The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book (2 Vols)

The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book (2 Vols)
Author: Marvin J. Heller
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1605
Release: 2010
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9004186387

The Seventeenth Century Hebrew Book covers the gamut of Hebrew literature in that century. Each entry has a descriptive text page and an accompaning reproduction. There is an extensive introduction with an overview of Hebrew printing in the seventeenth century.

Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century

Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century
Author: Francesca Bregoli
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319894056

The volume investigates the interconnections between the Italian Jewish worlds and wider European and Mediterranean circles, situating the Italian Jewish experience within a transregional and transnational context mindful of the complex set of networks, relations, and loyalties that characterized Jewish diasporic life. Preceded by a methodological introduction by the editors, the chapters address rabbinic connections and ties of communal solidarity in the early modern period, and examine the circulation of Hebrew books and the overlap of national and transnational identities after emancipation. For the twentieth century, this volume additionally explores the Italian side of the Wissenschaft des Judentums; the role of international Jewish agencies in the years of Fascist racial persecution; the interactions between Italian Jewry, JDPs and Zionist envoys after Word War II; and the impact of Zionism in transforming modern Jewish identities.

The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book

The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book
Author: Marvin J. Heller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 570
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

"The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book" covers the gamut of Hebrew literature in that century. Each entry has a descriptive text page and an accompaning reproduction. There is an extensive introduction with an overview of Hebrew printing in the sixteenth century.

Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate

Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate
Author: Yosie Levine
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1802072047

With the social and cultural upheavals of early modern Europe, rabbis had to fight to preserve Jewish tradition. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, chief rabbi of Amsterdam, emerged as one of the leading halakhic authorities of the epoch, and the battles he waged would come to define rabbinic norms in the decades that followed.

Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500-2000

Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge, 1500-2000
Author: Peter Burke
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2017-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1512600334

In this wide-ranging consideration of intellectual diasporas, historian Peter Burke questions what distinctive contribution to knowledge exiles and expatriates have made. The answer may be summed up in one word: deprovincialization. Historically, the encounter between scholars from different cultures was an education for both parties, exposing them to research opportunities and alternative ways of thinking. Deprovincialization was in part the result of mediation, as many ŽmigrŽs informed people in their "hostland" about the culture of the native land, and vice versa. The detachment of the exiles, who sometimes viewed both homeland and hostland through foreign eyes, allowed them to notice what scholars in both countries had missed. Yet at the same time, the engagement between two styles of thought, one associated with the exiles and the other with their hosts, sometimes resulted in creative hybridization, for example, between German theory and Anglo-American empiricism. This timely appraisal is brimming with anecdotes and fascinating findings about the intellectual assets that exiles and immigrants bring to their new country, even in the shadow of personal loss.

Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy

Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy
Author: Kirsten Macfarlane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-01-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0192898825

This book provides a new account of a distinctive, important, but forgotten moment in early modern religious and intellectual history. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Christian scholars were investing heavily in techniques for studying the Bible that would now be recognised as the foundations of modern biblical criticism. According to previous studies, this process of transformation was caused by academic elites whose work, whether religious or secular in its motivations, paved the way for the Bible to be seen as a human document rather than a divine message. At the time, however, such methods were not simply an academic concern, and they pointed in many directions other than that of secular modernity. Biblical Scholarship in an Age of Controversy establishes previously unknown religious and cultural contexts for the practice of biblical criticism in the early modern period, and reveals the diversity of its effects. The central figure in this story is the itinerant and bitterly divisive English scholar Hugh Broughton (1549-1612), whose prolific writings in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English offer a new and surprising image of Protestant intellectual culture. In this image, scholarly advances were not impeded but inspired by strict scripturalism; criticism was driven by missionary ideals, even as actual proselytization was sidelined; and learned neo-Latin texts were repackaged to appeal to ordinary believers. Seen through the eyes of Broughton and his neglected colleagues and followers, the complex and unexpected contributions of reformed Protestant intellectuals and laypeople to longer-term religious and cultural change finally become visible.

