism and its effects are placed within the broader context of Muslim politics and how Islamic ideals and movements, mainstream and extremist, have shaped Asian Muslim societies. Democratization experiments -- successful and unsuccessful -- are examined. The rise of radical militant movements is analyzed and placed in historical perspective. The result is an insightful portrait of the rich diversity of Muslim politics and discourse that continue to affect Asian Muslim majority and minority countries.Specialists and students of Islamic studies, religion and international affairs, and comparative politics as well as general readers will benefit from this sorely needed comprehensive analysis of a part of the world that has become increasingly important in the 21st century.

The present volume focuses on Henry Bate of Mechelen (1246-after 1310), the first scholar to bring Ibn Ezra's astrological work to the knowledge of Latin readers. The volume has two main objectives. The first is to offer as complete and panoramic an account as possible of Bate's translational project. Therefore, this volume offers critical editions of all six of Bate's complete translations of Ibn Ezra's astrological writings. The second objective is to accompany Bate's Latin translations with literal English translations and to offer a thorough collation of the Latin translation (with their English translations) against the Hebrew and French source texts. This is volume 2 of a two-volume set.

While the resonance of Giambattista Vico's hermeneutics for postcolonialism has long been recognised, a rupture has been perceived between his intercultural sensibility and the actual content of his philological investigations, which have often been criticised as being Eurocentric and philologically spurious. China is a case in point. In his magnum opus New Science, Vico portrays China as backward and philosophically primitive compared to Europe. In this first study dedicated to China in Vico's thought, Daniel Canaris shows that scholars have been beguiled by Vico's value judgements of China without considering the function of these value judgements in his theory of divine providence. This monograph illustrates that Vico's image of China is best appreciated within the contemporary theological controversies surrounding the Jesuit accommodation of Confucianism. Through close examination of Vico's sources and intellectual context, Canaris argues that by refusing to consider Confucius as a "filosofo", Vico dismantles the rationalist premises of the theological accommodation proposed by the Jesuits and proposes a new functionalist valorisation of non-Christian religion that anticipates post-colonial critiques of the Enlightenment.

The study of religions is essential for understanding other cultures, building a sense of belonging in a multicultural world and fostering a global intercultural dialogue. Exploring Chinese religions as one interlocutor in this dialogue, Diana Arghirescu engages with Song-dynasty Confucian and Buddhist theoretical developments through a detailed study of the original texts of the Chan scholar-monk Qisong (1007-1072) and the Neo-Confucian master Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Starting with these figures, she builds an interpretive theory focusing on "ethical interrelatedness" and proposes it as a theoretical tool for the study of the Chinese religious traditions. By actively engaging with other contemporary theories of religion and refusing to approach Chinese religions with Western frameworks, Arghirescu's comparative perspective makes it possible to uncover differences between the various Western and Chinese cultural presuppositions upon which these theories are built. As such, this book breaks new ground in the methodology of religious studies, comparative philosophy and furthers our understanding of the Confucian-Buddhist interaction.

The ERC-funded research project BuddhistRoad aims to create a new framework to enable understanding of the complexities in the dynamics of cultural encounter and religious transfer in pre-modern Eastern Central Asia. Buddhism was one major factor in this exchange: for the first time the multi-layered relationships between the trans-regional Buddhist traditions (Chinese, Indian, Tibetan) and those based on local Buddhist cultures (Khotanese, Uyghur, Tangut) will be explored in a systematic way. The second volume Buddhism in Central Asia II-Practice and Rituals, Visual and Materials Transfer based on the mid-project conference held on September 16th-18th, 2019, at CERES, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (Germany) focuses on two of the six thematic topics addressed by the project, namely on "practices and rituals", exploring material culture in religious context such as mandalas and talismans, as well as "visual and material transfer", including shared iconographies and the spread of 'Khotanese' themes.

Sociologist Jeffrey Guhin spent a year and a half embedded in four high schools in the New York City area - two of them Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian. At first pass, these communities do not seem to have much in common. But under closer inspection Guhin finds several common threads: each school community holds to a conservative approach to gender and sexuality, a hostility towards the theory of evolution, and a deep suspicion of secularism. All possess a double-sided image of America, on the one hand as a place where their children can excel and prosper, and on the other hand as a land of temptations that could lead their children astray. He shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the secular world, both in school and online. Guhin develops his study of boundaries in the book's first half to show how the school communities teach their children who they are not; the book's second half shows how the communities use "external authorities" to teach their children who they are. These "external authorities" - such as Science, Scripture, and Prayer - are experienced by community members as real powers with the ability to issue commands and coerce action. By offloading agency to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and 143 formal interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to sociology, religious studies, and education.

In this groundbreaking book, based on in-depth ethnographic research spanning ten years, Antoinette Elizabeth DeNapoli brings to light the little known, and often marginalized, lives of female Hindu ascetics (sadhus) in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. Her book offers a new perspective on the practice of asceticism in India today, exploring a phenomenon she terms vernacular asceticism. Examining the everyday religious worlds and practices of primarily "unlettered" female sadhus who come from a variety of castes, Real Sadhus Sing to God illustrates that the female sadhus whom DeNapoli knew experience asceticism in relational and celebratory ways and construct their lives as paths of singing to God. While the sadhus have combined ritual initiation with institutionalized and orthodox orders of asceticism, they also draw on the non-orthodox traditions of the medieval devotional poet-saints of North India to create a form of asceticism that synthesizes multiple and competing world views. DeNapoli suggests that in the vernacular asceticism of the sadhus, singing to God serves as the female way of being an ascetic. As women who have escaped the dominant societal expectations of marriage and housework, female sadhus are unusual because they devote themselves to a way of life traditionally reserved for men in Indian society. Female sadhus are simultaneously respected and distrusted for transgressing normative gender roles in order to dedicate themselves to a life of singing to the divine. Real Sadhus Sing to God is the first book-length study to explore the ways in which female sadhus perform and, thus, create gendered views of asceticism through their singing, storytelling, and sacred text practices, which DeNapoli characterizes as the sadhus' "rhetoric of renunciation." The book also examines the relationship between asceticism (sannyas) and devotion (bhakti) in contemporary contexts. It brings together two disparate fields of study in religious scholarship-yoga/asceticism and bhakti-through use of the orienting metaphor of singing bhajans (devotional songs) to understand vernacular asceticism in contemporary India.