Judaism and Europe

It is not possible to make sense of Judaism today without understanding how it evolved in Europe. It was in Europe that the multiple options took shape for thinking about what Jewishness could mean once it became just one component among others in an individual’s sense of self. At the same time, European Jewry has endured a long and painful journey as it tried to create confident accounts of how Jewish identity could be understood. This journey reflects a struggle faced right across Europe between accommodating difference and acknowledging the inherent limitations of tolerance. With this in mind, this chapter examines the different pathways that have been forged by Jews across Europe as they sought to construct proud interpretations of both Judaism and Jewishness. In so doing, key themes are explored: cultural Judaism, religious reform, assimilation, anti-Semitism, secularization, and Zionism.

Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe

This chapter provides an overview of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in Europe. It begins by establishing the significance of the Reformation and commenting on recent trends in historical scholarship. An outline of theological change during the period follows, before consideration of the political dimension of religious reform across Europe, including the position of religious ‘radicals’, and the development of theories of resistance against persecuting secular rulers. The chapter moves on to consider the impact of the Reformations on religious belief, practice, and identity, looking at the spread of reform through visual and musical means, as well as topics such as education and disenchantment. It ends with the social impacts of Reformation on religious violence, toleration, and gender, and concludes by suggesting that the transformations instigated by the Catholic and Protestant Reformations wrought changes of great magnitude and complexity upon the Churches, nations, and peoples of early modern Europe.

Simon Szántó, Nineteenth Century Viennese Writer and Educator: A Study on Integration, Particularism, and the Ideal of Bildung

Simon Szántó is known as one of the founders of the Jewish press in Vienna, the editor and main author of the Jewish periodical Die Neuzeit, and an influential educator during the high point of Austrian liberalism between the 1860s and the early 1880s. His enormously rich literary legacy covers issues such as the integration of Jews into the Austrian-Hungarian society, religious reform, gender roles, and particularly education. Szántó’s writings offer a unique opportunity to look at the Viennese liberal period of the second half of the nineteenth century and its challenges through the eyes of a mostly overlooked, but highly significant and influential actor of the time. This article will first introduce Simon Szántó’s cultural and educational background that impacted his ideals and his activities, and go on to discuss one of his main concerns, namely Jewish education. Religious education, confessional schooling, and Jewish upbringing at home bore the burden of responsibility for shaping Austrian Jewish women and men. These Jews were to be integrated in an Austrian culture, while at the same time to retain a strong Jewish particularity. Szántó aimed to unite this dichotomous reality through the realization of his ideals of Jewish Bildung.

Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition

This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

Theology, Martyrdom and Female Agency in Reformation Prague

The Hussite tradition historically has been excluded by the mainstream of Reformation historiography. Czech-language scholarship treating Hussite history have made few significant advances in the study of women and there has been limited attention given to the role women played in the Hussite tradition. The gap in Anglophone historiography is even more apparent. This essay considers Klára, a sixteenth-century Prague housekeeper, Marta, a learned figure contemporary with Klára who withstood civil and ecclesiastical officials, and Anna Marie Trejtlarová, an early seventeen-century educated laywoman. Their names are almost completely unknown outside Czech historiography. An examination of their lives and faith by means of the surviving primary sources and relevant historiography provides a window through which to observe the nature of religious reform in the Prague context in the world of Reformations. What is striking is the role of theology and the nature of female agency in the examination of these women. The essay endeavours to use these case studies to present a preliminary answer to the question: What do women tell us about Reformation? This study reveals the world of religious reform more fully by situating women and female agency in an active capacity.

Incunabula in Communities of Canonesses Regular and Tertiaries Related to the Devotio Moderna

This contribution discusses the hitherto overlooked ownership of the earliest printed books (incunabula) by Netherlandish female religious communities of tertiaries and canonesses regular connected to the religious reform movement of the Devotio moderna. Studies of book ownership and book collections in these communities have tended to focus on manuscripts. From the last decades of the fifteenth century onwards, however, these religious women increasingly came in contact with printed books, even though the involvement of the Devotio moderna with the printing press was limited. The discussion focuses on the channels via which tertiaries and canonesses acquired books produced by commercially operating printers, the ways in which incunabula affected what these (semi-)religious women read, as well as the ratio between printed books in Latin and the vernacular, and their function(s) within these communities. Thus the essay intends to sketch a preliminary image of the role of incunabula in female convents, and advocates a more inclusive approach of female religious book ownership.

