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.

The Council of Constance: Its Fame and its Failure

1921 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 43-69
Author(s):  
David Schley Schaff
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Church Administration ◽  
The North ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Middle Ages

Van Der Hardt significantly entitled his voluminous collection of documents bearing on the Council of Constance, Magnum œcumenicum Constantiense concilium —the Great Œcumenical Council of Constance. The recent Catholic historian Funk pronounced it to be “eine der grossartigsten Kirchenversammlungen welche die Geschichte kennt”—one of the most imposing church assemblies known to history. In my own judgment, the council which assembled in Constance (1414) was, upon the whole, not only one of the most imposing of church œcumenical councils but perhaps the most imposing assembly of any sort which has ever met on the soil of Western Europe. In its sessions the urgent questions were discussed which agitated to its foundations Western Christendom during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. The Council had on it the smell of the Middle Ages and at the same time it felt the breath of the age about to open. It was an ecclesiastical synod and yet it had much of the swing of a democratic assembly. It was the first approach to a free religious parliament in which the lay element had recognition at the side of the clerical element. The two elements, mediæval and modern, strictly clerical and lay, had representation in its two places of meeting, the Cathedral, the temple of religion, and the Kaufhaus, the board of trade. The assembly was an ecclesiastical body, called to settle ecclesiastical questions; Constance was an imperial city, one of the centers of the North Alpine traffic. The questions discussed were of church administration and doctrinal purity, but the voting was done by national groups, “nations,” a wide departure from the habit of restricting the voting to the bishops, as at the Council of Nice, 325 A.D., and later councils.

scholarly journals The Laws of the Temple and the Proper Sleep in Biblical and Rabbinic traditions

2018 ◽  
pp. 12-32
Author(s):  
Svetlana Babkina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People ◽  
Bed Form ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article deals with the idea that the bed should be placed north to south and not from west to east formulated in B. Berakhot 5b. As the later tradition says, this rule stays actual during the middle ages and till these days. According to the commentators this rule is based on the idea, that the Shekhinah lays from west to east, so this direction became sacred. There are three reasons to avoid this position during the sleep. All of them are connected to the ritual impurity. The first is nocturnal emission, which can happen to a man or a woman and which make that person impure. The second reason is the connection of sleep to death, which is the «father of fathers of impurities». The third is the vulnerability of the human being from the side of the different kind of night demonic creatures, who can kill the people (and make them ritually impure). All the ideas have deep biblical roots, but were combined only in rabbinical period when the prescription to put the bed form north to south first appeared. The problem is, that the practice could be very much older than the rabbinic tradition. This the rule formulated in Talmud can serve as a good example of adaptation of popular beliefs toward the official religion. From the other side this example shows that inside the monotheistic tradition there always was a place for ideas rooted in archaic societies: here we can see the clearly formulated idea, that by the manipulation sleeping space one can influence prosperity.

scholarly journals Sophia's theme in world and national spirituality

2004 ◽  
pp. 86-95
Author(s):  
Yevgen A. Harkovschenko
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Wisdom Of Solomon ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Sophia tradition was formed in European philosophical and religious creativity and was developed in the pre-Christian period by Plato. Then it was reflected in Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, the writings of prominent theorists of Christianity - fathers and teachers of the church, mystics of the Middle Ages. This tradition was reflected in the temple architecture and iconography of the Orthodox East, and took a systematic form of the doctrine of sophiology in the "philosophy of unity." The doctrine of Sophia the Wisdom of God is set forth in the biblical book of the parables of the Solomons, as well as in the non-canonical books of the Old Testament - the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach. In Ukraine, Sofia teaching has been known since medieval times and was a feature of Kyiv Christianity.

Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Levi Roach
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages

This book takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale. As the book illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime. Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy, the book examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church. Above all, the book indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present — a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity. These conclusions revise traditional master narratives about the development of antiquarianism in the modern era, showing that medieval forgers were every bit as sophisticated as their Renaissance successors. Medieval forgers were simply interested in different subjects — the history of the Church and their local realms, rather than the literary world of classical antiquity. As a comparative history of falsified records at a crucial turning point in the Middle Ages, the book offers valuable insights into how institutions and individuals rewrote and reimagined the past.

