Brill, 2008. - 329 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 125). This volume considers a major shift among Jewish sages during the Second Temple period, as certain authors moved from an earthly focus to a belief in individual immortality. Egyptian instructions and the book of Proverbs are examined for necessary background. The colorful responses of...
Brill, 2009. - 345 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 140) This study analyzes mythic narratives, found in the 8th century midrashic text Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer (PRE), that were excluded, or ‘repressed’, from the rabbinic canon, while preserved in the Pseudepigrapha of the Second Temple period. Examples include the role of the Samael (i.e. Satan) in the...
Palgrave, 2001. — 262 p. 'Professor Michael Alpert offers here a beautiful work, rigorously documented, clearly structured, which succeeds, and this is not its lease merit, to give a panoramic as well as a punctual view of such a difficult and vast question. A dense, precise, clear and alive study, a scientific and measured approach of a fascinating question, that the historian...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2015. - 327 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 165). In The Institution of the Hasmonean High Priesthood, Vasile Babota offers an interdisciplinary study of the establishment of the Hasmonean priests as high priests in Jerusalem, from their revolt in 167 down to 140. The Hasmonean high priests exercised both religious and civil...
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. — 333 p. In September 1791, two years after the Revolution, French Jews were granted full rights of citizenship. Scholarship has traditionally focused on this turning point of emancipation while often overlooking much of what came before. In Rites and Passages, Jay R. Berkovitz argues that no serious treatment of Jewish emancipation can...
Indiana University Press, 2007. — 300 p. Miriam Bodian’s study of crypto-Jewish martyrdom in Iberian lands depicts a new type of martyr that emerged in the late 16th century — a defiant, educated judaizing martyr who engaged in disputes with inquisitors. By examining closely the Inquisition dossiers of four men who were tried in the Iberian peninsula or Spanish America and who...
Cambridge University Press, 2004. - 296 p. Jesus and Israel’s Traditions of Judgement and Restoration examines the eschatology of Jesus by evaluating his appropriation of sacred traditions related to Israel’s restoration. It addresses the way in which Jesus’ future expectations impinged upon his understanding of key features of Jewish society. Scholars have long debated the...
2nd ed. — Louisville, 2006. — 262 p. In this new edition of a best-selling classic, Shaye Cohen offers a thorough analysis of Judaism's development from the early years of the Roman Empire to the formative period of rabbinic Judaism. Cohen's synthesis of religion, literature, and history offers deep insight into the nature of Judaism at this key period, including the...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. - 241 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 100). This is a collection of 12 essays, written since 1997, on themes related to Hellenistic (Greek-speaking) Judaism. They include a review essay on recent scholarship on Hellenistic Judaism, a discussion of the question of anti-Semitism in antiquity, a study of the Hellenistic...
Westminster John Knox Press, 1997. - 288 p. - (Old Testament Library). Jewish wisdom flourished under Hellenism in the books of Ben Sira and the wisdom of Solomon, as well as in a recently discovered sapiential text from Qumran. In this book, now available as a casebound, internationally known author John Collins presents a compelling description and analysis of these three...
Brill, 2001. - 452 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 54). This title studies aspects of Judaism, from the Persian period through late antiqity, including its influence on early Christianity. The essays cover the problem of the Canon in Second Temple Judaism and deal with apocalypticism, the Book of Daniel, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Eerdmans , 2012. - 468 p. Culled from The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism, a monumental, groundbreaking reference work published in late 2010, Early Judaism: A Comprehensive Overview contains fifteen first-rate essays from a diverse group of internationally renowned scholars. This volume provides the most comprehensive and authoritative overview available of Judaism in the...
Jason Aronson Inc., 1998. — 374 p. The book concise of investigation about Jewish religious mysticism in the Middle Ages. Exploring kabbalah and the origins of mysticism movement in Hebrew textual sources.
Brill, 2007. - 601 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 116). The book deals with leisure, pleasure and healing at the thermo-mineral sites in the Levant since the biblical era throughout the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and early Muslim periods. It looks closely at the question of whether the spas, which are models for social interaction between...
Brill, 2011. - 293 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 155) The Jewish revolt against Rome in the first century C.E. provides ancient historians the opportunity to study one of the best-documented provincial revolts in the early Roman Empire. This volume brings together different disciplines, some for the first time. The contributors draw from a wide range...
Princeton University Press, 1993. - 691 p. Dr. Feldman accomplished many things with this book. For one, he gathered together an enormous amount of material that only someone as knowledgeable and as thorough as he could do. The sources cited in the text and the footnotes represent an overwhelming amount of material. His encyclopedic knowledge of ancient texts makes him the...
