scholarly journals Forgotten Approaches to Care: The Human Being as Neighbour in the German-Jewish Tradition of the Nineteenth Century

2017 ◽  
pp. 13-35
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Conradi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
German Jewish

La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

2013 ◽  
pp. 174-183
Author(s):  
Piotr Sadkowski
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
French Writer ◽  
The World ◽  
Jewish Writers

Throughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

Preserving a Synagogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-233
Author(s):  
Sergey R. Kravtsov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Universal Theory ◽  
Physical Components

This chapter focuses on the ageing synagogue that reaches a moment when the problem of worn physical components must be addressed and must be concealed, removed, substituted, conserved, or repaired. It clarifies how preserving the old synagogue raises numerous questions as it acquires diverse values that are not equally appreciated by all the congregants or by the wider society. It also emphasizes how the questions became more acute from the end of the nineteenth-century, when the modern and virtually universal theory of conservation was developed in the non-Jewish realm. The chapter looks at the arguments on maintenance practices that emerge from the discourse about the holy and the profane, the memorable and the forgettable, and the valuable and the worthless, which seep into the economic and societal discussion about patronage and authority. It discusses Jewish tradition as a characteristic trait of an oriental society destined to somnolence, stagnation, and passivity.

Concluding Meditations

2020 ◽  
pp. 235-240
Author(s):  
Joshua Dubler ◽  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Prison Education ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Prison Abolition ◽  
Jewish Liturgy

In two concluding vignettes, the authors gesture toward how the religious traditions of their divergent upbringings inform their respective abolitionist commitments. Dubler, who was raised an observant Jew, reflects on how, among other aspects of the Jewish tradition, his formative encounters with Passover seder helped shape him into the abolitionist he is today. Drawing a connection between Jewish liturgy and the nineteenth-century abolitionist opponents of slavery, Dubler accounts for how the book acquired its title. Lloyd reflects on the experience of “witness” and how the ambivalence of this practice motivated his interest in prison abolition, and his scholarship. Both authors meditate on how direct action, prison education, scholarship, and citizenship are entangled, and how those tangles can be worked through Judaism or Protestantism.

scholarly journals Defining Hellenistic Jews in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Case of Jacob Bernays and Jacob Freudenthal

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-342
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Kurtz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Diagnostic Features ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Hellenistic Judaism ◽  
Jewish Writers

Hellenic language and culture occupy a deeply ambivalent place in the mapping of Jewish history. If the entanglement of the Jewish and the Greek became especially conflicted for modern Jews in philhellenic Europe, nowhere was it more vexed than in the German-speaking lands of the long nineteenth century. Amidst the modern redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish as well as doubts about the genuine Jewishness of Hellenistic Judaism, how did scholars identify Jewish authorship behind ambiguous, fragmented, and interpolated texts – all the more with much of the Hebraic allegedly deprived by the Hellenic? This article not only argues for the contingency of diagnostic features deployed to define the Jewish amidst the Greek but also maintains the embeddedness of those features in nineteenth-century Germany. It scrutinizes the criteria deployed to establish Jewish texts and authors of the Hellenistic period: the claims and qualities assumedly suggestive of Judaism. First, the inquiry investigates which characteristics German Jewish scholars expected to see in Greek-speaking Jewish writers of antiquity, interrogating their procedures and their verdicts. Second, it examines how these expectations of antiquity corresponded to those scholars’ own modern world. The analysis centers on Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) and Jacob Freudenthal (1839–1907), two savants who helped establish the modern study of Hellenistic Judaism. Each overturned centuries of learned consensus by establishing an ancient author – Pseudo-Phocylides and Eupolemus, respectively – as Jewish, rather than Christian or pagan. This article ultimately reveals the subtle entanglements as well as the mutually conditioning forces not only of antiquity and modernity but also of the personal and academic, manifest both in the philological analysis of ancient texts and in the larger historiography of antique Judaism in the Graecophone world.

scholarly journals LEOPOLD RANKE'S ARCHIVAL TURN: LOCATION AND EVIDENCE IN MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
KASPER RISBJERG ESKILDSEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
New Model ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
Important Site ◽  
German Historian

From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology.

The Identity of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark: Past and Present Proposals

2011 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Johansson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gospel Of Mark ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Focusing on the question whether the Markan Jesus is viewed as a divine figure or a merely human being, this article surveys the various interpretations of the Christology of the Gospel of Mark from the late nineteenth century to the present date. Three broad periods are detected. The first is characterized by a combination of a low Christology with a high estimation of Mark as history. After the publication of Wrede’s Messiasgeheimnis this changes, and for various reasons the majority of scholars view Mark’s Jesus as a superhuman being. A new shift takes place around 1970 when the Markan Jesus again is seen as a merely human being. While this still remains the majority position there is far from a consensus in this regard, and present Markan scholarship seems to be more divided than ever before.

Science with a Soul

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-262
Author(s):  
Deborah K. Manson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
Active Participant ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
Divinity School ◽  
The Mind

From the 1840s through to the end of his life in 1888, James Freeman Clarke’s influence permeated newspapers, churches, and lecture halls in Boston. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Clarke was an educated and active participant in his community and a respected voice amongst Boston intellectuals. At a time when sciences of the mind were rapidly expanding, Clarke neither ceded authority nor turned a blind eye. Instead, he studied emerging psychologies himself, approaching them as ways to enhance his understanding of the human being—body, soul, and spirit. In his private writings, including journals and letters, Clarke discusses his applications of experimental science, and he appears especially enthusiastic about mesmerism. However, from the pulpit and the lectern, Clarke was almost silent on the topic. This article examines Clarke’s private letters, journals, and sermon notes, accessed in the archives at the Massachusetts Historical Society, for evidence of the role mesmerism played in Clarke’s religious ideology, specifically his concept of man’s physical and spiritual constitution. For Clarke, mesmerism allowed an intimate incorporation of the body with theology, for through it the body became a conduit to the soul and to individual character. Clarke’s interest in and practice of mesmerism reveals it as an underground force that not only shaped his thoughts and theology, but also influenced a number of fellow theologians and intellectuals during the mid-nineteenth century.

Shifting Conceptions of Oral Tradition in the Nineteenth Century

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 78-86
Author(s):  
Chanan Gafni
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Oral Transmission ◽  
Changing Environments ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Modern Period

AbstractThe dispute over the nature of the Oral Law in the nineteenth century sheds light on fundamental developments in modern Jewish thought. An attitudinal shift can be discerned in the modern period. If in the medieval period, oral transmission was perceived as preserving the accuracy and authentic meaning of the tradition, in modern times it was described, to the contrary, as a crucial means of adapting Jewish tradition to constantly changing environments and to the demands of each generation. This radical new assumption that the existence of an oral tradition reflected the ability of the halakha to change gave rise to countless arguments: if the writing of a text signifies stagnation, when did Jewish tradition lose its vitality? Who was responsible for thus turning the halakha into a fixed or even, according to some, a lifeless system by writing it down? The article addresses these and similar questions raised by the nineteenth-century Jewish scholars throughout Europe and shows how their answers reflect the governing ideologies of the various camps in Jewish society.

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