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In this wide-ranging discussion of Kabbalah—from the mystical trends of medieval Judaism to modern Hasidism—this book considers different visions of the nature of the sacred text and of the methods to interpret it. It takes as a starting point the fact that the postbiblical Jewish world lost its geographical center with the destruction of the temple and so was left with a textual center, the Holy Book. The author argues that a text-oriented religion produced language-centered forms of mysticism. Against this background, he demonstrates how various Jewish mystics amplified the content of the Scriptures so as to include everything: the world, or God, for example. Thus the text becomes a major realm for contemplation, and the interpretation of the text frequently becomes an encounter with the deepest realms of reality. The author delineates the particular hermeneutics belonging to Jewish mysticism, investigates the progressive filling of the text with secrets and hidden levels of meaning, and considers in detail the various interpretive strategies needed to decodify the arcane dimensions of the text.

Martin Buber's embrace of Hasidism at the start of the twentieth century was instrumental to the revival of this popular form of Jewish mysticism. Hoping to instigate a Jewish cultural and spiritual renaissance, Buber published a series of anthologies of Hasidic teachings written in German to introduce the tradition to a wide audience. This book closely analyzes his writings and sources to explore his interpretation of Hasidic spirituality as a form of cultural criticism. For Buber, Hasidic legends and teachings were not a static, canonical body of knowledge, but were dynamic and open to continuous reinterpretation. The author argues that this representation of Hasidism was essential to the Zionist effort to restore a sense of unity across the Jewish diaspora as purely religious traditions weakened—and that Buber's anthologies in turn played a vital part in the broad movement to use cultural memory as a means to reconstruct a collective identity for Jews. As the author unravels the rich layers of Buber's vision of Hasidism, Buber emerges as one of the preeminent thinkers on the place of religion in modern culture.

On August 3, 1492, the same day that Columbus set sail from Spain, the long and glorious history of that nation's Jewish community officially came to a close. The expulsion of Europe's last major Jewish community ended more than a thousand years of unparalleled prosperity, cultural vitality and intellectual productivity. Yet, the crisis of 1492 also gave rise to a dynamic and resilient diaspora society spanning East and West. This book traces the various paths of migration and resettlement of Sephardic Jews and Conversos over the course of the tumultuous sixteenth century. Pivotally, it argues that the exiles did not become “Sephardic Jews” overnight. Only in the second and third generation did these disparate groups coalesce and adopt a “Sephardic Jewish” identity. The book presents a new and fascinating portrait of Jewish society in transition from the medieval to the early modern period, a portrait that challenges many longstanding assumptions about the differences between Europe and the Middle East.

This book explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, the book draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation with one another. The book discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time. The framework for this examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word emet, “truth,” comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alef, mem, and tau, which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time—past, present, and future. By heeding the letters of emet we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken—between, before, beyond.

This new cultural history of Jewish life and identity in the United States after World War II focuses on the process of upward mobility. Rachel Kranson challenges the common notion that most American Jews unambivalently celebrated their generally strong growth in economic status and social acceptance during the booming postwar era. In fact, a significant number of Jewish religious, artistic, and intellectual leaders worried about the ascent of large numbers of Jews into the American middle class. Kranson reveals that many newly-affluent, postwar Jews were deeply concerned that their lives—affected by rapidly changing political pressures, gender norms, and religious practices—were becoming dangerously disconnected from what they saw as authentic Jewish values. She uncovers how Jewish leaders continued to identify with Jewish histories of economic and social insecurity, and romanticized Jewish life in America’s immigrant slums and Europe’s impoverished shtetls. Jewish leaders, while not trying to hinder economic development, thus cemented an ongoing identification with the Jewish heritage of poverty and marginality as a crucial element in an American Jewish ethos.

The present collection makes available in fresh translations all of the ancient examples of the Jewish novels, and introduces them for the student and general reader. The texts are divided into three categories: novels, historical novels, and testaments, and each text is given its own introduction. Similarities and differences are discussed in regard to other ancient popular literature, such as Greek novels, Roman novels, Christian novels, and Apocryphal Acts, and the distinction between fiction and history is explored. Jewish identity and the competition of ethnic groups are generally the themes, but with the large number of women characters, we are also afforded insights into gender constructions in Jewish popular literature. The protagonists of Jewish novels are often figures otherwise unknown to Jewish history, but are sometimes also biblical patriarchs (Moses, Joseph, Abraham, Job), although their stories are told here in a way surprisingly different from what is found in the Hebrew Bible. There are also possible allusions to Jewish mysticism and mysteries in some of the texts.