Brill, 2006. - 971 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 107). This book is a collection of 26 previously published articles, with a number of additions and corrections, and with a long new introduction on "The Influence of Hellenism on Jews in Palestine in the Hellenistic Period." The articles deal with such subjects as "Homer and the Near East,"...
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. — 279 p. — ISBN: 9780674088795. The book that you are reading is a piece of my larger Arch of Titus Project, which is committed to exploring the arch and its reception from its construction in circa 81 CE to the present, here focusing upon just one element of that monument, the menorah. I write this diachronic study from within the...
Walter de Gruyter, 2014. — 367 p. This book brings together historians, literature scholars, and archaeologists to explore how the integrated study of rabbinic texts and material culture increases our understanding of the complex nature of rabbinic culture. Steering away from 20th-century trends stressing disjunction between archaeology and rabbinic literature, this book seeks...
Stanford University Press, 2009. - 322 p. As Light Before Dawn 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...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2015. - 327 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 169). Ancient Near Eastern empires, including Assyria, Babylon and Persia, frequently permitted local rulers to remain in power. The roles of the indigenous elites reflected in the Nehemiah Memoir can be compared to those encountered elsewhere. Nehemiah was an imperial appointee,...
Bern, München, Wien: Scherz Verlag, 2000. — 256 S. «Die ganze weite Welt ist ein enger Steg, geh darüber und fürchte dich nicht», lehrte Rabbi Nachman von Bratzlaw. 1772 wurde er in Medzhibozh (Ukraine) geboren und starb 1810 in Uman. Seitdem beflügeln seine Geschichten und Thoraauslegungen Rabbiner und Philosophen. Lea Fleischmann, die in ihren Büchern Nichtjuden das Judentum...
Cambridge University Press, 2007. — 313 p. The Origins of Judaism provides a clear, straightforward account of the development of ancient Judaism in both the Judean homeland and the Diaspora. Beginning with the Bible and ending with the rise of Islam, the text depicts the emergence of a religion that would be recognized today as Judaism out of customs and conceptions that were...
BRILL, 2007. — 290 p. These collected studies, previously published in diverse places between 199 and 26, discuss important and controversial issues in the study of the development of Judaism in the Roman world from the first century C.E. to the fifth.
Princeton University Press, 2018. — 656 p. Judaism is one of the oldest religions in the world, and it has preserved its distinctive identity despite the extraordinarily diverse forms and beliefs it has embodied over the course of more than three millennia. A History of Judaism provides the first truly comprehensive look in one volume at how this great religion came to be, how...
Stanford University Press, 2014. — 310 p. As the greatest book of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar is a revered and much-studied work. Yet, surprisingly, scholarship on the Zohar has yet to pay attention to its most unique literary device — the presentation of its insights while its teachers walk on the road. In these pages, rabbi and scholar David Greenstein offers the first...
Brill, 2008. - 247 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 128). Ever since the Elephantine papyri were first published over a century ago, scholars have speculated on the origins of the well-developed legal formularies used in these documents. Since then, many more Aramaic deeds of conveyance both from Elephantine and from elsewhere have been...
De Gruyter, 2016. — 588 p. — (Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Studies 29). — ISBN: 9783110375558. This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however,...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. - 636 p. Research of burials constitutes one of the main reliable sources of information related to various aspects of funerary practices and rituals, and offers a perception of ancient social life and community organization. The material remains of mortuary rituals is effective in reconstructing the history of a society, its religious beliefs...
Purdue University Press, 2009. — 258 p. This book begins with a brief history about the Jews in Babylon (Iraq), their Hebrew creativity and the fact that this creativity was excluded from the history of Modern Hebrew literature because it was unknown to the scholars. The book focuses on the years 1735-1950 and presents the secular Hebrew poetry written in Babylon at that time,...
Oxford University Press, 2009. — 203 p. Drawing on the great progress in Talmudic scholarship over the last century, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture is both an introduction to a close reading of rabbinic literature and a demonstration of the development of rabbinic thought on education in the first centuries of the Common Era. In Roman Palestine and Sasanid Persia, a...
Yale University Press, 2017. — 248 p. A compelling and lucid account of the life and teachings of a founder of rabbinic Judaism and one of the most beloved heroes of Jewish history Born in the Land of Israel around the year 50 C.E., Rabbi Akiva was the greatest rabbi of his time and one of the most important influences on Judaism as we know it today. Traditional sources tell...
Columbia University Press, 2005. — 373 p. In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling over the matter, Hordes realized that these practices might very well have been passed down through the centuries from early crypto-Jewish settlers in New...
