Elazar ben Jacob of Baghdad in Jewish Liturgy

2018 ◽  
pp. 151-169
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Liturgy

Early Jewish Liturgy

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Stewart-Sykes ◽  
Judith Newman
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Liturgy

Hebrew School in Nineteenth-Century Bombay: Protestant Missionaries, Cochin Jews, and the Hebraization of India's Bene Israel Community

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1764-1808 ◽  
Author(s):  
MITCH NUMARK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Hebrew School ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Bene Israel ◽  
Jewish Liturgy

AbstractThis paper is a study of cultural interaction and diffusion in colonial Bombay. Focusing on Hebrew language instruction, it examines the encounter between India's little-known Bene Israel Jewish community and Protestant missionaries. Whilst eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cochin Jews were responsible for teaching the Bene Israel Jewish liturgy and forms of worship, the Bene Israel acquired Hebrew and Biblical knowledge primarily from nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Bene Israel community was a Konkan jati with limited knowledge of Judaism. However, by the end of the century the community had become an Indian-Jewish community roughly analogous to other Jewish communities. This paper explores how this transformation occurred, detailing the content, motivation, and means by which British and American missionaries and, to a lesser extent, Cochin Jews instructed the Bene Israel in Jewish knowledge. Through a critical examination of neglected English and Marathi sources, it reconstructs the Bene Israel perspective in these encounters and their attitude towards the Christian missionaries who laboured amongst them. It demonstrates that the Bene Israel were active participants and selective consumers in their interaction with the missionaries, taking what they wanted most from the encounter: knowledge of the Old Testament and the Hebrew language. Ultimately, the instruction the Bene Israel received from Protestant missionaries did not convert them to Christianity but strengthened and transformed their Judaism.

Jewish Liturgy and Jewish Scholarship: Method and Cosmology

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
The State ◽  
Scientific Rigour ◽  
Jewish Liturgy

The state of Jewish liturgy as a modern discipline has received treatment in many quarters. This article describes liturgical study in Judaism. It examines how Jewish liturgy is a discipline on its own. It now turns out that if it is a discipline, it is a very postmodern one, in the sense that it asks how Jews construct the meaning of their lives. New paradigms do not necessarily displace old ones; they build on them. The scientific rigour of the philologists is as important as ever; the reconstruction of piyyutim and rites serves as raw. With the abandoning of the model by which only origins matter, and with the understanding that every communal ritualizing deserves attention for what it says about Jewish identity, liturgy is becoming a ‘post-discipline’ with enormous potential.

Concluding Meditations

2020 ◽  
pp. 235-240
Author(s):  
Joshua Dubler ◽  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Prison Education ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Prison Abolition ◽  
Jewish Liturgy

In two concluding vignettes, the authors gesture toward how the religious traditions of their divergent upbringings inform their respective abolitionist commitments. Dubler, who was raised an observant Jew, reflects on how, among other aspects of the Jewish tradition, his formative encounters with Passover seder helped shape him into the abolitionist he is today. Drawing a connection between Jewish liturgy and the nineteenth-century abolitionist opponents of slavery, Dubler accounts for how the book acquired its title. Lloyd reflects on the experience of “witness” and how the ambivalence of this practice motivated his interest in prison abolition, and his scholarship. Both authors meditate on how direct action, prison education, scholarship, and citizenship are entangled, and how those tangles can be worked through Judaism or Protestantism.

Jewish Liturgical Memory and the Non-Jew

2012 ◽  
pp. 167-186
Author(s):  
Ruth Langer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Religious Other ◽  
Jewish Liturgy ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter examines the power and construction of Jewish memory as well as the image of the religious Other in Jewish liturgy, which has been so heavily conditioned by adversarial biblical narratives and the experience of historical persecution. In the memory shaped by Jewish liturgy — be it the daily Amidah, the High Holiday prayers, Passover and Purim texts, or the Ninth of Av piyutim (liturgical poems) memorializing the destruction of the Temple, the tragedies of the Middle Ages, and the Holocaust — the religious or political Other is portrayed as almost universally negative. The non-Jew — usually considered in the impersonal abstract, rather than the particular other — is a threat to Jewish uniqueness. It disrupts God's covenantal plan for Israel. The chapter then looks at the ongoing tension between making historical memory part of Jewish identity and an openness to allowing history to unfold into a future that may move beyond tragedy.

Christian Heresy and Jewish Polemic in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

1975 ◽  
Vol 68 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 287-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Berger
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Status ◽  
Jewish Liturgy ◽  
The Middle Ages

The suggestion that there was meaningful contact between Christian heretics and Jews during the middle ages is entirely plausible, quite significant, and generally unproved. That the existence of heresy had some impact upon the status of medieval Jews is, of course, beyond question. Inquisitorial proceedings aimed at heretics affected not only crypto-Jews (whether real or alleged) but members of the established Jewish community as well. Jews were accused of harboring heretics, encouraging them, and even of leading orthodox Christians into heresy. On several important occasions, procedures usually directed against heretical works were turned against the Talmud, the works of Maimonides, and certain sections of the Jewish liturgy. By the end of the middle ages, Jews were very well aware of the Church's lack of affection for heretics.

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