Introduction

2017 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Chaim I. Waxman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Religious Law

This chapter introduces Orthodox Judaism, which is viewed phenomenologically, defined broadly, and recognized in the systems of beliefs and practices maintained by Orthodox Jews. It mentions the halakhah or Orthodox religious law that conceives the ‘practices’ part of the Orthodox Jewish system. It also reveals Orthodox Jewish practices that are not pursued to accord with halakhah but can be characterized as minhag or custom. The chapter looks at Orthodox Judaism in America since the nineteenth century and examines a series of halakhic changes or changes in what is deemed to be proper Orthodox conduct. It explains the various directions in which ‘acceptable’ Orthodox behaviour is developing from a social and psychological perspective.

Setting the Scene: The Jewish Landscape

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-68
Author(s):  
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Religious Geography ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Basic Parameters ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter examines the historical and sociological context of Orthodox Jewish women in London, and applies concepts of community to analyse the religious geography of Orthodox Jews in Britain. The term 'community' is used by British Jews, generally in one of two distinct senses: the first, refers to all Jews who identify as Jews and participate in Jewish activities, the second, indicates a particular subgroup, the members of a particular synagogue. Most Jews who identify as belonging to the Jewish community also belong to several of these 'subcommunities,' all of which overlap with family and social circles within the Jewish and wider communities, and most of which are not mutually exclusive. Community affiliation thus exists at several levels and in several modes, with an individual's particular combination of networks and community memberships providing basic parameters of his or her individual Jewish identity. This complex, layered character of modern Jewish identity complicates the definition of the term 'Orthodox'. Current denominations include Liberal Judaism and Reform Judaism; Masorti Judaism; and Orthodox Judaism. Earlier tensions between traditional expectations for women and new ideas about their role in the wider society were reflected in developments within the British Jewish community: the foundation of Liberal Judaism. Orthodoxy has been slow to respond. The very word 'feminist' carries negative connotations in most Orthodox communities, even among women who profess strongly feminist views in economic and political matters.

Studying Jewish Women

2021 ◽  
pp. 10-36
Author(s):  
Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Religious Activities ◽  
Torah Study ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Religious Lives ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the problems of studying Orthodox Jewish women, in particular the 'double invisibility' they experience, first from the perspective of male Orthodox Jews, and, second, in the lack of knowledge about them in the non-Jewish world. Orthodox women engage in a wide range of communal and domestic religious activities, in spite of their exclusion from an active role in worship in synagogue and from some areas of Torah study. Activities defined by Orthodoxy as the supreme religious privileges of women, such as keeping a kosher kitchen, preparing food for sabbath and festivals, and nurturing and educating children, remain largely invisible to Orthodox men. Standard descriptions of women's practices in the domestic and individual spheres omit many widespread customs and practices, often characterized as 'superstitions' although they form an integral and meaningful part of many women's religious lives. A major problem in studying women's religious lives and the ways in which they differ from and intersect with those of men is imagining how women fit into one's overall picture of Jewish religious activity. Neither the 'separate but equal' apologetic nor the simplistic identification of 'oppressed and oppressors' made by some feminists provides an adequate way of thinking about the relationship between male and female lived experience of Judaism. Given that Orthodox Judaism is undeniably patriarchal, it may reasonably be asked whether women have any access to power or agency within the religious life of the community, particularly in matters of ritual and correct practice.

Microcosm and Macrocosm

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Marek Tuszewicki
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The World

This chapter examines the far-reaching consequences of the persistent conviction in folk culture of the close bonds between the human body (the microcosm) and the world (the macrocosm). This conviction was not only the ground from which 'folk-type medicine' grew, but also key evidence that ancient theories surrounding the origins and functioning of the world, the anatomy and workings of the human body, and even astrology were very much alive in the medicine-related beliefs and practices of the residents of eastern Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapter contains examples of treatments employing methods inspired by folk mythology and expressed in a language that used an anthropomorphic and cosmological code, and of the consequences of the perception of humans as a reflection of the world around them.

“The Nature of Harmony”

2011 ◽  
pp. 54-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Steege
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Intellectual Discourse ◽  
Theoretical Evolution ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Trajectory

This article provides and introduction and translation of Riemann's “The Nature of Harmony”. The translation in this article provides an easy access to an important Riemann's own theoretical evolution, which was written at the moment when a budding psychological perspective was beginning to supersede Riemann's earlier acoustical and physiological perspective. Just as Riemann attempts to place his theoretical program within a historical trajectory, the article locates his work within the wider and broader historical and intellectual discourse of nineteenth-century physics, physiology, and psychology, highlighting the implied and overt polemics with Helmholtz and others that course through its pages.

