Taking Herod to Task: Source Critical and New Historical Methods of Reading Herod’s Trial

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-422
Author(s):  
Ari Finkelstein
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Historian ◽  
Historical Methods

AbstractFor nearly three decades scholars of the first-century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, have debated this author’s methodologies and goals in writing his Jewish Antiquities. While source-critics view Josephus as a compiler, new historians have chosen to read Antiquities as primarily a literary work which reveals social, political, and intellectual history. A series of recent publications place these methodologies side by side but rarely coordinate them, which leaves out important insights of each group. At stake is how we moderns read Jewish history of the first century CE. I explore how parallel accounts of Herod’s trial while he was Tetrarch of the Galilee in Jewish War and in Antiquities can be justified by employing source-critical analysis as a first step to explain the changes made to the text of Antiquities before turning to new historians’ methodologies. We can better understand the function of Herod’s trial in Antiquities through this process.

Flavius Josephus

2019 ◽  
pp. 281-298
Author(s):  
Michael Tuval
Keyword(s):  
Jewish History ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Second Temple Period ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Russian Version ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Greek Manuscript

The works of first century CE Jewish historian Flavius Josephus constitute our main source for the study of Jewish history of the Second Temple period. In this chapter, we briefly discuss Josephus’ career and his four compositions, as well as the condition of the Greek manuscript tradition of his works. The chapter also deals with the Latin translations of Josephus, a late antique Christian adaptation of mainly Judean War in Latin, known as Hegesippus, and the remnants of Judean War in Syriac. Next comes Josippon, a medieval Hebrew adaptation of Josephus and some other sources, and finally the much-discussed Slavonic, or Old Russian, version of the Judean War.

The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Public Law ◽  
First Century ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Legal Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

This book provides an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel’s classic The Dual State (1941), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel’s was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National Socialism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler’s Germany. His sophisticated––not to mention courageous––analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. Because of its clandestine origins, The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of intellectual resistance to the racial regime. This book brings Fraenkel’s innovative concept of “the dual state” back in, restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public law scholarship. Uniquely blending insights from legal theory and legal history, it tells in an accessible manner the truly suspenseful gestation of Fraenkel’s ethnography of law inside the belly of the behemoth. But this is also a book about the ordering presence of institutions more generally. In addition to upending conventional wisdom about the law of the “Third Reich,” it explores the legal origins of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. It theorizes the idea of an authoritarian rule of law, a cutting edge topic in law-and-society scholarship, and thus also speaks to the topic of democratic backsliding in the twenty-first century.

American Jewish History

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasia Diner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
American Jewish History ◽  
Modern Jewish History ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

American Jewish history as a field of scholarly inquiry takes as its subject-matter the experience of Jews in the United States and places it within the context of both modern Jewish history and the history of the United States. Its practitioners see their intellectual project as inextricably connected to both histories. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the enterprise of American Jewish history enjoys a condition of robust health. By the 1990s American immigration history had generally declined in favour within the ranks of American historians. That Jews, outsiders to American culture upon their arrival in the United States, were able to penetrate barriers and enter the mainstream clashes with the way historians want to see the American past. As a group who craved both economic security and respectability, their story lacks the dramatic punch of resisters and rebels to the American ethos.

Philosophy before the Greeks

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
First Century ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Many ◽  
Eastern Traditions

There is a growing recognition that philosophy isn’t unique to the West, that it didn’t begin only with the classical Greeks, and that Greek philosophy was influenced by Near Eastern traditions. Yet even today there is a widespread assumption that what came before the Greeks was “before philosophy.” This book presents a groundbreaking argument that, for three millennia before the Greeks, one Near Eastern people had a rich and sophisticated tradition of philosophy fully worthy of the name. In the first century BC, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily praised the Babylonians for their devotion to philosophy. Showing the justice of Diodorus’s comment, this is the first book to argue that there were Babylonian philosophers and that they studied knowledge systematically using a coherent system of logic rooted in the practices of cuneiform script. The book uncovers Babylonian approaches to knowledge in three areas: the study of language, which in its analysis of the written word formed the basis of all logic; the art of divination, which interpreted communications between gods and humans; and the rules of law, which confirmed that royal justice was founded on truth. The result is an innovative intellectual history of the ancient Near Eastern world during the many centuries in which Babylonian philosophers inspired scholars throughout the region—until the first millennium BC, when the breakdown of this cosmopolitan system enabled others, including the Greeks, to develop alternative methods of philosophical reasoning.

The Cultural Significance of k-NN

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-130
Author(s):  
James E. Dobson
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Nearest Neighbor ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Big Data Applications ◽  
Actual Use ◽  
History Of ◽  
Formalized Description

This chapter turns to a lower level of computation to produce a cultural critique and historicization of one of the most important algorithms used in digital humanities and other big-data applications in the present moment, the k-nearest neighbor or k-NN algorithm. The chapter reconstructs the partial genealogy, the intellectual history, of this important algorithm that was key to sense making in the midtwentieth century and has found continued life in the twenty-first century. In both its formalized description, its exposition in the papers introducing and refining the rule and its implementation in algorithmic form, and its actual use, the k-nearest neighbor algorithm draws on dominant midtwentieth-century ideologies and tropes, including partitioning, segregation, suburbanization, and democratization. In the process of situating the k-NN algorithm within the larger field containing other residual and emergent statistical methods, the author seeks to produce an intervention within the developing critical theory of algorithmic governmentality.

