Rashi's Commentary on the Torah

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Lawee
Keyword(s):  
Collective Identity ◽  
Reception History ◽  
World Today ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Passionate Debate ◽  
Jewish Learning ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah explores the reception history of the most important Jewish Bible commentary ever composed, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040–1105). The Commentary has shaped perceptions of the meaning of the Torah, Judaism’s foundation document, among leading scholars, lay readers, and initiates in Jewish learning for more than nine centuries. The Commentary has benefited from enormous scholarly attention but analysis of diverse reactions to this work has been amazingly scant. Viewing the Commentary’s path to preeminence through a wide array of religious, intellectual, and literary lenses, Lawee focuses considerable attention on a hitherto unexamined—and wholly unexpected—feature of the work’s reception: critical, and at times astonishingly harsh, resistance to it. At the same time, he shows how Rashi’s interpretation of the Torah became an exegetical classic, a staple in the curriculum, a source of shared religious vocabulary for Jews across time and place, and a foundational text that shaped the Jewish nation’s collective identity. The book takes as its larger integrating perspective processes of canonicity as they shape how traditions flourish, disintegrate, or evolve. Rashi’s scriptural magnum opus, the foremost work of Franco-German (Ashkenazic) biblical scholarship, faced stiff completion for canonical preeminence in the form of rationalist reconfigurations of Judaism abroad in Mediterranean seats of learning. It nevertheless emerged triumphant in an intense medieval battle for Judaism’s future. Investigation of the reception of Rashi’s Commentary throws light on issues in Jewish scholarship and spirituality that continue to stir reflection, and even passionate debate, in the Jewish world today.

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Cultural Turn

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.

Rationalism versus the Rashi/Rabbinic Axis

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-195
Author(s):  
Eric Lawee
Keyword(s):  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of

The Book of Strictures, the work of an unknown late medieval rationalist, is the most concentrated assault on Rashi’s biblical scholarship in the annals of Jewish literature. In devoting himself to an often scornful assault on Rashi’s exegesis and ideas, focusing almost exclusively on those of midrashic provenance, the work’s author put himself at odds with powerful intellectual, halakhic, and educational currents pulling in the opposite direction, each buttressing the work’s growing reach and authority. Sefer hassagot occupies a significant place in the reception history of Rashi’s work, especially when viewed in terms of the hermeneutics of canonicity. The author’s literary vehicle is the stricture (hassagah), to which he often appends a corrective to Rashi’s interpretation. In so doing, he insistently contrasts an understanding of scripture grounded in canons of plain sense interpretation and scientific criteria of credibility with Rashi’s more fanciful midrashic methods and fantastical mentality.

The Woman at the Well and the Limits of Biblical Scholarship: Maximus the Confessor’s Scholion on Thal. 41

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 258-280
Author(s):  
Adam G Cooper
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Original Publication ◽  
Human History ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Original Response ◽  
History Of

Abstract In 2018 Maximus the Confessor’s premier work on biblical hermeneutics, the Responses to Thalassius, finally appeared in English translation. Following its original publication in the early 630 s, Maximus reissued the Responses in a second edition, to which he appended a dedicated prologue and his so-called scholia, an extensive set of annotations or footnoted clarifications. In both Maximus’s prologue and in the reception history of the Responses, these scholia were regarded as intrinsic to the integrity of the whole work. This article focuses on scholion 1 to Thal. 41, in which Maximus comments on the number of husbands belonging to the Woman at the Well in John 4, and why Jesus’ conversation with her took place when and where it did. It treats the scholion as a test case to see whether, how, and to what extent it further enlightens the reader as to the meaning of Maximus’s initial commentary, as he says it should. It argues that the scholion crucially qualifies several insights raised by Maximus in his original response, touching on his anagogical reading of Scripture, the progressive character of human history towards a culminating salvific goal, the limits of learning and discursive reason, and the role of faith and grace in receiving deifying wisdom.

scholarly journals Receiving the Word in Image: Federico Zuccaro’s the Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) and the Reception History of the Bible in the Counter-Reformation

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Church
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Visual Exegesis ◽  
Church Tradition

