Nahmanides

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moshe Halbertal
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Relationship

A broad, systematic account of one of the most original and creative kabbalists, biblical interpreters, and Talmudic scholars the Jewish tradition has ever produced, Rabbi Moses b. Nahman (1194-1270), known in English as Nahmanides, was the greatest Talmudic scholar of the thirteenth century and one of the deepest and most original biblical interpreters. Beyond his monumental scholastic achievements, Nahmanides was a distinguished kabbalist and mystic, and in his commentary on the Torah he dispensed esoteric kabbalistic teachings that he termed “By Way of Truth.” This broad, systematic account of Nahmanides's thought explores his conception of halakhah and his approach to the central concerns of medieval Jewish thought, including notions of God, history, revelation, and the reasons for the commandments. The relationship between Nahmanides's kabbalah and mysticism and the existential religious drive that nourishes them, as well as the legal and exoteric aspects of his thinking, are at the center of the book's portrayal of Nahmanides as a complex and transformative thinker.

Freud and Jewish Dreaming

2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Frosh
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Biblical Figures

This paper describes some links between Freud's creative activity in The Interpretation of Dreams and his identification with the biblical figures of Joseph and Moses. In particular, it draws on traditional Jewish thought on the relationship between prophecy and dreaming, and on the characters of Joseph and of Moses. It is argued that The Interpretation of Dreams shows Freud exploring aspects of his gendered and cultural identity and finding a place for himself as a provocative and iconoclastic ‘dreamer’ in the Jewish tradition.

Mimetic Monsters

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
Book Of Job ◽  
Edge Of Chaos ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship

This article reads between two recent explorations of the relationship between religion, chaos, and the monstrous: Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and Author's Religion and Its Monsters. Both are oriented toward the edge of chaos and order; both see the primordial and chaotic as generative; both pursue monstrous mythological figures as divine personifications of primordial chaos; both find a deep theological ambivalences in Christian and Jewish tradition with regard to the monstrous, chaotic divine; both are critical of theological and cultural tendencies to demonize chaos and the monstrous; and finally, both read the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job as a revelation of divine chaos. But whereas one sees it as a call for laughter, a chaotic life-affirming laughter with Leviathan in the face of the deep, the other sees it as an incarnation of theological horror, leaving Job and the reader overwhelmed and out-monstered by God. Must it be one way or the other? Can laughter and horror coincide in the face of the deep?

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

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.

Joseph Soloveitchik and Immanuel Kant's Mitzvah-Aesthetic

AJS Review ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zachary Braiterman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
Formal System ◽  
Order Effects ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Personal Morality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Ideal

In the following pages, I will address the relationship between Jewish thought and aesthetics by bringing Joseph Soloveitchik into conversation with Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment remains an imposing monument in the history of philosophical aesthetics. While Buber and Rosenzweig may have been more accomplished aesthetes, Soloveitchik's aesthetic proves closer to Kant's own. In particular, I draw upon the latter's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime and the notion of a form of indeterminate purposiveness without determinate purpose. I will relate these three figures to Soloveitcchik's understanding of halakhah and to the ideal of performing commandments for their own sake (li-shemah). The model of mitzvah advanced by this comparison is quintessentially modern: an autonomous, self-contained, formal system that does not (immediately) point to extraneous goods, such as spiritual enlightenment, personal morality, or social ethics. The good presupposed by this system proves first and foremost “aesthetic.” That is, immanent to the system. Supererogatory goods enter into the picture only afterward as second-order effects.

Jazzing It Up A Storm: The Execution and Meaning of Toni Morrison's Jazzy Prose Style

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan J. Rice
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Rigorous Analysis ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
New Novel ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

