169 papers from the Toledo Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies, offering a broad, realistic perspective on the advances, achievements and anxieties of Judaic Studies, from the Bible to our days, on the eve of the new millennium.

In July of 1998 the European Association for Jewish Studies celebrated its Sixth Congress in Toledo, with almost four hundred participants. In these Proceedings 169 papers and communications read during the conference have been collected . By and large, they offer a broad, realistic perspective on the advances, achievements and anxieties of Judaic Studies at the turn of the 20th century, on the eve of the new millennium. They represent the point of view of the European scholars, enriched with notable contributions by colleagues from other continents. One volume (ISBN 978-90-04-11554-5) includes papers dealing with Jewish studies on biblical, rabbinical and medieval times, as well as with some general subjects, such as Jewish languages and bibliography. A second volume (ISBN 978-90-04-11558-3) is dedicated to the Judaism of modern times, from the Renaissance to our days.

Provides the first comprehensive overview by world-renowned experts of what we know today of medieval Jews' engagement with the sciences.

This book is about Jewish language. The fact that Jews speak and write in distinctive ways is well known. (The journalist Mike Royko called it “Hebonics.”) These forms of expression actually draw from many sources and have been employed in popular culture from Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep to the novels of Saul Bellow to contemporary television. What has received less attention is what allowed these modern forms to flow from a rich body of Yiddish literature. This book fills that gap by exploring the language of modern Yiddish literature, addressing emblematically why Jews answer a question with a question. Through a series of case studies, A Rhetorical Conversation explores various distinctive aspects of Yiddish literature to explain the nature and importance of Jewish discourse: the way of speaking, writing, arguing, and thinking developed by Yiddish culture based on prolonged and intimate contact with traditional texts.

This Festschrift honours Günter Stemberger on the occasion of his 75th birthday on 7 December 2015 and contains 41 articles from colleagues and students. The studies focus on a variety of subjects pertaining to the history, religion and culture of Judaism – and, to a lesser extent, of Christianity – from late antiquity and the Middle Ages to the modern era.

The T&T Clark Encyclopedia of Second Temple Judaism provides a comprehensive reference resource of over 600 scholarly articles aimed at scholars and students interested in Judaism of the Second Temple Period. The two-volume work is split into four parts. Part One offers a prolegomenon for the contemporary study and appreciation of Second Temple Judaism, locating the discipline in relation to other relevant fields (such as Hebrew Bible, Rabbinics, Christian Origins). Beginning with a discussion of terminology, the discussion suggests ways the Second Temple period may be described, and concludes by noting areas of study that challenge our perception of ancient Judaism. Part Two presents an overview of respective contexts of the discipline set within the broad framework of historical chronology corresponding to a set of full-colour, custom-designed maps. With distinct attention to primary sources, the author traces the development of historical, social, political, and religious developments from the time period following the exile in the late 6th century B.C.E. through to the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 C.E.). Part Three focuses specifically on a wide selection of primary-source literature of Second Temple Judaism, summarizing the content of key texts, and examining their similarities and differences with other texts of the period. Essays here include a brief introduction to the work and a summary of its contents, as well as examination of critical issues such as date, provenance, location, language(s), and interpretative matters. The early reception history of texts is also considered, and followed by a bibliography specific to that essay. Numerous high-resolution manuscript images are utilized to illustrate distinct features of the texts. Part Four addresses topics relevant to the Second Temple Period such as places, practices, historical figures, concepts, and subjects of scholarly discussion. These are often supplemented by images, maps, drawings, or diagrams, some of which appear here for the first time. Copiously illustrated, carefully researched and meticulously referenced, this resource provides a reliable, up-to-date and complete guide for those studying early Judaism in its literary and historical settings.

The thirteen essays in this volume are largely revised papers which were originally presented as part of the Ancient Historiography Seminar of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies and they investigate particular texts of Chronicles, examine central themes, and consider future prospects for Chronicles study. The volume includes chapters by Shannon E. Baines, Ehud Ben Zvi, Mark J. Boda, Keith Bodner, Paul S. Evans, Louis Jonker, Gary N. Knoppers, Christine Mitchell, Peter J. Sabo, Steven J. Schweitzer, and John W. Wright. The essays represent many different perspectives, methodologies, and conclusions regarding the Chronicler’s work and this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Chronicles, ancient Israelite historiography and biblical literature in general.

Ehud Ben Zvi has been at the forefront of exploring how the study of social memory contributes to our understanding of the intellectual worldof the literati of the early Second Temple period and their textual repertoire. Many of his studies on the matter and several new relevant works are here collected together providing a very useful resource for furthering research and teaching in this area. The essays included here address, inter alia, prophets as sites of memory, kings as sites memory, Jerusalem as a site of memory, a mnemonic system shaped by two interacting ‘national’ histories, matters of identity and othering as framed and explored via memories, mnemonic metanarratives making sense of the past and serving various didactic purposes and their problems, memories of past and futures events shared by the literati, issues of gender constructions and memory, memories understood by the group as ‘counterfactual’ and their importance, and, in multiple ways, how and why shared memories served as a (safe) playground for exploring multiple, central ideological issues within the group and of generative grammars governing systemic preferences and dis-preferences for particular memories.

In their long history, Jews encountered political, social, cultural, and religious crises which threatened not only their very existence but Jewish identity as well. Examples for such crises include the Babylonian Exile, the so-called Hellenistic Religious reforms, the first and second Jewish war, the inquisition, and the Shoah, but also the encounter of modernity or socio-economic developments. Political, cultural, and religious crises did not coin Jewish culture, thought, and religion but forced Jews from the very beginnings of Judaism until today to rethink and shape their Jewish identity anew. This volume asks how Jews coped with events that threatened Jewish existence, culture, and religion and how they responded to them. Each crisis was different in nature and evoked hence different developments in Jewish culture, thought, and religion.

A investigation into the thirteenth-century Norwich circumcision case and its meaning for Christians and Jews In 1230, Jews in the English city of Norwich were accused of having seized and circumcised a five-year-old Christian boy named Edward because they "wanted to make him a Jew." Contemporaneous accounts of the "Norwich circumcision case," as it came to be called, recast this episode as an attempted ritual murder. Contextualizing and analyzing accounts of this event and others, with special attention to the roles of children, Paola Tartakoff sheds new light on medieval Christian views of circumcision. She shows that Christian characterizations of Jews as sinister agents of Christian apostasy belonged to the same constellation of anti-Jewish libels as the notorious charge of ritual murder. Drawing on a wide variety of Jewish and Christian sources, Tartakoff investigates the elusive backstory of the Norwich circumcision case and exposes the thirteenth-century resurgence of Christian concerns about formal Christian conversion to Judaism. In the process, she elucidates little-known cases of movement out of Christianity and into Judaism, as well as Christian anxieties about the instability of religious identity. Conversion, Circumcision, and Ritual Murder in Medieval Europe recovers the complexity of medieval Jewish-Christian conversion and reveals the links between religious conversion and mounting Jewish-Christian tensions. At the same time, Tartakoff does not lose sight of the mystery surrounding the events that spurred the Norwich circumcision case, and she concludes the book by offering a solution of her own: Christians and Jews, she posits, understood these events in fundamentally irreconcilable ways, illustrating the chasm that separated Christians and Jews in a world in which some Christians and Jews knew each other intimately.