Abstract The Annunciation Broadcast by Prophets (1565) was an altarpiece created by Federico Zuccaro (1541–1609) for the Church of the Annunciation, Rome. It was the first image commissioned by the Order of the Jesuits, a movement involved in propagating the objectives of the Counter-Reformation Church. Altarpieces were particularly effective points of communication between the Catholic Church and the lay beholder, and used visual exegesis as a means to communicate appropriated receptions of biblical texts. The intimate connection that these objects have to their theological and political context marks them as significant moments of biblical reception, that have, up to this point, been overlooked by historians in the field. This article identifies the broader lacuna in scholarship surrounding the reception history of the Bible during the Counter-Reformation. Whilst this is due to a preference for studies of the Bible in the Protestant Reformation, the lack of scholarly investment poorly reflects the relevance of the Counter-Reformation period to the reception-historical methodology. The context prioritized the interpretation of the Bible through the lens of Church tradition, or in other words, the history of the Bible’s reception. This affinity is echoed in the reception-historical approach found in contemporary biblical scholarship, creating a hermeneutical link between the two contexts. Visual culture was a valuable expression of Counter-Reformation rhetoric and visualized the mediation of biblical texts through Church tradition. This article uses Zuccaro’s altarpiece as a tool to argue this hypothesis and postulate the intimate relationship maintained between texts and their reception in Counter-Reformation Catholicism.

scholarly journals Displacement, Repetition and Repression: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on Stage in the Weimar Republic

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-151
Author(s):  
Áine Sheil
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Reception History ◽  
World War ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opera Houses ◽  
Scholarly Attention

AbstractRelatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the performance and reception history of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg during the Weimar Republic (1919–33), but as this article will demonstrate, the opera played an indispensable role in the repertories of Weimar-era opera houses. Despite an evident desire on the part of some Weimar Republic directors and designers of Die Meistersinger to draw on staging innovations of the time, productions of the work from this period are characterised by scenic conservatism and repetition of familiar naturalistic imagery. This was not coincidental, I will argue, since Die Meistersinger served as a comforting rite for many opera-going members of the Weimar-era middle classes, at least some of whom felt economically or socially beleaguered in the aftermath of World War I. But no matter how secure the conservative theatrical conventions surrounding the Weimar Republic Meistersinger appeared, the repressed turmoil of the period seeped into ideas about the work, haunting the performance and reception of constructed German stability.

Paratexts and the Reception History of the Apocalypse

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 600-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrick V Allen
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Biblical scholarship usually engages with reconstructed texts without taking into account the form and material culture of the manuscripts that transmit the texts used in reconstruction. This article examines the influence of paratexts on biblical studies and reception history, using the book of Revelation as a test case, in an effort to rediscover the significance of transmission for comprehending the ways in which past reading communities engaged their scriptural traditions. The liminal features of manuscripts that are often ignored in modern editions are an integral part of the artefact that influence and shape a text’s reading. This study argues that paratexts represent an underdeveloped resource for reception history, insofar as the relationship between text and paratext is rarely taken into consideration by modern interpreters. Material culture, textual transmission, reception history, and exegesis are integrally linked processes.

MUCH ADO ABOUT SOMETHING; OR, COSÌ FAN TUTTE IN THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION: A COMMENTARY ON AND TRANSLATION OF AN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY EPISTOLARY EXCHANGE

2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
EDMUND J. GOEHRING
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Irony ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cosi Fan Tutte ◽  
Epistolary Exchange ◽  
Century Thought ◽  
Scholarly Attention

