scholarly journals “They Remembered That They Had Seen It in a Jewish Midrash”: How a Samaritan Tale Became a Legend of the Jews

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 635
Author(s):  
Steven Fine

This article relates the transmission history of a single Samaritan text and its fascinating trajectory from a Samaritan legend into early modern rabbinic tradition, and on to nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish studies circles. It focuses on the only Samaritan narrative cited in all of Louis Ginzberg’s monumental Legends of the Jews (1909–1938). Often called the “Epistle of Joshua son of Nun,” I trace the trajectory of this story from a medieval Samaritan chronicle to Samuel Sulam’s 1566 publication of Abraham Zacuto’s Sefer Yuḥasin. From there, we move to early modern belles lettres in Hebrew and Yiddish, western scholarship and then to the great Jewish anthologizers of the fin de siècle, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, Judah David Eisenstein and Louis Ginzberg. I will suggest reasons why this tale was so appealing to Sulam, a Sephardi scholar based in Istanbul, that he appended it to Sefer Yuḥasin, and what about this tale of heroism ingratiated it to early modern European and then early Zionist readers. The afterlife of this tale is a rare instance of Samaritan influence upon classical Jewish literature, undermining assumptions of unidirectional Jewish influence upon the minority Samaritan culture from antiquity to modern times.

2006 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Jordi Piqué-Angordans ◽  
David Viera

AbstractNineteenth and early twentieth-century criticism oftentimes tended to lump literary works on the topic of women from the middle ages and early modern times as either essentially misogynist or feminist. Moral-didactic works that often fluctuated between antifeminist and profeminist opinion were often categorized as misogynist, akin to works such as Boccaccio's Corbaccio. This is the case of Francesc Eiximenis' Catalan literature, written for the most part in València. The authors of this study analyzed Eiximenis' views on women, for the most part taken from biblical, patristic, scholastic, and canonical sources, and found within his writings various contradictions. In this study, Eiximenis emerges as one who readily cited antifeminist literature, but who also defended women, whom he views as weaker than men, but equally if not more capable of being devout, performing good works, and most importantly, worthy of salvation.


1985 ◽  
Vol 106 ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Michael Hoskin

The paper outlines the history of attempts to explain the Milky Way, from Antiquity to the early-twentieth century, with special reference to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Also discussed is the relationship of the Galaxy to other star systems, and particularly the question of whether there are other galaxies in the visible universe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
T.N. GELLA ◽  

The main purpose of the article is to analyze the views of a famous British historian G.D.G. Cole on the history of the British workers' and UK socialist movement in the early twentieth century. The arti-cle focuses on the historian's assessment and the reasons for the workers' strike movement intensi-fication on the eve of the First World War, the specifics of such trends as labourism, trade unionism and syndicalism.


Author(s):  
Bill T. Arnold

Deuteronomy appears to share numerous thematic and phraseological connections with the book of Hosea from the eighth century bce. Investigation of these connections during the early twentieth century settled upon a scholarly consensus, which has broken down in more recent work. Related to this question is the possibility of northern origins of Deuteronomy—as a whole, or more likely, in an early proto-Deuteronomy legal core. This chapter surveys the history of the investigation leading up to the current impasse and offers a reexamination of the problem from the standpoint of one passage in Hosea.


2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.


Histories ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
Satoshi Murayama ◽  
Hiroko Nakamura

Jan de Vries revised Akira Hayami’s original theory of the “Industrious Revolution” to make the idea more applicable to early modern commercialization in Europe, showcasing the development of the rural proletariat and especially the consumer revolution and women’s emancipation on the way toward an “Industrial Revolution.” However, Japanese villages followed a different path from the Western trajectory of the “Industrious Revolution,” which is recognized as the first step to industrialization. This article will explore how a different form of “industriousness” developed in Japan, covering medieval, early modern, and modern times. It will first describe why the communal village system was established in Japan and how this unique institution, the self-reliance system of a village, affected commercialization and industrialization and was sustained until modern times. Then, the local history of Kuta Village in Kyô-Otagi, a former county located close to Kyoto, is considered over the long term, from medieval through modern times. Kuta was not directly affected by the siting of new industrial production bases and the changes brought to villages located nearer to Kyoto. A variety of diligent interactions with living spaces is introduced to demonstrate that the industriousness of local women was characterized by conscience-driven perseverance.


1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.


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