Judaism

Recent sociological studies have confirmed the persistence of profound internal challenges to the continuity of Judaism as a religion and to the Jews as a people. These challenges are eroding the foundations of Jewish identity and are threatening the authenticity of Judaism as a historical living faith-tradition. This work “makes the case” for a return to Jewish theology as a means of restoring Jewish authenticity and for reversing self-destructive trends. After identifying and critiquing various “substitute faiths” embraced by many contemporary Jews in Chapters One and Two, the nature and goals of Jewish theology are examined (Chapter Three). Rather than depicting theology as “faith seeking understanding,” the chapters that follow present a comprehensive theology of Judaism, deeply rooted in classical Jewish texts, and an understanding of theology as “faith seeking meaning (Chapter Four). Rather than portraying theology, as often has been the case, as a systematic creed imposed from without, theology is presented here as an outcome of the dialogue between an individual's quest for meaning and the spiritual and intellectual resources of a historical faith-tradition—in this case, Judaism. Features of faith such as living in a covenantal relationship (Chapter Five), seeking a rendezvous with God in the self, the sacred word, the world, and the sacred and ethical deed, are offered as paths to individual meaning and to creating one's life as a work of art (Chapter Six), despite the challenges of evil and absurdity encountered in daily experience (Chapters Seven and Eight).

The father–daughter dyad features in the Hebrew Bible in all of narratives, laws, myths, and metaphors. In previous explorations of this relationship, the tendency has been to focus on discrete stories – notable among them, Judges 11 (the story of Jephthah’s human sacrifice of his daughter) and Genesis 19 (the dark tale of Lot’s daughters’ seduction of their father). By taking the full spectrum into account, however, the daughter emerges prominently as (not only) expendable and exploitable (as an emphasis on daughter sacrifice or incest has suggested) but as cherished and protected by her father. Depictions of daughters are multifarious and there is a balance of very positive and very negative images. While not uncritical of earlier feminist investigations, this book makes a contribution to feminist biblical criticism and – being firmly interdisciplinary – utilizes also methods drawn from the social sciences and psychoanalysis. Alongside careful textual analysis, this book offers a critical evaluation of the heuristic usefulness of the ethnographic honour–shame model, of parallels wit0068 Roman family studies, and of the application and meaning of ‘patriarchy’. Following semantic analysis of the primary Hebrew terms for ‘father’ (בא) and ‘daughter’ (תב), as well as careful examination of inter-family dynamics and the daughter’s role vis-à-vis the son’s, alongside thorough investigation of both Judges 11 and Genesis 19, and also of the metaphor of God-the-father of daughters Eve, Wisdom, and Zion, this book provides a full exploration of daughters in the Hebrew Bible.

Many scholars and learned readers believe that rabbinic Judaism assumes a dogmatic commitment to the notion that the Bible text, particularly the Torah text, is letter perfect; orthodox Jews often accept this notion as fact, others, as normative rabbinic doctrine. This position developed over the centuries as an internal theological and interpretative posture and as a response to external pressures. These factors include rabbinic indifference to alternative forms of the Bible text recovered from pre‐rabbinic times or non‐rabbinic sources, attacks from Christians and Muslims who accused the Jews of falsifying the text or failing to transmit it accurately, and mystical Jewish teachings that saw in the Torah a divinely revealed and perfectly transmitted document whose letters were, in their entirety, a divine name. The assumption of letter‐perfect accuracy sustains much of the midrashic literature and has become a cornerstone of the postmodern fad of decoding the text to reveal alleged references to phenomena that occurred long after its books were written. This study, based on careful examination of hundreds of authoritative rabbinic writings, offers a very different picture of the Bible's textual reality and the rabbinic beliefs about it. Beginning with late antiquity and progressing throughout the subsequent ages, this book explores Talmudic, midrashic, medieval, Renaissance, and modern rabbinic texts that address the question of the letter‐perfect accuracy of the Bible text; it is particularly attentive to the writings of Rabbis Solomon ben Adret, Jacob ben Ibn Adoniyah, and David Ibn Zimra, as well as others who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The documents analysed have been chosen from Bible commentaries, responsa, halakhic codes, guidebooks for scribes, studies of Bible manuscripts and the printed Bible, and many other rabbinic works. In presenting these sources, many translated here for the first time, the author explores the various rabbinic attempts to fix the Bible text—to correct it and to establish its authoritative spelling. He demonstrates conclusively that many of the same rabbinic figures whose teachings inform other contemporary Orthodox doctrines were quite open about the fact that their Bible texts, even their Torah scrolls, were not completely accurate. Moreover, though many of the variations are of little exegetical significance, these rabbis often acknowledged that, textually speaking, the situation was beyond repair.

This book surveys the corpus of rabbinic literature, which was written in Hebrew and Aramaic about 1,500 years ago and which contains the foundations of Judaism, in particular the Talmud. The rabbinic works are introduced in groups, illustrated by shorter and longer passages, and described according to their literary structures and genres. Tables and summaries provide short information on key topics: the individual works and their nature, the recurrent literary forms which are used widely in different works, techniques of rabbinic Bible interpretation, and discourse strategies of the Talmud. Key topics of current research into the texts are addressed: their relationship to each other, their unity, their ambiguous and ‘unsystematic’ character, and their roots in oral tradition. The book explains why the character of the texts is crucial to an understanding of rabbinic thought, and why they pose specific problems to modern, Western-educated readers.