The Philological Uncanny: Nineteenth-Century Jewish Readings of the Qur'an

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-213
Author(s):  
Susannah Heschel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Orthodox Jewish ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Jewish Students ◽  
Parallel Texts ◽  
German Universities ◽  
At Home

Is the Qur'an a Jewish book? When Jews first began studying and analysing Qur'anic texts as students at German universities in the 1830s, they experienced what this essay calls a ‘philological uncanny’—elements and aspects which are both recognisable and alien, giving a sense of being at home and in a different place simultaneously. The Qur'an, in that moment of first reading, may well have appeared uncanny to these young Jewish students, suddenly rendering in Arabic, in the Scripture of Islam, words from the Hebrew of the Mishnah. This article follows the experience and interpretation of these elements in the writing of key figures among Jewish scholars of Islam from the 1830s to the 1930s. These Jewish scholars, raised in religiously observant homes and given a classical Orthodox Jewish education in Talmud and its commentaries, played a central role in establishing the field of Islamic Studies in Europe. From Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) and Gustav Weil (1808–1888), to Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921) and Eugen Mittwoch (1876–1942), they shaped an approach to the Qur'an that placed it within the context of rabbinic Judaism, outlining parallel texts and religious practices, even as they also created an important stream of Jewish self-definition in which Judaism and Islam were identified as the two most intimate monotheistic religions.

Response to Prasenjit Duara, “Asia Redux”

2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1015-1020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Watson Andaya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Maritime Trade ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Cultural Contact ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Territorial Boundaries ◽  
The Web

In his provocative essay, Prasenjit Duara argues that prior to the nineteenth century, the web of maritime trade networks infused the ill-defined area we call “Asia” with a genuine coherence, providing a conduit for cultural flows that readily permitted interactive relationships and the mutual adoption of new beliefs and practices. By the late nineteenth century, however, the imperial powers sought to ensure their global dominance by creating regional blocs consisting of territories that were economically subservient to the metropole. The consequent focus on the establishment of territorial boundaries encouraged a “nationalist congruence between state and culture” that gathered pace over the next hundred years. Only now are we beginning to see an Asia where interdependence and increasing cultural contact, carrying echoes of past connectivities, have opened up new opportunities by which a “transnational consciousness” can and should be encouraged.

scholarly journals Kabbalist and Communal Leader: Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg and the Canadian Jewish Community

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Religious Law ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
The Relationship

The social, economic and religious pressures encountered by Eastern European Jews who emigrated to North America have been well documented. But focus on these areas has mostly failed to take into account the relationship between Orthodox Judaism and the process of adaptation to the New World. At the turn of the century, Orthodox rabbis, immigrants themselves, actively wrestled with the competing demands of Orthodox tradition and modern society. One such rabbi, Judah (Yudel) Rosenberg, brought with him to Canada a background combining both traditional Hasidism and secular learning. Rosenberg sought to draw the people closer to tradition by making it more accessible to them. Mysticism, especially, he viewed as the key to the preservation and regeneration of Judaism amongst a population that found it easier to make excuses than to follow the letter of religious law.

Maxine Jacobson, Modern Orthodoxy in American Judaism: The Era of Rabbi Leo Jung. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016. 250 pp.

2020 ◽  
pp. 294-296
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Orthodox Jews ◽  
Orthodox Judaism ◽  
Jewish Immigrant ◽  
Dominant Group ◽  
American Judaism ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The Many ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Modern Orthodox

The premise of this book, actually based on an article I published in 1982, is that rabbis can serve as indicators of the Orthodoxy they serve. In her examination of a once-dominant group within Orthodox Judaism, the so-called “Modern Orthodox,” Maxine Jacobson focuses on Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, a German Jewish immigrant to America who became a prominent spokesman and exemplar of these Jews. Admitting that a precise definition of Modern Orthodoxy is elusive and that even many of those who came to be associated with this worldview and its allied behaviors were uncomfortable with the term (nor did they all agree on its parameters), Jacobson falls back on metaphor: “The Modern Orthodox Jew has been pulled in two directions” (p. 10). Those two directions are defined by Jacobson as either “not religious enough” or “not modern enough” (p. 10). Effectively, Modern Orthodoxy hoped to harmonize these two opposites, having relationships of respect with non-Jews and embracing the larger surrounding open culture, while remaining conscientiously observant. In contrast, Jacobson notes, “the Ultra-Orthodox group seeks to exclude” all that is different from it (p. 11). Nothing new here. The many faces of Orthodoxy have been more or less defined, from almost the first days that Orthodox Jews were subject to critical analysis, by a variety of observers, including myself....

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