The texts are: Greek Esther, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon (or Bel and the Serpent) from Greek Daniel, Tobit, Judith, Third Maccabees, The Marriage and Conversion of Aseneth (or Joseph and Aseneth), The Tobiad Romance, The Royal Family of Adiabene, the Testament of Joseph, the Testament of Job, and the Testament of Abraham. Some of the novels are found in the Old Testament Apocrypha, while others derive from other sources, such as Josephus or the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

This volume offers a rereading of several canonical stories in Jewish texts and Greek tragedy using devoted resistance as the interpretative lens. These include the stories of Isaac and Iphigenia who were used as exemplars of a total and unyielding commitment to the values of God and country, the Talmudic “Snake Oven” story, which is considered by many as a triumphant source-text for human autonomy as a Jewish religious value, the iconic Talmudic figure Beruriah and the biblical figure of Hannah, who was elevated by the Talmud into a central paradigm for Jewish prayer. These stories highlight the ways in which cultural heroes can distort key parts of themselves and their traditions in the name of tradition itself. This volume explains the tendency of carriers of culture to enshrine authoritative voices in the collective imagination through their selection of canonical stories and to stigmatize and marginalize traditions seen as standing in opposition to the dominant system. It also discusses the effectiveness of devoted resistance as a literary interpretative tool in allowing us to hear the voices of people who have been marginalized, and yet ultimately preserved, by the often brutal mechanisms of cultural authority.

Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient romance Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel’s God. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth’s tale “remixes” Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel’s sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel’s God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God’s mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundaries the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth’s conclusions or offering competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation—one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel’s God.

This book studies the Zohar as a work of literature. While the Zohar has long been recognized as a signal achievement of mystical theology, myth, and exegesis, this monograph presents a poetics of zoharic narrative, a morphology of mystical storytelling. Topics examined include mysticism and literature; fiction and pseudepigraphy; diaspora and exile; dramatic monologue and the representation of emotion; voice, gesture, and the theatrics of the zoharic tale; the wandering quest for wisdom; anagnorisis and the poetics of recognition; encounters with the natural world as stimuli for mystical creativity; the dynamic relationship between narrative and exegesis; magical realism and the fantastic in the representation of experience and Being; narrative ethics and the exemplum of virtuous piety in the Zohar; the place of the zoharic frame-tale in the comparative context of medieval Iberian literature, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

This book explores the mystical thought of Isaac ben Samuel of Akko, a major medieval kabbalist whose work has until now received relatively little attention. Through consideration of an extensive literary corpus, including much that still remains in manuscript, this study examines an array of themes and questions that have great applicability to the comparative study of mysticism and the broader study of religion. These include prayer and the nature of mystical experience; meditative concentration directed to God; and the power of mental intention, authority, creativity, and the transmission of wisdom.

Becoming Hebrew is a study of the ways in which a Zionist national culture was generated in the Jewish Yishuv (prestate community) of Palestine between 1900 and 1914. The book addresses three principal lacunae in the study of Zionist culture to date. The first of these is chronological. Much of the literature to date has assumed that a distinctive Zionist national culture began to appear in Palestine during the interwar period, whereas Becoming Hebrew argues that its formative period in fact predates the war. Out of this chronological claim emerge the two additional, more conceptually and theoretically substantive, correctives. In the first instance, the book shows that the relationship between the Zionist cultural undertaking and traditional Jewish culture is far more complicated and nuanced than has often been recognized. Joining a new and important historiographical trend, the book suggests further that the Zionist case sheds important light on nationalism generally, which itself emerges in a more complex and dialectical relationship with the religious cultures and traditional societies out of which it grows than has often been acknowledged in much of the now classical literature. Finally, in its conceptualization of “culture” as created in Zionist Palestine, the book synthesizes a literary‐like study of imageries and discourses and a more anthropological examination of observable cultural practices and tangible, public social processes to produce a history of culture as a broad interweaving of many aspects of human life.

