Sustain Me With Raisin-Cakes: Pesikta deRav Kahana and the Popularization of Rabbinic Judaism


Book Description

History and literature come together in a new way in this study of the midrashic collection Pesikta deRav Kahana. The book combines the findings of rabbinic historians and early Christianity scholars with a close reading of this midrashic text on its own and in relation to the tannaitic midrashim which preceded it. The rich picture that emerges suggests that PRK, in its new homiletical and aggadic stance, develops a religious language more appealing and accessible to the masses, an outreach language meant to win rabbinic popularity. Exploring issues of power and rhetoric, the book also places PRK’s outreach language into the cultural context of the imperialism of Roman Christian homily.




A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the ...


Book Description

Since the Middle Ages, lexographies of Talmudic and other rabbinic literature have combined in one entry Babylonian, Palestinian, and Targumic words from various periods. Because morphologically identical words in even closely related dialects can frequently differ in both meaning and nuance, their consolidation into one dictionary entry is often misleading. Scholars now realize the need to treat each dialect separately, and in A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Michael Sokoloff provides a complete lexicon of the dialect spoken and written by Jews in Palestine during the Byzantine period, from the third century C.E. to the tenth century. Sokoloff draws on a wide range of sources, from inscriptions discovered in the remains of synagogues and on amulets, fragments of letters and other documents, poems, and marginal notations to local Targumim, the Palestinian Midrashim and Talmud, texts addressing religious law (halacha), and Palestinian marriage documents (ketubbot) from the Arabic period. Many of these sources were unavailable to previous lexographers, who based their dictionaries on corrupt nineteenth-century editions of the rabbinic literature. The discovery of new manuscripts in both European libraries and the Cairo Geniza over the course of the twentieth century has revolutionized the textual basis of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. Each entry in A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic is divided into six parts: lemma or root, part of speech, English gloss, etymology, semantic features, and bibliographic references. Sokoloff also includes an index of all cited passages. This major reference work, updated to reflect the publication of new texts over the last decade, will both provide students and scholars with a tool for an accurate understanding of the Aramaic dialect of Jewish Palestinian literature of the Byzantine period and help Aramaist and Semitic linguists to see the relationship between this dialect and others, especially the contemporary dialects of Palestine.




Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash


Book Description

Gunter Stemberger's revision of H. L. Strack's classic introduction to rabbinic literature, which appeared in its first English edition in 1991, was widely acclaimed. Gunter Stemberger and Markus Bockmuehl have now produced this updated edition, which is a significant revision (completed in 1996) of the 1991 volume. Following Strack's original outline, Stemberger discusses first the historical framework, the basic principles of rabbinic literature and hermeneutics and the most important Rabbis. The main part of the book is devoted to the Talmudic and Midrashic literature in the light of contemporary rabbinic research. The appendix includes a new section on electronic resources for the study of the Talmud and Midrash. The result is a comprehensive work of reference that no student of rabbinics can afford to be without.




Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans


Book Description

The shifting image of the Hasmoneans in the eyes of their contemporaries and later generations is a compelling issue in the history of the Maccabean revolt and the Hasmonean commonwealth. Based on a series of six Jewish folktales from the Second Temple period that describe the Hasmonean dynasty and its history from its legendary founders, through achievement of full sovereignty, to downfall, this volume examines the Hasmoneans through the lens of reception history. On the one hand, these brief, colorful legends are embedded in the narrative of the historian of the age, Flavius Josephus; on the other hand, they are scattered throughout the extensive halakhic-exegetical compositions known as rabbinic literature, redacted and compiled centuries later. Each set of parallel stories is examined for the motivation underlying its creation, its original message, language, and the historical context. This analysis is followed by exploration of the nature of the relationship between the Josephan and the rabbinic versions, in an attempt to reconstruct the adaptation of the putative original traditions in the two corpora, and to decipher the disparities, different emphases, reworking, and unique orientations typical of each. These adaptations reflect the reception of the pristine tales and thus disclose the shifting images of the Hasmoneans in later generations and within distinct contexts. The compilation and characterization of these sources which were preserved by means of two such different conduits of transmission brings us closer to reconstruction of a lost literary continent, a hidden Jewish "Atlantis" of early pseudo-historical legends and facilitates examination of the relationship between the substantially different libraries and worlds of Josephus and rabbinic literature.




Jerome's Hebrew Philology


Book Description

St Jerome (ca. 347-419), translator and prolific commentator on the Old Testament, left a lasting and controversial mark on the history of biblical scholarship through his radical return to the hebraica veritas, the 'Hebrew truth.' Yet, the extent of Jerome’s Hebrew knowledge has been debated, and the actual role of Hebrew in Jerome’s biblical exegesis has been little explored. This book shows how Jerome’s Hebrew philology developed out of his training in classical literary studies, describes the nature of Jerome’s command of Hebrew in light of his historical context and his use of Jewish sources, and explains how Jerome used Hebrew scholarship in his biblical interpretation. Jerome emerges as a competent Hebraist, limited by his context, yet producing work of enduring significance.