This book examines the attraction of American Jews to Christian Science during the early 1900s, and the emergence of Jewish Science as a counter movement. It discusses the works of the major proponents of Jewish Science: Morris Lichtenstein, Tehilla Lichtenstein, Alfred Geiger Moses, and Clifton Harby Levy. It argues that the greatest legacy of Jewish Science may well be its emphasis on the importance of spiritual healing.

Offering a novel understanding of the origins of renewed Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel in modern times, this book situates that settlement in the context of Jewish messianism and traces it to a wave of messianic fervor that swept the Jewish world during the first half of the 19th century. Believing that the Messiah would appear in the year 5600 AM (1840 CE), thousands of Jews immigrated to the Land of Israel from throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Eastern Europe. This book focuses primarily on the immigration (“aliyah”) of the disciples of the Ga’on of Vilna, the Eastern European opponents of Hasidism (known in the Land of Israel as the Perushim) who, notwithstanding their vaunted rationalism, were characterized by a strong mystical and messianic bent. In recounting their story, the book describes their complex and changing relationships with the ruling Ottoman and Egyptian authorities, with the Anglican missionaries then active in Jerusalem (principally the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews), and with the Organization of Peqidim and Amarkalim (Clerk’s organization) in Amsterdam and its head, Zevi Hirsch Lehren. The book makes extensive use of the newly discovered archives of the Peqidim and Amarkalim, of the diaries and journals of the Anglican missionaries, of kabbalistic texts from throughout North Africa and the Near East, and of previously unavailable manuscripts by the disciples of the Vilna Ga’on. Finally, the book recounts the varied responses to the Messiah’s failure to appear in 1840, and the continued growth in the Jewish community, a precursor to the emergence of modern political Zionism in the late 19th century.

At the time of the Nazi invasion in May 1940, Belgium was a Catholic country with linguistic divisions between north and south. The Catholic Church was the only institution untouched by the German occupiers. Therefore many hunted Jews sought the Church's help, which was spontaneously extended by the lower clergy. The book is based on unstructured interviews with formerly hidden children, with nuns who sheltered them, and with two surviving escorts who worked for the Committee for the Defense of Jews resistance network and took the children from their families to convents willing to hide them. The interviews detail from the point of view of both nuns and children how the children were integrated into daily convent life and how they reacted to Catholic rituals and socialization. The lives are framed by their historical context. The chapter on the escorts and on the Committee for the Defense of Jews leads to a general discussion of the different facets of the Belgian resistance. A chapter on memory and commemoration then traces the emergence of the concept of the hidden child and the construction of collective memories. The chapter also addresses the formal recognition of rescuers as “Righteous Among the Nations” and offers an in‐depth interpretation of Yad Vashem, the memorial institution of Israel. At the same time, it uncovers how gender initially played a major role in the recognition of priests and nuns who were rescuers. The struggle for the souls of some orphaned Jewish children who were baptized during the war and whose return to the Jewish community was contested is discussed as a particularly painful episode. This book contributes to Holocaust literature written in English about Belgium, a country given relatively too little attention. With its focus on commemoration, the book also adds to the understanding of how memory is institutionalized and reinforced by mnemonic practices.

The existence of ascetic elements within rabbinic Judaism has generally been either overlooked or actually denied. This is in part because asceticism is not commonly identified with celibacy, whereas the rabbis emphasized sexuality as a positive good. In addition, argues this book, it serves the theological agendas of both Jewish and Christian scholars to characterize Judaism as non- or anti-ascetic. In fact, however, the book shows that rabbinic asceticism does indeed exist. This asceticism is secondary, rather than primary, in that the rabbis place no value on self-denial in and of itself, but rather require themselves the virtual abandonment of familial, social, and economic life in favour of an absolute commitment to the study of the Torah. It is an asceticism of neglect, rather than negation. One form of asceticism in particular—fasting—became increasingly popular in the wake of the destruction of the second temple. The book traces this to the need to mourn the temple's devastation but also to the cessation of temple-related rituals. The book shows that fasting was seen as a substitute for these rituals when the Temple was destroyed.

Holy war, defined for this study as war authorized or even commanded by God, is a fundamental part of biblical religion and a core institution of the Hebrew Bible. Jews of antiquity engaged in wars considered to be divinely sanctioned, but after crushing defeats against the Roman Empire this kind of response to communal threat became so self-destructive that Jewish leaders devised a means of removing holy war from the repertoire of Jewish political actions. The result was the tendering of two interpretive instruments, normative for nearly two thousand years, which would prevent Jewish zealots from declaring holy war and thus endangering the community. The exegesis was possible within a particular historical context, but times change. The transformations brought about by modernity required Jews to re-examine the traditional rabbinic prohibition against war in the light of the times. Within a hundred years the traditional safeguards were effectively removed for the majority of religious Jews that continued to take Jewish traditional exegesis seriously. This full process, from removing holy war from possibility to reviving holy war as a paradigm for action, is the topic of this study.