Publisher Description

Examines the notion of divine incarnations as a central element of the portrait of God that came into focus through the Judaism of the dual Torah.

This volume introduces the sources of Judaism in late antiquity to scholars in adjacent fields, such as the study of the Old and New Testaments, Ancient History, the ancient Near East, and the history of religion. In two volumes, leading American, Israeli, and European specialists in the history, literature, theology, and archaeology of Judaism offer factual answers to the two questions that the study of any religion in ancient times must raise. The first is, what are the sources — written and in material culture — that inform us about that religion? The second is, how have we to understand those sources in reconstructing the history of various Judaic systems in antiquity. The chapters set forth in simple statements, intelligible to non-specialists, the facts which the sources provide. Because of the nature of the subject and acute interest in it, the specialists also raise some questions particular to the study of Judaism, dealing with its historical relationship with nascent Christianity in New Testament times. The work forms the starting point for the study of all the principal questions concerning Judaism in late antiquity and sets forth the most current, critical results of scholarship.

Investigating Jewish spatial practices by exploring the symbol of the house in Judaism, this book examines two groups of houses: ritual objects based on the iconology of the house (ritual houses) and house metaphors (the text, community and the covenant with god as house). This unique pairing is explored as place-making tools which exist in a constant state of tension between diaspora and belonging. Containing many photographs of historical and contemporary artefacts from Europe, Israel and the United States, this book maps out the intersection of architecture, Jewish studies, cultural and gender studies and opens up the discussion of distinctly Jewish objects and metaphors to discourses taking place outside explicitly Jewish contexts.

Jacob Neusner has published more than 1000 books and articles, scholarly and academic, popular and journalistic, and is one of the most published humanities scholars in the world. Over a period of fifty years he has made significant, insightful and challenging contributions to the study of Rabbinic Judaism, particularly in the disciplines covered in the three volumes which make up Neusner on Judaism: the study of history (volume 1), literature (volume 2), and religion and theology (volume 3). These unique volumes of selective writings by Jacob Neusner, with new introductions by the author, offer scholars an invaluable resource in the field of Judaic Studies.

In two volumes, leading American, Israeli, and European specialists in the history, literature, theology, and archaeology of Judaism offer factual answers to the two questions that study of any religion in ancient times must raise. The first is, what are the sources written and in material culture that inform us about that religion? The second is, how do we understand those sources in the reconstruction of the history of various Judaic systems in antiquity. The historical relationship of Judaism with nascent Christianity in New Testament times is also treated.

Notions of history and the past contained in literature of the Karaite Jewish sect offer in­sight into the relationship of Karaism to mainstream rabbinic Judaism and to Islam and Christianity. Karaite Juda­ism and Histori­cal Understanding describes how a minority sectarian religious community constructs and uses historical ideology. It investigates the proportioning of historical ideology to law and doctrine and the influence of historical setting on religious writings about the past. Fred Astren discusses modes of repre­senting the past, especially in Jewish culture, and then poses questions about the past in sectarian--particularly Judaic sectarian--contexts. He contrasts early Karaite scriptur­alism with the litera­ture of rabbinic Judaism, which, embodying histori­cal views that carry a moralistic burden, draws upon the chain of tradition to suppose a generation-to-genera­tion trans­mission of divine knowl­edge and authority. The center of Karaism shifted to the Byzantine-Turkish world during the twelfth through sixteenth centuries, when a new historical outlook unoblivious of the past accommodated legal developments in­fluenced by rabbinic thought. Reconstructing Karaite historical expression from both published works and previously unexamined manuscripts, Astren shows that Karaites relied on rabbinic litera­ture to extract and compile his­torical data for their own readings of Jewish history. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Karaite scholars in Poland and Lithuania collated and harmonized historical materials inherited from their Middle Eastern predecessors. Astren portrays the way that Karaites, with some influence from Jewish Re­naissance historiography and impelled by features of Protestant-Catholic discourse, prepared complete literary historical works that maintained their Jewishness while offering a Karaite reading of Jewish history.

America's foremost scholar on formative Judaism examines the issue of gender as it appears in the corpus of rabbinic literature and arrives at some provocative conclusions. While the structure of Judaism based on the dual Torah is clearly masculine in orientation, the substructure--the religious system that shapes its values and perception--is androgynous, an individual conjunction of genders. In fact, the higher values, as defined by the relevant writings, prove to be feminine.

Harle focuses on the perennial issue of social order by providing a comparative analysis of ideas on social order in the classical Chinese political philosophy, the Indian epic and political literature, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, the classical Greek and Roman political thought, and early Christianity. His analysis is based on the religious, political, and literary texts that represent their respective civilizations as both their major achievements and sources of shared values. Harle maintains that two major approaches to establishing and maintaining social order exist in all levels and types of social relations: moral principles and political power. According to the principle-oriented approaches, social order will prevail if and when people follow strict moral principles. According to the contending power-oriented approach, orderly relations can only be based on the application of power by the ruler over the ruled. The principle-oriented approaches introduce a comprehensive civil society of individuals; the power-oriented approaches give major roles to the city-state, its government and relationships between them. The question of morality can be recognized also within the power-oriented approaches which either submit politics to morality or maintain that politics must be taken as nothing else than politics. This book is a contribution to peace and international studies as well as political theory and international relations.

The result for the history of Judaism of a documentary reading of the Rabbinic canonical sources illustrates the working of that hypothesis. It is the first major outcome of that hypothesis, but there are other implications, and a variety of new problems emerge from time to time as the work proceeds. In the recent past, Neusner has continued to explore special problems of the documentary hypothesis of the Rabbinic canon. At the same time, Neusner notes, others join in the discussion that have produced important and ambitious analyses of the thesis and its implications. Here, Neuser has collected some of the more ambitious ventures into the hypothesis and its current recapitulations. Neusner begins with the article written by Professor William Scott Green for the Encyclopaedia Judaica second edition, as Green places the documentary hypothesis into the context of Neusner's entire oeuvre. Neuser then reproduces what he regards as the single most successful venture of the documentary hypothesis, contrasting between the Mishnah's and the Talmuds' programs for the social order of Israel, the doctrines of economics, politics, and philosophy set forth in those documents, respectively. Then come the two foci of discourse: Halakhah or normative law and Aggadah or normative theology. Professors Bernard Jackson of the University of Manchester, England and Mayer Gruber of Ben Gurion University of the Negev treat the Halakhic program that Neusner has devised, and Kevin Edgecomb of the University of California, Berkeley, has produced a remarkable summary of the theological system Neusner discerns in the Aggadic documents. Neusner concludes with a review of a book by a critic of the documentary hypothesis.