ABSTRACTAmong the gems buried in Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s short-lived Berlinische musikalische Zeitung is a ‘Musikalischer Briefwechsel’ that appeared over three volumes in September 1805. The text, cast as an epistolary exchange between the fictional characters Arithmos and Phantasus, argues the merits of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. (The opera had recently returned to the Berlin stage after a thirteen-year absence.) The exchange has received little scholarly attention, and yet it is a remarkable document for the glimpse it gives both into Berlin’s musical politics and, most of all, the reception history of Mozart’s opera.The authorship of the ‘Briefwechsel’, which appeared pseudonymously, has been attributed to Georg Christian Schlimbach, a frequent contributor to the journal. This article, in contrast, argues that Reichardt himself makes the more likely author: the correspondence more closely reflects his personality, his ambitions for the advancement of opera in the Prussian capital and his theory of art. Indeed, arising from his defence of Mozart’s opera is an extraordinary claim in the history of Così’s reception: that the work exemplifies romantic irony. E. T. A. Hoffmann is famous for his terse praise of the opera’s ‘ergötzlichste Ironie’. Reichardt, however, goes further by showing how the opera amalgamates, in quintessentially romantic fashion, the opposing forces of the comic and serious. Employing a Shakespearean conceit, he argues that Mozart’s music amounts to more than ‘much ado about nothing’.Reichardt’s move is the more significant given that he builds his reading not on Da Ponte’s libretto but on German adaptations by Bretzner and Treitschke, translations that modern scholarship has widely faulted for lacking the original’s subtlety. Thus, although Così fan tutte has generally been viewed as a work that runs counter to romantic tastes, Reichardt’s ‘Briefwechsel’, along with some newly discovered material, provides a basis for revisiting that claim about the opera’s place in nineteenth-century thought.

The “Unspeakable Teachings” of The Secret Gospel of Mark: Feelings and Fantasies in the Making of Christian Histories

2019 ◽  
pp. 145-173
Author(s):  
Alexis G. Waller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gospel Of Mark ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Order ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of

A fragmentary text exhumed from the archives in 1958—or else fabricated that same year—is the fraught subject of this essay. Secret Mark has been embraced as the earliest surviving version of the Gospel of Mark and denounced as either a second-century forgery or a twentieth-century hoax. The stormy reception history of this controversial text—one that appears to represent a homoerotic encounter between Jesus and an unnamed young man—is an affective history of the first order, as the essay demonstrates. Approaching the scholarly and popular reception of Secret Mark as a queer archive of feelings (a là Ann Cvetkovich), the essay explores the ways in which historiographical protocols—even, or especially, in a discipline as austere and affect-challenged as biblical scholarship—act as both medium and cover for affective investments, and it reflects on how historians might better handle (their feelings about) the early Christian past, or, indeed, any past.

scholarly journals ‘What is Language but a Sound We Christen?’ Poetic Retellings as an Improper Surprise for Biblical Reception History

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-271
Author(s):  
Samuel Tongue
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Literary Space ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Practices

Although overtly poetic interaction with biblical material has often been deemed beyond the pale in critical biblical scholarship, much work in reception history now positions such literature as part of the afterlife of a biblical text. While this is a welcome turn, this article argues that acts of poetic biblical retelling and recycling are more disruptive, troubling the ways in which critical scholarship operates. Utilising Timothy Beal’s thinking around the ‘cultural history of scripture’ and analysing Roland Boer’s sceptical attitude toward reception-historical practices, the first section teases out the nuances of how certain modes of biblical interpretation are deemed primary (and thus more legitimate) and others secondary (and thus anachronistic).
As such, the second section introduces poetic retellings of biblical material that foreground how poetry is a literary space where knowledge is articulated in particularly performative idioms. Reading poems from Kei Miller and Michael Symmons Roberts that appropriate biblical material, this analysis demonstrates that the poetic retelling of biblical material is an act of writing that refuses secondary status and cannot be simplistically yoked to traditional modes of exegesis. In this way, poetry problematizes the originary-secondary binary in reception-historical interpretation and, at the same time, recasts historical-critical exegesis as another form of ‘supplemental’ writing. This opens up the discipline to rethink some of its most protected interpretative paradigms and engage more fully with other forms of biblical ‘supplement’ across the disciplines.


Unveiling the European Woman

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Tofighi
Keyword(s):  
Reception History ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
European Identity ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
The Public ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
High Prevalence ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Veil ◽  
European Woman

In recent years, many biblical scholars have tried to uncover the unethical readings of scriptures. Despite the relatively high prevalence of ethical exegesis, the ramifications of biblical scholarship for people outside Judaism and Christianity have yet to be taken into account. In this essay, I will focus on the interpretation of the veil in ecclesiastical literature and what it entails for both European self-understanding and the exclusion of the veil from the public. I will start by a survey of the reception history of 1 Corinthians 11:5–16, where Paul admonishes women to cover their heads veil praying or prophesying. Then, I will show how the reinterpretation of this passage in modern literature was tantamount to the exclusion of the veil as foreign to European identity.

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