The Mishnaic Moment

The Mishnaic Moment
Author: Piet van Boxel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2022-05-27
Genre: Christianity and other religions
ISBN: 0192898906

This collection of essays treats a topic that has scarcely been approached in the literature on Hebrew and Hebraism in the early modern period. In the seventeenth century, Christians, especially Protestants, studied the Mishnah alongside a host of Jewish commentaries in order to reconstructJewish culture, history, and ritual, shedding new light on the world of the Old and New Testaments. Their work was also inextricably dependent upon the vigorous Mishnaic studies of early modern Jewish communities. Both traditions, in a sense, culminated in the monumental production in six volumes ofan edition and Latin translation of the Mishnah published by Guilielmus Surenhusius in Amsterdam between 1698 and 1703. Surenhusius gathered up more than a century's worth of Mishnaic studies by scholars from England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as the commentaries of Maimonidesand Obadiah of Bertinoro (c. 1455-c.1515), but this edition was also born out of the unique milieu of Amsterdam at the end of the seventeenth century, a place which offered possibilities for cross-cultural interactions between Jews and Christians. With Surenhusius's great volumes as an end point,the essays presented here discuss for the first time the multiple ways in which the canonical text of Jewish law, the Mishnah (c.200 CE), was studied by a variety of scholars, both Jewish and Christian, in early modern Europe. They tell the story of how the Mishnah generated an encounter betweendifferent cultures, faiths, and confessions that would prove to be enduringly influential for centuries to come.

History of Universities

History of Universities
Author: Mordechai Feingold
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2017-07-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 019253372X

This double issue of of History of Universities, Volume XXX / 1-2, contains the customary mix of learned articles and book reviews which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. The volume is, as always, a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.

The Early Modern Yiddish Bible

The Early Modern Yiddish Bible
Author: Morris M. Faierstein
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2023-12-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0878207066

The translation of the Bible into the vernacular is a venerable Jewish tradition, more than two thousand years old. Ashkenazi Jewish culture was a latecomer to the vernacular Bible, and it was only in the sixteenth century that the Yiddish Bible made its appearance in print. Almost one hundred years ago, Wilhelm Staerk and Albert Leitzmann's survey of Early Modern Yiddish Bible translations was the first attempt to define this genre of Early Modern Yiddish literature. In the intervening century there has been relatively little scholarly interest in these texts. The purpose of the present study is to survey the present state of research in this field and place these works in the context of the popular religious culture of Ashkenazi Jewry, which is defined by its use of Yiddish as a means of both oral communication and literary production. The subject of this study is every Yiddish work from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that is directly or indirectly related to the Bible. The survey begins with the Mirkevet ha-Mishneh, the first published Yiddish book, which is a biblical concordance, published in Cracow, 1534-36, and concludes with the two competing translations of the entire Bible into Yiddish by Yekutiel Blitz and Joseph Witzenhausen, published in Amsterdam, 1676-86. (These were translations without any accompanying commentaries, and were modeled on Protestant Bibles, like the English King James, or the German Luther Bible.) The study includes not only translations of biblical books, but also adaptations, reworkings, and paraphrases of biblical texts, appearing in diverse literary styles, by a wide variety of authors. King David, for example, is presented in the Shmuel Bukh as a combination of medieval chivalric hero and rabbinic scholar who is careful to observe the strictures of Halakhah. The story of Jonah is retold through a midrashic lens, and concludes with a kabbalistic parable that analogizes Jonah's journey to that of the soul from conception through life, death, and return to its heavenly source. Some authors take great liberties with the biblical text. The author of the paraphrase of Isaiah only includes what he considers to be prophetic utterances and disregards the rest of the book. Another author decides that the second half of the Torah is too legalistic and not worth retelling, so he ends his commentary after the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. As for the Five Scrolls, Lamentations is too depressing so he ignores it. There are also surprising inclusions in these volumes, such as the books of Judith and Susanna from the Apocrypha, and the very colorful medieval version of the Book of Ben Sira, which is considered by modern scholars to be a parody.