Studies in the History of the Jewish People and the Land of Israel, Second volume, ed. by B. ODED, U. RAPPAPORT, A. SCHOCHAT, Y. SCHATZMILLER (modern Hebrew with summaries in English), University of Haifa, 1972, 321 and XXII pp

1973 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-92
AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Shapira

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard C. Lux

One of the principal issues confronting Christians in the dialogue is the significance of the land in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. This article explores the significance of the Land of Israel in the Scriptures as land given, retained and holy – especially to Christians. The history of the significant Christian religious relationship to the land is reviewed and finally a re-imaging of our relationship to the Holy Land in terms of a post-Vatican II expansion of our understanding of Catholic sacramental theology is suggested: that as Christ is the sacrament of encounter with God, so the Holy Land is a sacrament of our encounter with Christ.


Author(s):  
Ivan Matkovskyy

The history of relations of the Sheptytskyj family and the Jewish people reaches back to those remote times when the representatives of the Sheptytskyi lineage held high and honorable secular and clerical posts, and the Jews, either upon invitation of King Danylo of Halych or King Casimir the Great, began to build up their own world in Halychyna. Throughout the whole life of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi and Blessed Martyr Klymentii, a thread of cooperation with the Jews is traceable. It should be noted that heroic deeds of the Sheptytskyi Brothers to save Jews during the Second World War were not purely circumstantial: they were preceded by a long-standing deep relationship with representatives of Jewish culture. In addition, the sense of responsibility of the Spiritual Pastor, as advocated by the Brothers, extended to all people of different religions and genesis with no exception. The world-view principles of Metropolitan Sheptytskyi are important for us in order to understand what was going on in the then society in attitude to the Jews. Also, of importance is the influence of the Metropolitan on Kasymyr Sheptytskyi, later Fr. Klymentii, because the Archbishop was not only his Brother, but also a church authority and the leader. And if from under the Metropolitan Sheptytskyi’s pen letters and pastorals were published, they were directives, instructions, edifications and explanations for the faithful and the clergy, and not at all, the products of His own reflections or personal experiences, which Archbishop Andrey wanted to share with the faithful. On the grounds of the available archive materials, an effort to reconstruct the chief moments of those relations was undertaken, aiming among others, to illustrate the fact that the saving of Jews during the Holocaust was not incidental, nor with any underlying reasons behind, but a natural manifestation of a good Christian tradition of «Love thy Neighbor», to which the Sheptytskyj were faithful. Keywords: Andrey Sheptytskyi, the Blessed Hieromartyr Klymentii Sheptytskyi, Jews, the Holocaust, Galicia, Righteous Among the Nations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 1199-1218
Author(s):  
Evgeniya D. Zarubina

Minute books (pinkas) constitute one of the most valuable sources for studying the history of the Jewish communal institutions up to the 20th century. They comprise rich and diverse data on the everyday activities of the Jewish people. In the academic language, the word “pinkas” is applied not only to the communal minute books and minute books of the communal bodies but also to private minute books. The article deals with the development of this category of sources which evolved from private minute books dating back to at least the 11th century to the communal ones as well as the minute books of the communal bodies based on the dozen manuscript examples. These are mostly of European origin, however, with a few Eastern additions. This evolution process becomes visible as a result of the analysis of the manuscripts’ internal structure and composition. Special attention is paid to the techniques used to enforce this structure on codicological and paleographic levels. The data at hand suggest that at the beginning of the Modern period some of the minute books were shifted from private to the public domain. This was a response to the demand from the rapidly evolving communal institutions. To suit the widened audience of varying backgrounds the communal minute books compared to those for private use adopted a more uniform structure as well as with a set of “navigation” or referencing tools, such as captions written on margins. The early modern Italian communal minute books tend to be the most structured ones.


Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky

For many centuries Poland and Russia formed the heartland of the Jewish world: right up to the Second World War, the area was home to over 40 per cent of the world's Jews. Yet the history of their Jewish communities is not well known. This book recreates this lost world, beginning with Jewish economic, cultural and religious life, including the emergence of hasidism. By the late eighteenth century, other factors had come into play: with the onset of modernization there were government attempts to integrate and transform the Jews, and the stirrings of Enlightenment led to the growth of the Haskalah movement. The book looks at developments in each area in turn: the problems of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist empire. It shows how the deterioration in the position of the Jews between 1881 and 1914 encouraged a range of new movements as well as the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. It also examines Jewish urbanization and the rise of Jewish mass culture. The final part, starting from the First World War and the establishment of the Soviet Union, looks in turn at Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union up to the Second World War. It reviews Polish–Jewish relations during the war and examines the Soviet record in relation to the Holocaust. The final chapters deal with the Jews in the Soviet Union and in Poland since 1945, concluding with an epilogue on the Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia since the collapse of communism.


Arthur Szyk ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 92-108
Author(s):  
Joseph P. Ansell

This chapter primarily discusses the background and context of Arthur Szyk's most enduring work, The Haggadah. It also provides an analysis of the work and its publication. For much of the 1930s, Szyk had been working on this illustrated and illuminated book — his version of the Haggadah, the prayer book used by the Jews for the celebration of Passover. The holiday of Passover commemorates the liberation and Exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. It is thus a celebration of freedom. The decision to work with this text had both art-historical precedent and contemporary political significance. So that work on The Haggadah could be completed and the many details of its production could proceed smoothly, the Szyks settled in London in 1937. Although the several years he spent with his family in London were occupied primarily with work on The Haggadah, Szyk also worked on two additional and very different major projects: a series of paintings on the history of Poles in America and a set of eight illustrations for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.


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