Demonic Desires


Book Description

In Demonic Desires, Ishay Rosen-Zvi examines the concept of yetzer hara, or evil inclination, and its evolution in biblical and rabbinic literature. Contrary to existing scholarship, which reads the term under the rubric of destructive sexual desire, Rosen-Zvi contends that in late antiquity the yetzer represents a general tendency toward evil. Rather than the lower bodily part of a human, the rabbinic yetzer is a wicked, sophisticated inciter, attempting to snare humans to sin. The rabbinic yetzer should therefore not be read in the tradition of the Hellenistic quest for control over the lower parts of the psyche, writes Rosen-Zvi, but rather in the tradition of ancient Jewish and Christian demonology. Rosen-Zvi conducts a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the some one hundred and fifty appearances of the evil yetzer in classical rabbinic literature to explore the biblical and postbiblical search for the sources of human sinfulness. By examining the yetzer within a specific demonological tradition, Demonic Desires places the yetzer discourse in the larger context of a move toward psychologization in late antiquity, in which evil—and even demons—became internalized within the human psyche. The book discusses various manifestations of this move in patristic and monastic material, from Clement and Origin to Antony, Athanasius, and Evagrius. It concludes with a consideration of the broader implications of the yetzer discourse in rabbinic anthropology.




Medieval Midrash


Book Description

Medieval Midrash: The House for Inspired Innovation is the first book-length study of this under-examined genre of Jewish Literature. Mehlman and Limmer cover the history of scholarship of these curious texts and evaluate the origins, dating, and authors of Medieval Midrash. In addition to addressing such scholarly questions, Medieval Midrash illustrates its themes and judgments through the annotated translation of the six extant texts that revolve around the key figure of King Solomon. This book, whose underlying tropes speak to the continuing need for creative religious expression, will be of interest to scholars and non-academics alike.




Jewish Religious and Philosophical Ethics


Book Description

Twentieth century continental thinkers such as Bergson, Levinas and Jonas have brought fresh and renewed attentions to Jewish ethics, yet it still remains fairly low profile in the Anglophone academic world. This collection of critical essays brings together the work of established and up-and-coming scholars from Israel, the United States, and around the world on the topic of Jewish religious and philosophical ethics. The chapters are broken into three main sections – Rabbinics, Philosophy, and Contemporary Challenges. The authors address, using a variety of research strategies, the work of both major and lesser-known figures in historical Jewish religious and philosophical traditions. The book discusses a wide variety of topics related to Jewish ethics, including "ethics and the Mishnah," "Afro Jewish ethics," "Jewish historiographical ethics," as well as the conceptual/philosophical foundations of the law and virtues in the work of Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Baruch Spinoza.The volume closes with four contributions on present-day frontiers in Jewish ethics. As the first book to focus on the nature, scope and ramifications of the Jewish ethics at work in religious and philosophical contexts, this book will be of great interest to anyone studying Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Religion.




Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine


Book Description

The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the third through sixth centuries CE, by rabbis living under Sasanian Persian rule in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. What kind of society did these rabbis inhabit? What effect did that society have on important rabbinic texts? In this book Richard Kalmin offers a thorough reexamination of rabbinic culture of late antique Babylonia. He shows how this culture was shaped in part by Persia on the one hand, and by Roman Palestine on the other. The mid fourth century CE in Jewish Babylonia was a period of particularly intense "Palestinianization," at the same time that the Mesopotamian and east Persian Christian communities were undergoing a period of intense "Syrianization." Kalmin argues that these closely related processes were accelerated by third-century Persian conquests deep into Roman territory, which resulted in the resettlement of thousands of Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the eastern Roman provinces in Persian Mesopotamia, eastern Syria, and western Persia, profoundly altering the cultural landscape for centuries to come. Kalmin also offers new interpretations of several fascinating rabbinic texts of late antiquity. He shows how they have often been misunderstood by historians who lack attentiveness to the role of anonymous editors in glossing or emending earlier texts and who insist on attributing these texts to sixth century editors rather than to storytellers and editors of earlier centuries who introduced changes into the texts they learned and transmitted. He also demonstrates how Babylonian rabbis interacted with the non-rabbinic Jewish world, often in the form of the incorporation of centuries-old non-rabbinic Jewish texts into the developing Talmud, rather than via the encounter with actual non-rabbinic Jews in the streets and marketplaces of Babylonia. Most of these texts were "domesticated" prior to their inclusion in the Babylonian Talmud, which was generally accomplished by means of the rabbinization of the non-rabbinic texts. Rabbis transformed a story's protagonists into rabbis rather than kings or priests, or portrayed them studying Torah rather than engaging in other activities, since Torah study was viewed by them as the most important, perhaps the only important, human activity. Kalmin's arguments shed new light on rabbinic Judaism in late antique society. This book will be invaluable to any student or scholar of this period.