Walter de Gruyter, 2008. — 315 p. — (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature). During the past few decades a great amount of scholarly work has been done on the various prayer cultures of antiquity, both Graeco-Roman and Jewish and Christian. In Jewish studies this burgeoning research on ancient prayer has been stimulated particularly by the many new prayer texts found at...
University of California Press, 2002. — 211 p. This study of contemporary crypto-Jews — descendants of European Jews forced to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition — traces the group's history of clandestinely conducting their faith and their present-day efforts to reclaim their past. Janet Liebman Jacobs masterfully combines historical and social scientific...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2011. - 319 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 151). The Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was a watershed event in the religious, political, and social life of first-century Jews. This book explores the reaction to this event found in Jewish apocalypses and related literature preserved among the Pseudepigrapha (4 Ezra,...
Indiana University Press, 2010. — 343 p. How Jews think about and work with objects is the subject of this fascinating study of the interplay between material culture and Jewish thought. Ken Koltun-Fromm draws from philosophy, cultural studies, literature, psychology, film, and photography to portray the vibrancy and richness of Jewish practice in America. His analyses of...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2014. - 259 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 167). Although the Jewish Targums were written down only from the second century CE onward, and need to be studied against their Late Antique background, the issue of their connection to earlier sources and traditions is an important one. Do the existing Targums link up with an oral...
Brill, 2007. - 352 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 119). This volume brings together a wide range of international scholars of Ancient Judaism, whose essays explore various issues surrounding Jewish communities and Jewish identity in late antiquity. The essays are organized into three sections: Interpreting Ritual Texts, Mapping Diaspora...
Brill, 2008. - 397 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 129). According to the current scholarly consensus, the apocalypse of 2 Baruch, written after the Fall of Jerusalem, either rejected the concept of the Land of Israel as a place of salvation or regarded it as of minor importance. Inspired by the perspective of Critical Spatial Theory, this book...
Brill, 2007. — 305 p. This book examines four texts: 1 Enoch, 4QInstruction, Matthew and 2 Enoch. A common idea in these texts, which blend sapiential and apocalyptic elements, is that the revealing of wisdom to an elect group inaugurates the eschatological period. The emphasis on “revealed wisdom” is essentially apocalyptic, but facilitates the uptake of motifs, forms and...
Brill, 2013. — 343 p. — (Studia Judaeoslavica 6). In The Slavonic Texts of 2 Enoch, Grant Macaskill publishes the manuscript evidence for this important pseudepigraphon in a format that, for the first time, allows synoptic comparison of the variants encountered. With the long and short recensions represented on facing pages, and variants listed against two exemplars (J and A),...
Indiana University Press, 2013. — 406 p. How do American Jews identify as both Jewish and American? American Post-Judaism argues that Zionism and the Holocaust, two anchors of contemporary American Jewish identity, will no longer be centers of identity formation for future generations of American Jews. Shaul Magid articulates a new, post-ethnic American Jewishness. He discusses...
Stanford University Press, 2014. — 288 p. Hasidism Incarnate contends that much of modern Judaism in the West developed in reaction to Christianity and in defense of Judaism as a unique tradition. Ironically enough, this occurred even as modern Judaism increasingly dovetailed with Christianity with regard to its ethos, aesthetics, and attitude toward ritual and faith. Shaul...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2014. - 216 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 168). This study examines the relationship between time and history in Second Temple literature. Numerous sources from that period express a belief that Jewish history began with an act of covenant formation and proceeded in linear fashion until the exile, an unprecedented event...
Brill, 2010. - 292 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 53) In her highly regarded book, Seconding Sinai (JSJSup 77; Leiden: Brill, 2003), Hindy Najman develops a new conception of the connection between interpretation and text-production in Second Temple Jewish literature. Scholars have long been aware that much of this literature is not only...
Blackwell Publishing, 2004. — 567 p. The Companion to Judaism affords perspective on Judaism, its history, doctrines, divisions, and contemporary condition. The work systematically organizes and places into context the history of Judaism from ancient through modern times, identifies and expounds some of Judaism’s principal doctrines, introduces the more important forms of...
Brill, 2006. - 503 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 114). This volume represents the first attempt to study Slavonic pseudepigrapha collectively as a unique group of texts that share common theophanic and mediatorial imagery crucial for the development of early Jewish mysticism.
Brill, 2011. - 485 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 154) The Jewish revolt against Rome in the first century C.E. provides ancient historians the opportunity to study one of the best-documented provincial revolts in the early Roman Empire. This volume brings together different disciplines, some for the first time. The contributors draw from a wide range...
