A Time to Gather

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust, when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually “own” this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: whether in Israel’s claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry’s rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of “birth certificate” or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews’ long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history’s traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future.

Muhammad dan Orisinalitas Al-Quran dalam Pandangan Abraham Geiger

Among the interest in the study of Muhammad and the Quran was born from the Orientalists. Including the Orientalists who were very influential on this study was Abraham Geiger. From this research, it is found that Geiger has a view that tends to be contrary to that of Muslim scholars in general. Where Geiger views that Muhammad was someone who had tried to bring up the Quran because it was influenced by the Jewish culture that already existed in the Arab region at that time. Geigers opinion is based on several facts that he put forward, which include: When Muhammad carried out his mission in Medina, Muhammad was dealing with Jews who had long had a strong influence on the local community and Muhammad had close relations with Jews. in the area. This fact is then reinforced by Geigers findings in the Qur'an which are indicated to be taken from the Jewish tradition, such as the discovery of 14 vocabulary words of the Koran which tend to be the same as Jewish dogma, the discovery of doctrinal concepts that indicate the adaptation of the Qur'an from the Jews. and the stories in the Koran that tend to be in line with Jewish teachings.

The Jewish Reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-century Provence: A Survey of the Arabic Sources

The last few years have seen a renewed interest in Aristotle’s logic in the Jewish tradition, giving a decisive impulse to the research on the Greek-into-Hebrew philosophical transmission in medieval and early modern times. The present article aims to contribute to the studies on Aristotelian logic in Hebrew by focusing on a less explored aspect, namely the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in Jewish culture.

“These Hearts, Can They Reach Tranquility?”

The article examines the Arabic literary poetry written by Iraqi Jews in Israel during the 1950s after their immigration from Iraq. This temporal revival of Arabic poetry by Jews was the swan song of the Arab-Jewish culture as we are currently witnessing its demise– a tradition that started more than fifteen hundred years ago is vanishing before our eyes. Until the twentieth century, the great majority of the Jews under the rule of Islam adopted Arabic as their language; now Arabic is gradually disappearing as a language mastered by Jews.

Springtime for Ulysses

Why did Mel Brooks name one of the main characters in The Producers (1967) after James Joyce's Leopold Bloom? Tracing the meanings of that name over the course of a half century, from Joyce's Ulysses (1922) to the stage adaptation Ulysses in Nighttown (1958) to Brooks's film, illuminates how the landmark modernist novel not only acquired outsize significance for American Jewish readers but in fact became a Jewish text. Having affiliated itself with highbrow Joycean modernism in a bid for respectability, Jewish culture discovered in the source of that respectability something not so highbrow and hardly respectable at all: an enjoyable perversity rooted in popular comic performance. The Jewish form and content of both Ulysses and The Producers turn out to celebrate ethnic, racial, sexual, and class difference in defiance of Christian norms of taste, health, and citizenship; and it is in Brooks's popular citation of the literary that this defiance becomes visible.