Collected Essays

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haym Soloveitchik
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Methodological Study ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
Hasidei Ashkenaz

Continuing the contribution to medieval Jewish intellectual history, this book's author focuses here on the radical pietist movement of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz and its main literary work, Sefer Ḥasidim, and on the writings and personality of the Provençal commentator Ravad of Posquières. In both areas the author challenges mainstream views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. Some of the essays are revised and updated versions of work previously published, and some are entirely new, but in all of them the author challenges reigning views to provide a new understanding of medieval Jewish thought. The section on Sefer Ḥasidim brings together over half a century of the author's writings on German Pietism, many of which originally appeared in obscure publications, and adds two new essays. The first of these is a methodological study of how to read this challenging work and an exposition of what constitutes a valid historical inference, while the second reviews the validity of the sociological and anthropological inferences presented in contemporary historiography. In discussing Ravad's oeuvre, the author questions the widespread notion that Ravad's chief accomplishment was his commentary on Maimonides' Mishneh Torah; his Talmud commentary, he claims, was of far greater importance and was his true masterpiece. He also adds a new study that focuses on the acrimony between Ravad, as the low-born genius of Posquières, and R. Zeraḥyah ha-Levi of Lunel, who belonged to the Jewish aristocracy of Languedoc, and considers the implications of that relationship.

Taking Herod to Task: Source Critical and New Historical Methods of Reading Herod’s Trial

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-422
Author(s):  
Ari Finkelstein
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
First Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jewish Historian ◽  
Historical Methods

AbstractFor nearly three decades scholars of the first-century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, have debated this author’s methodologies and goals in writing his Jewish Antiquities. While source-critics view Josephus as a compiler, new historians have chosen to read Antiquities as primarily a literary work which reveals social, political, and intellectual history. A series of recent publications place these methodologies side by side but rarely coordinate them, which leaves out important insights of each group. At stake is how we moderns read Jewish history of the first century CE. I explore how parallel accounts of Herod’s trial while he was Tetrarch of the Galilee in Jewish War and in Antiquities can be justified by employing source-critical analysis as a first step to explain the changes made to the text of Antiquities before turning to new historians’ methodologies. We can better understand the function of Herod’s trial in Antiquities through this process.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the Mystification of Maimonidean Rationalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 59-86
Author(s):  
James A. Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Political Advocacy ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Jewish Intellectual

This chapter points out how modern Jewish thinkers looked back and engaged a foundational Jewish canon of scriptural and rabbinic texts when they staked out their own novel ground and advanced Jewish thought in the twentieth century. It mentions the intellectual and jurisprudential legacy of Maimonides as a major part of the development of Jewish law and thought. It also focuses on Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook, who embodies modern Jewish authenticity in the twentieth century. The chapter discusses Jewish intellectual, literary, and activist currents that intersected Rabbi Kook. It explores Rabbi Kook's passionate spiritual and political advocacy of Zionism, and his rabbinic leadership of pre-state Jaffa. It describes how Rabbi Kook was constantly driven by an irrepressible urge to disclose his most intimate reflections, no matter what the consequences might be.

The Early Middle Ages of Samuel Beckett

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-38
Author(s):  
Mark Byron
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Medieval Philosophy ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
History Of ◽  
Divine Identity

Beckett's investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history, literature, and psychology. Numerous scholars – Daniella Caselli, Anthony Uhlmann, Dirk Van Hulle, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman among others – have carefully delineated the relationship between Beckett's note-taking and his deployment of philosophical sources in his literary texts. Whilst the focus quite rightly tends to fall on Beckett's absorption of Presocratic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophy, there are important strands of early medieval philosophy that find expression in his literary work. The philosophy notes housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, provide insights into Beckett's reading in medieval philosophy, drawing almost exclusively from Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy. The epoch spanning from Augustine to Abelard saw central concepts in theology and metaphysics develop in sophistication, such as matters of divine identity and non-identity, the metaphysics of light, and the nature of sin. The influence of the Eastern Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Maximus the Confessor) on Western metaphysics finds expression in the figuration of light and its relation to knowing and unknowing. This eastern theological inflection is evident in the ‘Dream’ Notebook, where Beckett's notes demonstrate his careful reading of William Inge's Christian Mysticism. These influences are expressed most prominently in various themes and allusions in his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, and Watt. The formal experiments and narrative self-consciousness of these early novels also respond to the early medieval transformation of textual form, where the precarious post-classical fruits of learning were preserved in new modes of encyclopaedism, commentary, and annotation. Beckett's overt display of learning in his early novels was arguably a kind of intellectual and textual preservation. But the contest of ideas in his work subsequently became less one of intellectual history and more that of immanent thinking in the process of composition itself.

Moses Mendelssohn

1984 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Altmann
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
General Reader ◽  
Intellectual Activity ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
New Phase

This acclaimed, wide-ranging biography of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–96) was first published in 1973, but its stature as the definitive biography remains unquestioned. Moses Mendelssohn came to be recognized as the inaugurator of a new phase in Jewish history. His life was a kaleidoscope of the European intellectual scene, Jewish and non-Jewish. As both a prominent philosopher and a believing Jew, Mendelssohn became a spokesman for the Jews and Judaism. What was Mendelssohn's Judaism like? To what extent did the disparate worlds of Judaism and modern Enlightenment jostle each other in his mind and to what degree could he harmonize them? These questions are not easily answered, and it is only in the aggregate of a multitude of accounts of experiences, reaction, and statements on his part that the answer is to be found. The book will be of interest not only to those who are concerned with Jewish intellectual history but also to those interested in eighteenth-century cultural and social history, philosophy and theology, literary criticism, aesthetics, and the other areas of intellectual activity in ferment at that time. The general reader will also find much of contemporary relevance in Mendelssohn's life, not only because of his exemplary devotion to reason and tolerance, but also because of his lifelong struggle with the basic dilemma of the Jew in the modern world: the attraction of assimilation versus the singularity of Jewish life, and the preservation of Jewish identity versus integration in the wider society.

scholarly journals COVID-19 Infodemic: A New Historicist Analysis of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uzma Imtiaz ◽  
Fatima Humda ◽  
Rabia Ramzan
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Genetically Engineered ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Fundamental Causes ◽  
Oryx And Crake ◽  
Bio Engineering

This research intends to explore the current calamitous situation of Covid-19 in the context of <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, mirroring how Covid-19 and <i>Oryx and Crake</i> are linked through the perception of unification and the consciousness of the world as a whole by holding the entire world hostage. It vigorously examines the disease being presented as a weapon of mass destruction, followed by a conspiracy theory, the reality of the present and fancy of the future, generating a feeling of mingled contradiction, a psychological aspect, and stout human response to the unpredicted as some shared themes between the two. The potential strength of the New Historicism was found applicable in contextualizing COVID-19 and <i>Oryx and Crake</i>, which explore and project forward the biotechnological, social, political, cultural, economic, and climatic givens of the pandemic ridden world. It involves a parallel study of a literary work, interpreting events as the products of time. The textual interpretation was based on observation of historical context to see how following pandemics of the past may allow today’s world to detect the fundamental causes of such diseases. Understanding the pandemic through intellectual history highlighted the consequences of unscrupulous exploitation of bio-engineering threats, a sense of uncertainty, fear, and insecurity, biotech corporations, and marketing genetically engineered life forms.

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