Jacob Ṣemaḥ, Humanist

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
J. H. Chajes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Educational Background ◽  
Humanist Education ◽  
Curriculum Vitae

Abstract Jacob Ṣemaḥ (ca. 1578–1667), an erudite physician-kabbalist, was raised amongst the conversos of Viana de Caminha in northwest Portugal. He fled the country in his mid-thirties to live openly as a Jew, arriving first in Salonica. Ṣemaḥ was responsible for the consolidation of the Lurianic literary corpus in the second third of the seventeenth century. His contribution, I argue, should be situated in the broader context of a scholarly curriculum vitae that began decades before his flight from Portugal, as Ṣemaḥ embraced Jewish life as a humanist. Coupled with his natural gifts and genius, Ṣemaḥ’s humanist education served him remarkably well in his new life. The interesting question is therefore not “how might he have learned Torah in Portugal” but “how did his Portuguese educational background affect—indeed, effect may be the more apt term—his Jewish scholarship?”

Singer, Isaac Bashevis (1904–1991)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Furnish
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
York City ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Religious Study ◽  
Jewish Immigrant ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
German Jewish

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in Leoncin, Poland, where his father was a Hasidic rabbi. He grew up between 1908–1917 in Warsaw and from 1917–1921 in Bilgoray (Biłgoraj), which shaped his knowledge of small-town Jewish life. The younger brother of Yiddish writers Israel Joshua Singer and Esther Kreitman, Singer began reading secular literature at 10, and after years of religious study, he eventually followed his brother into Warsaw’s bohemian literary Yiddish community, translating several modern writers into Yiddish. Singer’s first novel, Der Sotn in Goray [Satan in Goray], set in seventeenth-century Poland with the background of pogroms and the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, appeared in 1934, and the next year, he joined Israel Joshua in New York City where both wrote for the Yiddish press. In 1950, Singer married Alma Haimann Wassermann, a German Jewish immigrant from a once-wealthy family, who supported the couple by working as a retail clerk. Singer wrote in Yiddish for his entire life; most of his novels were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward Yiddish newspaper. Unlike most great Yiddish writers, he found success in translation, particularly after Saul Bellow’s translation of the story ‘Gimpel the Fool’ appeared in Partisan Review in 1953.

Outside the Ghetto: Jews and Christians in the Duchy of Modena

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-271
Author(s):  
Katherine Aron-Beller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
City States ◽  
Main City

Abstract Historians have in the past concentrated their studies of early modern Jewish life on the main city-states of Northern Italy where the largest Jewish communities existed. These areas have been categorized as territories which absorbed Jewish immigrants, enclosed them in ghettos, and monitored their actions with the creation of specific agencies. My essay turns to Jewish existence in the smaller towns and rural areas of the duchy of Modena in the seventeenth century, and attempts to question how this alienated minority was able to fare in areas which housed no ghettos. Here the political and religious decentralization, particularly in the early seventeenth century, generated retaliatory hostility as well as intimacy between Jews and Christians. Sources for this study will be Inquisitorial documents that concerned professing Jews. These sources, once decoded, provide extraordinarily rich images of daily life and provide a unique picture of social relations between the two religionists.

The Poetry and Practice of Meditation

Poetics Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-614
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bradburn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Mindfulness Meditation ◽  
Therapeutic Potential ◽  
Brain Structures ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Humanist Education ◽  
Sensory Modalities ◽  
Meditative Practice ◽  
Therapeutic Context ◽  
The Way

Is reading poetry good for you? Drawing on evidence that reading poetry involves some of the same brain structures as those upon which human psychological well-being depends, this essay argues that George Herbert’s devotional lyrics, long understood as Christian meditations, center on recurring images in a manner consistent with the modern practice of mindfulness meditation. There is a significant overlap between the way meditation was understood by seventeenth-century Christians and the way it is understood by modern meditators in a secular and therapeutic context. Neurally, meditation means the reduction of activity in the brain’s default mode network; phenomenally, it means repeatedly bringing wandering attention back to a chosen meditation object. Poetry can be isomorphic with meditative practice because the image of meditation has an identifying pattern of movement—spontaneous wandering and controlled return—that can be created in several sensory modalities. Complex enough to characterize Herbert’s poetry as meditative, the pattern of wandering from and returning to a focal image potentially defines a meditative literary mode with a distinctive relationship to the imagination. The therapeutic potential of meditative poetry speaks to the value not just of poetry but of humanist education in general.

Oral Language Behavior of Older Cerebral Palsied Children

1964 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Love
Keyword(s):  
Oral Language ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Educational Background ◽  
Socio Economic Status ◽  
Language Behavior ◽  
Hearing Acuity

A battery of six tests assessing various aspects of receptive and expressive oral language was administered to 27 cerebral palsied children and controls matched on the variables of age, intelligence, sex, race, hearing acuity, socio-economic status, and similarity of educational background. Results indicated only minimal differences between groups. Signs of deviancy in language behavior often attributed to the cerebral palsied were not observed. Although previous investigators have suggested consistent language disturbances in the cerebral palsied, evidence for a disorder of comprehension and formulation of oral symobls was not found.

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