Search results for "Judaism"
showing 10 items of 73 documents
The Centrality and Interpretation of Psalms in Judaism prior to and during Medieval Times: Approaches, Authorship, Genre, and Polemics
2020
Abstract This study discusses the centrality of the book of Psalms among the Jews and in Judaism. It outlines the seven most important and influential rabbinic exegetical works on Psalms, in the period before and during the medieval age: Targum Psalms and Midrash Psalms Shocher Tov, from some time in the Talmudic period; and five prominent medieval commentaries: Saadia Gaon, Moses haCohen ibn Gikatilla, Rashi, Abraham ibn Ezra, and David Kimchi. I briefly introduce each interpretative work and focus on selected aspects: The commentators’ distinct exegetical methods, their approaches to the questions of the authorship and genre of Psalms, and polemics with inside (e.g., Karaites) and outside…
New Testament Christology in its Hellenistic Reception
2001
This survey provides a sort of ‘counterpoint’ to the way in which the history of research has actually gone. In reaction to the ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’, nowadays the Jewish origins of NT Christology are usually pointed out. But when we pay attention to its ‘reception’ in Greco-Roman culture, some of the old findings may still prove useful. This article seeks to check this, taking into account especially the alternative models of explanation offered by the ‘New Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’.
Vashti and the Golden legend: A pagan queen turns saint?
2014
Hagiographic texts establish a narrative template for shame, avoidance of shame, what looks like death wish in courtly literature. Scenes of shame and its avoidance through death are adapted and folded into romance and other genres and affect how characters behave and are described and gendered. This article treats saints' lives as literary texts and identifies the language used for female saints in the Old French and Old Occitan versions of the Legenda aurea and uses that codified language to compare the hagiographic text with a vernacular Jewish narrative: the Occitan Romans de la reina Ester, written in octosyllabic rhyming couplets by Crescas Caslari in 1327. This codification gives ins…
Interdisziplinäre Grenzgänge bei Käte Hamburger: Zum Briefnachlass der Literaturwissenschaftlerin
2008
This article deals with the unpublished correspondence of the literary specialist Kate Hamburger (1896–1992), which is housed in the literary archive in Marbach, Germany. The correspondence of Hamburger, who is best known for her theoretical work The Logic of Literature, depicts the scholarly context as well as the personalities and public figures with whom she interchanged. The letters demonstrate that Kate Hamburger was widely admitted and acknowledged internationally, but at the same time reveal the problems she had to face as a scholar, female and Jewish, in the first half of the twentieth century. It was not until the end of the 1950s that her work, The Logic of Literature, was belated…
Słowo, które staje się obrazem, w tradycji chrześcijan syryjskich
2017
Word which becomes an image in the tradition of Syriac Christians. The paper examines the subject of figurative art in the theological space of the tradition of Syriac Churches. Even if in the early stage of their existence those communities were an integral part of Byzantine Empire, they developed a totally different pattern of the imaging, which didn’t consist in icons or in the other forms of the traditional art. The main focus of the Syriac theological painting was to use the written word. Such an approach wasn’t a result of any prohibition inherited from the Jewish tradition or of an internal iconoclasm, but it arises from the mentality and spiritual sensitivity of the people from the …
Forgetting to Remember: The Press Discourse, the Cold War and Conjunctures of Remembrance
2011
The first ‘memory wave’ of the Holocaust, largely based on the depictions of the liberation of the camps and the Nuremberg Trial, was coming to an end in the late 1940s.1 This period, sometimes called the ‘Nuremberg interregnum’,2 was also shaped by discussion relating to the Jewish DPs, the creation of Israel and its aftermath, as this this book has shown. As the Palestine issue became less acute and faded from daily news, talk of the Holocaust also vanished from the public domain. Consequently, the disappearance of the Holocaust from the public eye marked the beginning of a cultural amnesia that lasted, as the dominant historical wisdom now has it, until the 1960s.3 On the other hand, it …
The Anti-Samaritan Attitude as Reflected in Rabbinic Midrashim
2021
Samaritans, as a group within the ranges of ancient ‘Judaisms’, are often mentioned in Talmud and Midrash. As comparable social–religious entities, they are regarded ambivalently by the rabbis. First, they were viewed as Jews, but from the end of the Tannaitic times, and especially after the Bar Kokhba revolt, they were perceived as non-Jews, not reliable about different fields of Halakhic concern. Rabbinic writings reflect on this change in attitude and describe a long ongoing conflict and a growing anti-Samaritan attitude. This article analyzes several dialogues between rabbis and Samaritans transmitted in the Midrash on the book of Genesis, Bereshit Rabbah. In four larger sections, the f…
Professor Dr Med Oskar Fehr: the fate of an outstanding German-Jewish ophthalmologist: an early contributor to cornea and external disease.
2014
PURPOSE The aim of this study was to recount the immense and abrupt change in the private and professional life of a prominent German-Jewish ophthalmologist in the transition from democracy to dictatorship in Germany during the first half of the 20th century. METHODS This involves a Retrospective analysis of Fehr's clinical and scientific work as the first assistant of Julius Hirschberg's world-famous eye clinic in Berlin; evaluation of Fehr's successful tenure as a chair of Virchow's Eye Hospital; the catastrophic influence of Hitler's seizure of power on the private and professional lives of German-Jewish physicians; and an analysis of Fehr's personal and professional will to continue the…
Byzantine Liturgical Hymnography: a Stumbling Stone for the Jewish-Orthodox Christian Dialogue?
2019
Abstract This article discusses the role of Byzantine liturgical hymnography within the Jewish-Orthodox Christian dialogue. It seems that problematic anti-Jewish hymns of the Orthodox liturgy were often put forward by the Jewish side, but Orthodox theologians couldn’t offer a satisfactory answer, so that the dialogue itself profoundly suffered. The author of this study argues that liturgical hymnography cannot be a stumbling stone for the dialogue. Bringing new witnesses from several Orthodox theologians, the author underlines the need for a change of perspective. Then, beyond the intrinsic plea for the revision of the anti-Jewish texts, this article actually emphasizes the need to rediscov…