Angels and Anchoritic Culture in Late Medieval England

This book examines vernacular and Latin anchoritic writings in England (c.1170–1400) as these participated within late medieval negotiations between the distinct, and at times divergent, cultures of religious reform and spiritual charisma. It argues that admonitory (or regulatory), devotional, and hagiographic works composed for anchorites transmit, together with their intertexts, the urgent need within orthodox culture to manage the various and potentially unruly spiritualities so often associated with late medieval charismatics, including anchorites. So too, this study traces through the images of embodiment and angelic mediation a set of religious and cultural tensions around the efforts by religious (esp. clerical, monastic, and mendicant) elites to align individual and charismatic gifts (1 Cor. 12:8–11) with the widespread calls for obedience and submission to church authorities. This masculine suspicion of spiritual gifts was strategically framed within a discourse about (and in defence of) the clerical, Eucharistic, and ecclesial body, often in reaction against the increasingly acute threat of religious dissent. Related to these developments were the dominant narratives of corporate unity that marshaled images of angels—at once the messengers of charismatic power and the celestial associates of orthodox culture—as well as the Pauline text on angelic transfiguration (2 Cor. 11:14) to articulate major challenges at the level of institutional authority and spiritual power. Underwriting the fragile boundary between heresy and orthodoxy, mainstream figurations of charisma and the angelic image worked on behalf of a culture of reform and/as transformation in its efforts to secure the clerical and ecclesial body from corruption and falsification.

Exploring and Applying a Socially Progressive Hermeneutical Lens in Hindu Thought

Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpreting texts. In this paper, I describe and explore the implications of a hermeneutical lens that was utilized by the Caitanya Vaiṣṇava theologian A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda (1896–1977 CE). My aims in doing so are to (1) contribute toward inter-religious reform within the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), which Prabhupāda founded in 1966, and to (2) further develop Hindu conceptual resources that can inspire societal change. I also apply Prabhupāda’s hermeneutical lens to one narrative within the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (c. 9th to 10th century CE) and show how reading this narrative through this lens can de-emphasize certain patriarchal attitudes that are found within Hindu universes. Moreover, I demonstrate this lens’ applicability within ISKCON. I conclude by showing how this lens can also be applied in some other Hindu contexts.

(الحركة الإصلاحية في عُمان في العصر الحديث (نور الدّين السالمي وأبي مسلم البهلاني، نموذجين (The reform movement in Oman in the modern era (Nour al-Din al-Salmi and Abu Muslim al-Bahlani, two examples))

شهدت عُمان خلال العصر الحديث - شأنها شأن العالم العربي والإسلامي - بروز حركات إصلاحية، كان لها أثر فعال ودور متميز في إصلاح مختلف المجالات الحيوية في هذا البلد العربي الإسلامي، وما كان ذلك ليتم أو يكتمل، إلاّ بالانطلاق من إصلاح الأوضاع الثقافية والعلمية، التي ظلت إلى ذلك الحين، تشكو تخلفا كبيرا نتيجة فقدان الوعي بأهميتها، ولقد ساهم بعض المفكرين العُمانيين في هذه الحركة الإصلاحية، نذكر من بينهم نور الدّين السالمي وأبي مسلم البهلاني، الذيْن سنجعل منهما نموذجين لبحثنا، كون إصلاحاتهما مست عديد الميادين، منها: الإصلاح التربوي والإصلاح الديني والإصلاح الاجتماعي. إن هذا البحث يندرج ضمن البحوث التاريخية، لذا كان من الطبيعي أن يقوم على المنهج التاريخي الاستعراضي، وكذا على المنهج الاستقرائي التحليلي، وقد حاولت فيه استقراء الجوانب المتعلقة بالحركة الإصلاحية في عُمان، متتبعا لها ومعلقا عليها من حين لآخر. الكلمات المفتاحية: الحركة الإصلاحية، العالم العربي الإسلامي، فقدان الوعي، عُمان، الثقافية، العلمية. Abstract During the modern era, Oman - like the Arab and Islamic world - witnessed the emergence of reform movements, which had an effective impact and a distinguished role in reforming the various vital areas in this Arab and Islamic country. Until then, it complains of a great backwardness as a result of losing awareness of its importance, and some Omani thinkers have contributed to this reform movement, among them we mention Nour al-Din al-Salmi and Abu Muslim al-Bahlani, whom we will make as models for our research. The fact that their reforms touched many fields, including: Educational reform, religious reform and social reform. This research falls within the historical research, so it was natural for it to be based on the historical review method, as well as the inductive analytical method, in which I tried to extrapolate the aspects related to the reform movement in Oman, following it and commenting on it from time to time. Keywords: The reform movement, the Arab Islamic world, loss of consciousness, Oman, cultural, scientific.