Auschwitz is the center of the twentieth century, its dark core, yet, in the postwar years in America few intellectuals dared to come to grips with the horror and the suffering. Jewish theologians too were slow to respond until, in the turbulent years of the sixties and beyond, a small number of Jewish thinkers came to realize that the survival of Judaism and continued Jewish life require first and foremost confronting Auschwitz; looking into the abyss had become unavoidable. In this book, Michael Morgan tells the story of these theologians, and offers the first comprehensive overview of post‐Holocaust Jewish theology. He gives an account of the encounter with the death camps in the postwar writings of figures such as Hannah Arendt, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi and describes the role of the Six Day War in 1967 on the development and reception of post‐Holocaust Jewish thought. In chapters on each of the central thinkers (Richard Rubinstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, and Emil Fackenheim), he analyzes the way they have struggled with the dialectic of history and identity, and with the threat of radical rupture. Throughout the book, the intellectual developments are set in their historical context and there are chapters on the reception of post‐Holocaust Jewish thought and its legacy for today. This is a book of philosophical and theological analysis as well as a work of intellectual history and will interest a wide spectrum of readers.

Empathy is a way of re-membering oneself with the religious other that buttresses an interreligious unity-in-diversity. This book therefore proposes a way of strengthening the bonds of friendship and dialogue between Judaism and Catholicism is through a more detailed consideration of the phenomenological category of empathy vis-à-vis Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) and Edith Stein (1891–1942). The book's methodology is phenomenological and narrative in approach, and is therefore necessarily contextual in so far as it takes seriously the post-Shoah situation. Heschel's call for a prophetic return to God, a call that is “ecumenically” expansive and supportive of humanity's need to receive otherness, is a call to live life in the form of response to God's pathos. This call finds a prophetic response through Edith Stein's interreligiously attuned scholarship and witness of empathy, as narratively “drawn” from within the chiarascuro horizon of the Shoah. Stein's portrait rises in the typology of “mandorla” figure—as one capable of dialectically bridging sameness with otherness—conveying an em-pathos in word and deed that is less narrow and more interreligious in kind, precisely because her “way” of martyrdom is as a re-memberer with the religious other(s) who is same: she neither distances herself nor denies her consanguinity with the Jewish people. Stein's Jewish and Christian fidelity, while being an archetype for interreligious relations, also challenges Catholicism to do the teshuva work of remembering its Jewish heritage through new categories of witnessing and belonging with otherness.

Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), the charismatic leader of New York's Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), came to America in 1902 intent on revitalizing traditional Judaism. While he advocated a return to traditional practices, Schechter articulated no clear position on divisive issues, instead preferring to focus on similarities that could unite American Jewry. This book demonstrates how Schechter, unable to implement his vision on his own, turned to his disciples, rabbinical students and alumni of JTS, to shape his movement. By mid-century, Conservative Judaism had become the largest American Jewish grouping in the United States, guided by Schechter's disciples and their continuing efforts to embrace diversity while eschewing divisive debates. Yet Conservative Judaism's fluid boundaries also proved problematic for the movement, frustrating many rabbis who wanted a single platform to define their beliefs. The book demonstrates how a legacy of tension between diversity and boundaries now lies at the heart of Conservative Judaism's modern struggle for relevance. It explicates four key claims: that Conservative Judaism's clergy, not its laity or Seminary, created and shaped the movement; that diversity was—and still is—a crucial component of the success and failure of new American religions; that the Conservative movement's contemporary struggle for self-definition is tied to its origins; and that the porous boundaries between Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism reflect the complexity of the American Jewish landscape—a fact that Schechter and his disciples keenly understood. Rectifying misconceptions in previous accounts of Conservative Judaism's emergence, the book enables a fresh encounter with a unique religious phenomenon.

Over the last several decades, an astonishing phenomenon has developed: a Jewish rebirth of sorts occurring throughout Africa. Different ethnic groups proclaim that they are returning to long forgotten Jewish roots and African clans trace their lineage to the Lost Tribes of Israel. This book addresses the elaboration and the development of Jewish identities by Africans. Africans have encountered Jewish myths and traditions in multiple forms and under a number of situations. The context and circumstances of these encounters produced a series of influences that gradually led, within some African societies, to the elaboration of a new Jewish identity connected with that of the Diaspora. The book presents one by one the different groups of Black Jews from western central, eastern, and southern Africa, and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity. The purpose of the book is to review the processes and immensely complex interactions which shaped these new religious identities. It explores the way in which Africans have interacted with the ancient mythological sub-strata of both western and Africans idea of Jews in order to create a distinct Jewish identity. It particularly seeks to identify and to assess colonial influences and their internalization by African societies in the shaping of new African religious identities. Along with these notions the book examines how, in the absence of recorded African history, the eminently malleable accounts of Jewish lineage developed by African groups inspired by Judaism co-exist with the possible historical traces of a Jewish presence in Africa.

Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of classical rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. The book traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, and examines sacrifice and worship in the temple as sites through which the rabbis negotiated new and old intellectual, political, and religious ideas and practices. In its focus on legal-ritual texts and in its cultural orientation, this book diverges from the prevalent approach to the cessation of sacrifice in early Judaism. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to transform a sacrificial religion into a non-sacrificial religion, Blood for Thought argues that the rabbis developed anewsacrificial vision. This new sacrificial vision does not seek to “substitute” obsolete sacrificial practices, but rather to rearrange, reframe, and redefine sacrifice as a critically important component of social and religious life. The book argues that through their seemingly technical legal and ritual discussions, the rabbis present remarkably innovative perspectives on sacrifices and radical interpretations of biblical cultic institutions, and that their reinvention of sacrifice gives this practice new meanings within the greater context of the rabbis’ political and religious ideology.

The book analyses and assesses the various methods and approaches used by nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century scholars researching into the theme of the unity and diversity of the compositional structure of the Old Testament book of Isaiah. It considers the differences between the traditional, historical–critical, form of Old Testament study and the more modern, post‐critical literary reading, and argues that a more intensive application of the traditional methods would be of great value in studying the unity of the book of Isaiah and in interpreting its message. Focusing on one particular phase in the composition of Isaiah and on the relationship of the central section, known as ‘Deutero‐Isaiah’, to the other parts of the book and to other Old Testament writings, it investigates the literary influences on Deutero‐Isaiah and analyses his subsequent editorial contribution to the continuing prophecy of the judgement and salvation of Israel, thereby reinforcing the argument that critical analysis must precede interpretation.

This book analyzes the history of the interpretation of the book of Job by medieval Jewish exegetes. The scholarship on medieval Jewish thought has focused largely on the systematic philosophical aspects of this literature. The author, however, is concerned with exegesis qua exegesis. He offers a close examination of commentaries on Job written by six major thinkers: Saadiah Gaon (882-942, Egypt and Babylon), Moses Maimonides (1138-1204, Spain and Egypt), Samuel ibn Tibbon (1160-1230, Provence), Zerahiah Hen (13th Century, Barcelona and Rome), Levi Gersonides (1288-1344, Provence), and Simeon ben Zeham Duran (1361-1444, Majorca and Algiers). Saadiah and Maimonides wrote in Arabic, the other four in Hebrew. The author looks at the relationship between the commentaries and their antecedent sources as well as their relationship to the broader context of medieval Jewish thought. He also provides an overview of the questions the commentators confronted about the historicity, national origin, and “Jewishness” of the text. He argues that the commentaries on Job are linked in a coherent and evolving tradition of interpretation and he identifies various views of providence as the central concern of them all.

This book presents a social and religious history of the Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century. Initiated by a Jewish “messiah,” Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676), the movement became an influential historical event, in terms of its rapid dissemination and widespread impact, combining Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religious and social elements in the early modern Eurasian world. When Ottoman authorities forced Sevi to convert to Islam in 1666, his followers formed a messianic crypto Judeo-Islamic sect, Dönme, lived mainly in Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul, and which has survived to the present. During this long process of self-preservation, the book argues, the Dönmes internalized the Kabbalistic philosophy of a “burden of silence” to conceal their practices from their often hostile surroundings. They came to believe that they must keep their identities secret on pain of “spiritual” and material punishments, which shaped their responses to internal and external challenges over centuries. This “burden of silence” became the core aspect for the Dönme Kabbala. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, well-educated and well-organized community members played important roles in modernizing and secularizing Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. By using Ottoman, Turkish, Jewish, and European written and oral sources, the book narrates and analyzes the Dönme history against broader topics such as messianism, conversion, crypto- and hybrid identities, modernism, and memory.