Romantic Portraits and Contemporary Audiences: Report from an Exhibition on the History of Emotions

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Anna Schram Vejlby
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Emotional Communication ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Emotion ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
The Given ◽  
Emotional Landscape

This article combines two issues: the actual emotional landscape of Danish portraiture from the first half of the nineteenth century and twenty-first-century audiences' response to these portraits. My research is based on written sources, art historical methods of the interpretation of visual material, and surveys among the audiences of the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen, where the exhibition Keeping up Appearances. Portraits and emotions in the Golden Age takes place in the autumn of 2017. The exhibition is based on previous research that I have conducted into emotion in Danish portraiture and will be an occasion to reevaluate earlier surveys in order to present new conclusions in this article. The article explores the psychological and emotional circumstances that surround examples of some of the finest Danish portraits of the 1800s and how the modern individual can attain a more profound understanding of these images and the range of emotions they embody. The portraits' historical public had no doubts as to the deep and complex emotion embedded in them, but today they often prove more difficult to interpret since a prior understanding of the given period is required in order to fully grasp the people depicted and the different things they may have felt. When audiences see a portrait in the twenty-first century they are often compelled to interpret it in the same way that they would interpret living people. This creates a set of challenges in our relation to and understanding of a person in a portrait through a given time and space. I will use Lisa Feldman Barrett's research on emotional communication in my analyses of the encounter between the portrait and the modern viewer.

The Early Middle Ages of Samuel Beckett

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Mark Byron
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Medieval Philosophy ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Divine Identity

Beckett's investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history, literature, and psychology. Numerous scholars – Daniella Caselli, Anthony Uhlmann, Dirk Van Hulle, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman among others – have carefully delineated the relationship between Beckett's note-taking and his deployment of philosophical sources in his literary texts. Whilst the focus quite rightly tends to fall on Beckett's absorption of Presocratic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophy, there are important strands of early medieval philosophy that find expression in his literary work. The philosophy notes housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, provide insights into Beckett's reading in medieval philosophy, drawing almost exclusively from Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy. The epoch spanning from Augustine to Abelard saw central concepts in theology and metaphysics develop in sophistication, such as matters of divine identity and non-identity, the metaphysics of light, and the nature of sin. The influence of the Eastern Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Maximus the Confessor) on Western metaphysics finds expression in the figuration of light and its relation to knowing and unknowing. This eastern theological inflection is evident in the ‘Dream’ Notebook, where Beckett's notes demonstrate his careful reading of William Inge's Christian Mysticism. These influences are expressed most prominently in various themes and allusions in his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, and Watt. The formal experiments and narrative self-consciousness of these early novels also respond to the early medieval transformation of textual form, where the precarious post-classical fruits of learning were preserved in new modes of encyclopaedism, commentary, and annotation. Beckett's overt display of learning in his early novels was arguably a kind of intellectual and textual preservation. But the contest of ideas in his work subsequently became less one of intellectual history and more that of immanent thinking in the process of composition itself.

On unfinishable work at the turn of the 19–20th centuries: a problem statement

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-101
Author(s):  
Natalia N. Smirnova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Problem Statement ◽  
Distant Future ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
History Of

The study focuses on the special status of fundamentally unfinishable work in the Russian literature at the turn of the 19th — the first third of the 20th century. In this period such forms as a fragment, passage and outline — symbolically representing parts of the conception, but not leading to the fullness of its implementation — have special significance. In this period conception of a literary work implies some features of an ideal work, which either cannot be realized or should be realized in the distant future. The unrealized and unfinished work thus has utopian features, since its realization is associated with an indefinite / ideal future. The study of such ideas will highlight the phenomenon of the unrealized work, which still remains on the periphery of the theoretical analysis. The oral and written evidences of the unrealized work, forming a whole area of not fully developed, but only intended, influenced on intellectual horizon of the epoch and the forms of other, finished, works. Indirect forms of realization of the conception, which left traces in diaries, notebooks, memorials, fragmentary forms, are extraordinary important for understanding the literary process and the intellectual history of the twentieth century as a whole.

James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Self ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Charlie Chaplin ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film reappraises the lines of influence said to exist between Joyce’s writing and early cinema and provides an alternative to previous psychoanalytic readings of Joyce and film. Through a compelling combination of historical research and critical analysis, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley demonstrates that Joyce, early film-makers, and phenomenologists (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular) share a common enterprise: all are concerned with showing, rather than explaining, the ‘inherence of the self in the world’. Instead of portraying an objective, neutral world, bereft of human input, Joyce, the film-makers, and the phenomenologists present embodied, conscious engagement with the environment and others: they are interested in the world-as-it-is-lived and transcend the seemingly rigid binaries of seer/seen, subject/object, absorptive/theatrical, and personal/impersonal. This book re-evaluates the history of body- and spectator-focused film theories, placing Merleau-Ponty at the centre of the discussion, and considers the ways in which Joyce may have encountered such theories. In a wealth of close analyses, Joyce’s fiction is read alongside the work of early film-makers such as Charlie Chaplin, Georges Méliès, and Mitchell and Kenyon, and in relation to the philosophical dimensions of early cinematic devices such as the Mutoscope, the stereoscope, and the panorama. By putting Joyce’s literary work—Ulysses above all—into dialogue with both early cinema and phenomenology, this book elucidates and enlivens literature, film, and philosophy.

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