The Figure of Abraham in Hasidic Literature

1998 ◽  
Vol 91 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Gellman

The Hasidic movement started in the latter part of the eighteenth century in the Podolia section of Ukraine, under the influence of Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760). By the middle of the nineteenth century Hasidism came to dominate the religious sensibilities of Eastern European Jewry. As it changed from a marginal, nascent revivalist curiosity to an establishment fixture, it attracted magnetic leaders of great pneumatic powers and created a rich homiletical literature. Its combination of direct religious engagement and a message of joy in the worship of God appealed both to spiritually inclined rabbinic figures and to the masses of the undereducated.

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-337
Author(s):  
Scott Larson

Abstract The eighteenth-century Atlantic world was swept with a radical new form of Christian preaching that aimed to engage the feelings and sensations of mass audiences. In the nineteenth century, this heart-centered preaching became a mainstream form of American Christianity, but in its first hundred years, it was widely regarded as perverse, effeminate, and depraved. Early evangelical Christianity threatened to destabilize social and political orders, to drive the masses “out of their senses,” and to throw gender norms into chaos. This article argues that attention to “trans tonality”—an investigation of trans at the level of tone, expression, and sensation—offers a surprising trans history of early American culture and opens up an archive rich with accounts of gender and sensory variance.


2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-135
Author(s):  
Rachel Simon

Sephardi printers were pioneers of moveable type in the Islamic world, establishing a Hebrew printing house in Istanbul in 1493. Initially emphasizing classical religious works in Hebrew, since the eighteenth century printers have been instrumental in the development of scholarship, literature, and journalism in the vernacular of most Jews of the western Ottoman Empire: Ladino. Although most Jewish males knew the Hebrew alphabet, they did not understand Hebrew texts. Communal cultural leaders and printers collaborated in order to bring basic Jewish works to the masses in the only language they really knew. While some books in Ladino were printed as early as the sixteenth century, their percentage increased since the second quarter of the eighteenth century, following the printing of Me-’am lo’ez, by Jacob Culi (1730), and the Bible in Ladino translation by Abraham Assa (1739). In the nineteenth century the balance of Ladino printing shifted toward novels, poetry, history, and biography, sciences, and communal and state laws and regulations. Ladino periodicals, which aimed to modernize, educate, and entertain, were of special social and cultural importance, and their printing houses also served as publishers of Ladino books. Thus, from its beginnings as an agent that aimed to “Judaize” the Jews, Ladino publishing in the later period sought to modernize and entertain, while still trying to spread Judaic knowledge.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


2011 ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Galley ◽  
Eilidh Garrett ◽  
Ros Davies ◽  
Alice Reid

This article examines the extent to which living siblings were given identical first names. Whilst the practice of sibling name-sharing appeared to have died out in England during the eighteenth century, in northern Scotland it persisted at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Previously it has not been possible to provide quantitative evidence of this phenomenon, but an analysis of the rich census and vital registration data for the Isle of Skye reveals that this practice was widespread, with over a third of eligible families recording same-name siblings. Our results suggest that further research should focus on regional variations in sibling name-sharing and the extent to which this northern pattern occurred in other parts of Britain.


Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun

Chapter 1 introduces the broad context of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world in which Crispus Attucks lived, describes the events of the Boston Massacre, and assesses what we know about Attucks’s life. It also addresses some of the most widely known speculations and unsupported stories about Attucks’s life, experiences, and family. Much of what is assumed about Attucks today is drawn from a fictionalized juvenile biography from 1965, which was based largely on research in nineteenth-century sources. Attucks’s characterization as an unsavory outsider and a threat to the social order emerged during the soldiers’ trial. Subsequently, American Revolutionaries in Boston began the construction of a heroic Attucks as they used the memory of the massacre and all its victims to serve their own political agendas during the Revolution by portraying the victims as respectable, innocent citizens struck down by a tyrannical military power.


Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher

Although racial lines eventually hardened on both sides, in the opening decades of colonization European and native ideas about differences between themselves and the other were fluid and dynamic, changing on the ground in response to local developments and experiences. Over time, perceived differences were understood to be rooted in more than just environment and culture. In the eighteenth century, bodily differences became the basis for a wider range of deeper, more innate distinctions that, by the nineteenth century, hardened into what we might now understand to be racialized differences in the modern sense. Despite several centuries of dispossession, disease, warfare, and enslavement at the hands of Europeans, native peoples in the Americans almost universally believed the opposite to be true. The more indigenous Americans were exposed to Europeans, the more they believed in the vitality and superiority of their own cultures.


Author(s):  
William Weber

This chapter shows how selections from English operas composed between the 1730s and the 1790s—chiefly by Thomas Arne, Charles Dibdin, William Shield, and Stephen Storace—became standard repertory in concerts throughout the nineteenth century. Such pieces were performed at benefit concerts organized by individual musicians and at events given by local ensembles that blended songs with virtuoso pieces and orchestral numbers. Critical commentary on such songs justified their aesthetic legitimacy as groups separate from pieces deemed part of classical music. By 1900, songs by Arne, Storace, and even Dibdin were often sung in recitals along with German lieder and pieces from seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Italy or France. The solidity of this tradition contributed to the revival of the operas themselves from the 1920s, most often Arne’s Artaxerxes (1762). This chapter is paired with Rutger Helmers’s “National and international canons of opera in tsarist Russia.”


Author(s):  
Katharine Ellis

This chapter starts by revisiting a now-familiar text: James H. Johnson’s book Listening in Paris (1995). On the basis of concert and opera reviews, images, and the paratexts of concert programs, Ellis reframes Johnson’s question “When did audiences fall silent?” as “Where and why did audiences fail to fall silent?” Multilayered answers show how (1) many of the noisier phenomena of the eighteenth century resurfaced in new guises from the 1850s onward; (2) the democratization of art music took place in contexts that could not always impose “religious” listening; and (3) there was a resurgent demand, possibly concomitant, for music as pure entertainment in venues where silence was neither required nor expected. The chapter argues that although attentive listening was a gold standard during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century in Paris, practice rarely lived up to such expectations, and it was in effect a niche activity.


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