Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Modes Of Transmission ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
Means Of Transmission ◽  
Print Cultures

Jewish culture places a great deal of emphasis on texts and their means of transmission. At various points in Jewish history, the primary mode of transmission has changed in response to political, geographical, technological, and cultural shifts. Contemporary textual transmission in Jewish culture has been influenced by secularization, the return to Hebrew and the emergence of modern Yiddish, and the new centers of Jewish life in the United States and in Israel, as well as by advancements in print technology and the invention of the Internet. Volume XXXI of Studies in Contemporary Jewry deals with various aspects of textual transmission in Jewish culture in the last two centuries. Essays in this volume examine old and new kinds of media and their meanings; new modes of transmission in fields such as Jewish music; and the struggle to continue transmitting texts under difficult political circumstances. Two essays analyze textual transmission in the works of giants of modern Jewish literature: S.Y. Agnon, in Hebrew, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Yiddish. Other essays discuss paratexts in the East, print cultures in the West, and the organization of knowledge in libraries and encyclopedias.

Mediterranean Regionalism in Hebrew Panegyric Poetry

2018 ◽  
pp. 193-220
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Group Cohesion ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Factual Data

This chapter discusses the Hebrew panegyric corpus as a recognized, yet under-appreciated, resource for studying Jewish culture in the medieval Mediterranean. It considers the anathema to the tastes of scholars of Jewish literature and ungenerous source for scholars of Jewish history. It also describes Hebrew panegyrics that have largely been discounted as mere sycophantic dedications which occasionally yield titbits of factual data. The chapter looks at surviving Hebrew panegyrics that illuminate medieval Mediterranean Jews' most essential notions of group cohesion, human virtue, leadership, and politics. It includes Hebrew panegyrics that were composed for men who held transregional positions of power for their appointees and supporters in satellite communities.

Holiness in Jewish Thought

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Philosophical Reflection ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Life

Holiness is a challenge for contemporary Jewish thought. The concept of holiness is crucial to religious discourse in general and to Jewish discourse in particular. “Holiness” seems to express an important feature of religious thought and of religious ways of life. Yet the concept is ill defined. This collection explores what concepts of holiness were operative in different periods of Jewish history and bodies of Jewish literature. It offers preliminary reflections on their theological and philosophical import today. The contributors illumine some of the major episodes concerning holiness in the history of the development of the Jewish tradition. They think about the problems and potential implicit in Judaic concepts of holiness, to make them explicit, and to try to retrieve the concepts for contemporary theological and philosophical reflection. Holiness is elusive but it need not be opaque. This volume makes Jewish concepts of holiness lucid, accessible, and intellectually engaging.

Innovative Recent Perspectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter considers Salo Baron's writings on Jewish history. Recent historians have come to reject the supernaturally grounded assumption of unending Jewish suffering during the supposed third exile; many of them have also distanced themselves from the modern and naturalistic continuations of this sense of interminable Jewish suffering. The first major challenge to the received wisdom came in 1928 from Salo Baron, newly arrived in the United States from his native Europe. In an essay titled “Ghetto and Emancipation: Shall We Revisit the Traditional View?” he undertook a fairly limited assault on traditional Jewish thinking about exilic pain. Focusing on the French Revolution and the beginnings of the process of emancipation of Western Jewry, Baron examined the centuries immediately preceding the revolution and the immediate post-Emancipation period. He argued that the former was nowhere near so horrific as usually projected and that the latter was nowhere near so idyllic.

scholarly journals The Music Traditions of the Ashkenazi Jews and Radical Jewish Culture: A Brief Outline of the Definitions and Content of Jewish Music in the Past and Nowadays

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-227
Author(s):  
Luiza Zapiór
Keyword(s):  
Ashkenazi Jews ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Visual Component ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Music ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Music Tradition

The main purpose of this paper is to describe John Zorn’s approach to klezmer music and Jewish music tradition in general. The text has been divided into shorter sections. The first part of the article is dedicated to providing an overview of problems concerning the definition of Jewish music. The second part focuses on analysing klezmer motifs in John Zorn’s selected works and Jewish symbols present in the visual component of his recording projects. The last section contains a summary and conclusions.

Tradition and Vision

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moulie Vidas
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Babylonian Talmud ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Torah Study ◽  
Alternative Vision

This chapter considers Hekhalot literature to show that the Sar ha-Torah narrative from this corpus responds to the Talmudic academies‘ ideology of Torah study, presenting an alternative vision for Jewish culture in which retention and recitation are central rather than marginalized. It argues that this response correlates with other Hekhalot texts that recruit powerful images such as heavenly vision, transformation, and angelic liturgy to the project of memorizing and reciting the Oral Torah. It also contends that there is some evidence that the individuals whom the Babylonian Talmud marks as its opponents—the tanna'im—had a role in the shaping of Hekhalot traditions. Finally, the chapter suggests, based on the fact that the Hekhalot texts enter Jewish history as texts transmitted by Babylonian reciters, as well as on other connections between the tanna'im and Hekhalot texts, that the Babylonian reciters took active part in the shaping of Hekhalot traditions.

Spinoza’s Jewish Modernities

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel B. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Status ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
Great Culture

This introductory chapter considers why the hallmark of modern Jewish identity is its resistance to—and, at the same time, obsession with—definition. Like battles over national identity in the modern state, clashes over the nature and limits of Jewishness have frequently taken the shape of controversies over the status—and stature—of marginal Jews past and present. The Jewish rehabilitation of historical heretics and apostates with a vexed relationship to Judaism has become so much a part of contemporary discourse that it is difficult to imagine secular Jewish culture without it. Yet this tendency has a beginning as well as a template in modern Jewish history, which the chapter introduces in the figure of Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza (1632–1677)—“the first great culture-hero of modern secular Jews,” and still the most oft-mentioned candidate for the title of first modern secular Jew.

German-Jewish Literature and Culture and the Field of German-Jewish Studies

2007 ◽  
pp. 165-184
Author(s):  
Mark H. Gelber
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
German Society ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Host Culture ◽  
European Culture ◽  
German Jewish

This chapter delineates the parameters of developments and relationships to the 'Jewish contribution discourse'. It notes the marginality of Jewish culture in present-day Germany that has enabled the emergence of the quintessential post-modern field of cultural studies in Germany and the basis for diverse criticism. It also mentions Moritz Goldstein, who boldly claimed in his 'Deutsch-jüdischer Parnass' that the Jews in Germany had become the custodians and arbiters of the spiritual treasures of German society. The chapter explores the understanding of European culture as largely Jewish, which militates against the idea of a possible Jewish contribution to that culture since the term 'contribution' appears to make little sense if the Jewish element is the dominant one. It explains the concept of a contribution that rests on the notion of a dominant host culture to which guests might contribute.

7. The ingathering

2021 ◽  
pp. 70-80
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Clarice Lispector ◽  
Nadine Gordimer ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
Harold Pinter ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Elias Canetti ◽  
Second World

“The ingathering” surveys modern Jewish literature after the Second World War beyond Israel and the United States and meditates on the multilingual aspect of Jewish literature. This includes the work of Alberto Gerchunoff and Jacobo Timerman in Argentina, Clarice Lispector and Moacyr Scliar in Brazil, Elias Canetti in Bulgaria, Dan Jacobson and Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, and Harold Pinter and Howard Jacobson in the United Kingdom. Jewish writers are simultaneously insiders and outsiders, a position that allows them a unique perspective full of nuance. Therefore, modern Jewish literature is truly global, in regard to not only its authors but also its multifaceted audiences.

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