The publication of Toni Morrison's new novel Jazz with its insistent jazzy themes and rhythms will have concentrated the minds of critics on the relationship of her work to America's most important indigenous artistic form, jazz music. However, in their headlong rush to foreground the impact of jazz on Toni Morrison's latest novel critics should be wary of isolating this novel as her only jazz-influenced work. All of her novels have been informed by the rhythms and cadences of a black musical tradition and in this article I want to stress the centrality of jazz music stylistically to her whole corpus of work. Morrison herself has acknowledged the centrality of a musical aesthetic to her work in interview after interview long before the publication of Jazz:…a novel written a certain way can do precisely what spirituals used to do. It can do exactly what blues or jazz or gossip or stories or myths or folklore did – that stuff which was a common wellspring of ideas…Morrison is writing out of an oral tradition which foregrounds musical performances as well as other oral forms. Some critics have acknowledged the importance of jazz to her work, notably Anthony J. Berret in his article “Toni Morrison's Literary Jazz”. But, despite some provocative and illuminating comments, his is not a systematic account of the use of a jazz mode in Morrison's fiction and I wish in this paper to attempt a more rigorous analysis of her early novels, outlining her willed use of a jazz aesthetic as a pivotal structural device.

scholarly journals San Miniato al Monte e lo spazio politico fiorentino nel XIII secolo

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Enrico Faini
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
Political Space ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

Starting from the example of San Miniato al Monte, the essay dwells on the relationship existing between Florentine aristocracy and religious institutions. These were indispensable elements for the occupation of the urban ‘political space’, thanks to the social networks they controlled. Their political role – until now poorly investigated – was clearly recognised by the new ruling groups (Popolo). For this reason, the Florentine Popolo’s regime at the end of the thirteenth century tried to break the connection between aristocratic families and religious institutions, also through the use of precise rules that had become part of the Ordinamenti di Giustizia.

A Judaism of Ethics in a Post-Holocaust World: The Interplay of Literature and Theology in Cynthia Ozick's Messiah of Stockholm

AJS Review ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Claire E. Sufrin
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
Literature And Theology ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Bruno Schulz ◽  
The Relationship

This article suggests that bringing Jewish literature and Jewish thought into conversation can deepen our understanding of each. As an illustration of this interdisciplinary methodology, I offer a reading of Cynthia Ozick's 1987 Messiah of Stockholm. I claim that Ozick has embedded an argument about the relationship of post-Holocaust Jewry to the past into the literary features of her novel. Her argument draws in particular upon Leo Baeck's account of Judaism as focused on the present and future in contrast to the worshipful approach to the past characteristic of other religions. At the same time, I offer a more nuanced take on the fear of idolatry so often noted in analyses of Ozick's work and situate that fear in relationship to the literary theories of her predecessor Bruno Schulz, who plays a key role in the novel, and her contemporary Harold Bloom.

Symbolic Goods in Israeli Posters

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-120
Author(s):  
Michal Pal Bracha
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
The State ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Study Case ◽  
Bible Stories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Over Time

"This article deals with symbolic goods in posters in Israel from the period before the establishment of the state to the present day. The poster and the symbolic goods that appear in it, serve as an agent of ideological companies. In this study, I will examine the nature of the relationship between the symbolic goods and the Zionist-Israeli ideology, by comparing the symbolic goods represented in them over time and space. The questions the research asks are: What are the contribution and importance of symbolic goods as an ideological tool in Israeli posters? Has the world of symbolic goods that served Zionist ideology origin or been borrowed from other ideologies? The methodology is Qualitative research by: study case, Visual – genealogical. The conclusions of the study indicate the importance of the symbolic goods in the foundation of the State of Israel by posters and other media. The symbolic goods that characterize the posters in Israel, consist in part of content related to Jewish tradition and religion (Bible stories and myths) and its other part is influenced by the symbolic goods appropriated from ideologies around the globe. Keywords: Symbolic Goods, Posters, Marketing, Ideology, Zionist Movement, Israel. "

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-53
Author(s):  
Eitan P. Fishbane
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Philosophical Hermeneutics ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
The Relationship

The first chapter sets the stage for the broader project of the book; it begins with the idea that the Zohar may be approached as a classic of literary art, probing how the term “classic” has been used in the study of religion and philosophical hermeneutics. I will delve into the following issues: the contours of a literary approach to the Zohar and its relationship to the evolution of zoharic authorship and redaction theory; explore the nexus of mysticism and literature (both narrative and poetry) in comparative perspective; address the relationship between fiction, imagined history, and the merging of time between the medieval and (imagined) ancient periods; and explore the manner in which the Zohar operates with a diasporic-exilic consciousness, imagining the Holy Land from the distance of thirteenth-century Castile.

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