From Myth to History

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. B. Yehoshua
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Common Basis ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Family Memories ◽  
The Common ◽  
Bible Stories ◽  
Primary Basis ◽  
The Temple

If we were to unravel the foundation of Jewish identity into its primary components, we would discover that beyond the religious commandments, beyond the various national sentiments, beyond the sense of belonging and connection to the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language, beyond certain historical and family memories that uniquely determine the Jewish identity of each individual, the common basis of all Jewish identities, in their various dosages and strengths, comprises several fundamental stories—stories that have shed any clear indicia of historical time and place and have become myths, metastories, which can no longer be changed, only interpreted. These myths, such as the binding of Isaac (the akedah), the story of the exodus and other bible stories, the stories of the destruction of the Temple (and recently, in a certain sense, the Holocaust), have become the infrastructural components of Jewish consciousness and identity, both religious and secular. They have served for millennia as effective ingredients in the preservation of the identity of many Jews, scattered among various lands and continents, in the midst of various peoples and religions and assorted civilizations, and for centuries without being specifically dependent on the clear historical context of a defined territory or language. These myths are the most primary basis for the existence of diaspora Jewish identity, which makes possible the preservation of Jewish identity “outside history,” in the famous phrase of Gershon Scholem, notwithstanding the terrible toll that this existence has taken on the Jewish people in the end. The power of these myths lies in the fact that one's connection to them can be immediate, in all places and at all times, and beyond their original linguistic form; this connection finds succinct expression in the sentence, “In every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as if he himself left Egypt.”

Rachel Ertel. Le Shtetl. La bourgade juive de Pologne de la tradition a la modenité. Paris: Payot. 1982. Pp. 321.

2004 ◽  
pp. 409-411
Author(s):  
Władysław T. Bartoszewski
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Secondary Material ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter focuses on Rachel Ertel's Le Shtetl (1982). One of the most unusual characteristics of Poland as compared with other European countries, was a large Jewish presence in villages and townlets. In the inter-war period, approximately 30 per cent of Jews lived in such settlements. These settlements, shtetlekh, were fascinating centres of Jewish life and culture, and places of daily contacts between Jews and Christian Poles. It is therefore surprising how few books on the shtetl have been published. Hence, one welcomes every publication dealing with this important aspect of Jewish life before the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the work of Rachel Ertel does not fulfil expectations. The author, who teaches American and Jewish civilization in Paris, attempts to show the evolution of shtetlekh from tradition to modernity. The first quarter of the book is an historical summary of Jewish life in Poland from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century. This is based on secondary material only, much of which is quite old. The history of Jews in Poland is treated in total isolation from Polish history, about which the author knows precious little.

scholarly journals Those who require ‘[…] the burning of incense in synagogues are the Rabbinic Jews’: Burning incense in synagogues in commemoration of the temple

2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham O. Shemesh
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article focuses on the burning of incense in synagogues subsequent to the destruction of the temple, in commemoration of the incense formerly used in the temple rites. We hear about the implementation of this custom in Samaritan and Rabbinic synagogues only several centuries after the destruction of the Samaritan and Jewish Temples. The Samaritans still burn incense in their synagogues at certain times, but among Rabbinic Jews the custom came to an end, probably in the Middle Ages. Burning incense in the synagogue was a point of controversy between the Karaites and the Rabbinic Jews. The Karaites argued that acts involving burning incense and lighting candles are only appropriate for the Temple and their status is like that of sacrifices or offerings that are limited to this complex. It may have been that the rabbinic custom discontinued as a result of the strict Karaite objections to this custom for concern of idolatry. In fact, burning incense in commemoration of the Temple indeed ceased, but this practice remained in evidence until the 19th century for purposes of conveying respect or on festive occasions.

scholarly journals Between Heaven and Earth: Places of Worship in Egypt and Syria through the Mirror of Visual Evidence

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 90
Author(s):  
Rachel Sarfati
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Heaven And Earth ◽  
The Temple ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the villages Dammūh, near Fustֿׅatׅ, and Jobar, near Damascus, there were places of worship dedicated to Moses and Elijah which were part of central pilgrimage sites. This article will propose a depiction of the architecture and interiors of these places based on visual and literary sources from the Middle Ages. In addition to the realistic aspect, this article will suggest that the unique design of the reviewed illustrations expressed the prevalent belief that when the Temple was destroyed, the Shekhinah was exiled to the holy sites in Dammūh and Jobar. According to a common tradition, these places are located between heaven and earth, and he who prays in them feels like he is in the Garden of Eden.

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