Cambridge University Press, 2005. — 336 p. This book considers the early history of Jewish–Christian relations through a focus on traditions about the fallen angels. In the Book of the Watchers, an Enochic apocalypse from the third century bce, the “sons of God” of Gen 6:1 –4 are accused of corrupting humankind through their teachings of metalworking, cosmetology, magic, and...
Baylor University Press, 2004. - 467 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 92). Archaeology has unearthed the glories of ancient Jewish buildings throughout the Mediterranean. But what has remained shrouded is what these buildings meant. "Building Jewish" first surveys the architecture of small rural villages in the Galilee in the early Roman period before...
Brill, 2009. - 333 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 138). This book contains pioneering research on aspects of society, culture and geography of rabbinic Torah centers in Palestine 70-400 CE. It surveys the history of the centers in their geographic and social context in chronological order.
University of Illinois Press, 2009. — 262 p. — (Traditions). The Invention of Hebrew is the first book to approach the Bible in light of recent findings on the use of the Hebrew alphabet as a deliberate and meaningful choice. Seth L. Sanders connects the Bible's distinctive linguistic form--writing down a local spoken language--to a cultural desire to speak directly to people,...
State University of New York Press, 1992. — 211 p. This book represents the first wide-scale presentation and interpretation of pre-kabbalistic, Jewish mysticism. This is the Hekhalot or Merkavah mysticism. The emphasis is on the conceptions of God, the angels, and man that the texts provide and that are the framework of the Judaic world view in late antiquity and the early...
Brill, 2007. - 385 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the study of Judaism volume 117). In light of numerous contradictions between passages in Jubilees, this study proposes a new, literary-critical method to understand the development of the book. This analysis is significant for the interpretation of the diverse ideological and theological viewpoints found in Jubilees.
AAARGH, Internet, 2005, with audiobook, MP3, 53 Kbps. Foreword by Gore Vidal A Closed Utopia? Prejudice and Prevarication Orthodoxy and Interpretation The Weight of History The Laws against Non-Jews Political Consequences Israel Shahak, who came to Israel in 1945 after surviving the concentration camp in Belsen during the Holocaust, contends that the potential for Israel's...
Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. - 312 p. - (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 102). This book suggests a new approach to the social history of Jewish religious movements in the Second Temple and early Rabbinic periods. It argues that most of these movements and their traditions emerged within the context of complex interaction between traditional families and...
Cambridge University Press, 2011. - 256 p. This book explores the influence of Roman imperialism on the development of messianic themes in Judaism in the fifth through the eight centuries CE. It pays special attention to the ways in which Roman imperial ideology and imperial eschatology influenced Jewish representations of the Messiah and messianic age. Topics addressed in the...
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. — 502 p. — (Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements Series). — ISBN10: 1442241411, 13 978-1442241411. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Judaism covers the history of the Jewish religion, ranging from its biblical roots, through its formulation in the era of the Talmud, to the present day. This...
Cambridge University Press, 2006. — 1164 p. Editors of the volume - Davies W.D., Finkelstein Louis. Critical study of Judaism, by which is meant the form which the religion of Israel assumed in and after the Babylonian exile, is of comparatively recent origin. The first three volumes of The Cambridge History of Judaism cover the history of the Jews from the Exile in 587 BCE to...
Cambridge University Press, 1989. — 738 p. Editors of the volume - Davies W.D., Finkelstein Louis. This is the second of four volumes covering the history of Judaism from the Persian period, roughly 539-322 BCE, to the Tannaitic period, which culminated in the codification of the Mishnah around 250 CE. The volume describes both the rejection and adoption of Hellenism by...
Cambridge University Press, 2000. — 1300 p. Editors of the volume - Horbury William, Davies W.D., Sturdy John. This third volume in the series of a widely valued history of Judaism in the ancient world focuses on the period of the early Roman Empire. Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish schools of thought, the rise of Christianity and the archaeological findings and inscriptions throughout...
Cambridge University Press, 2006. — 1164 p. Editor of the volume - Katz Steven T. Volume four of The Cambridge History of Judaism covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. It focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic...
Walter de Gruyter , 2005. - 313 p. - (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature). During the past few decades a great amount of scholarly work has been done on the various prayer cultures of antiquity, both Graeco-Roman and Jewish and Christian. In Jewish studies this burgeoning research on ancient prayer has been stimulated particularly by the many new prayer texts found at...
Walter de Gruyter , 2015. - 501 p. - (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature). The Letter of Aristeas has been an object modern scholarly interest since the seventeenth century. It is best known for containing the earliest version of the translation of the Hebrew Law into Greek, and this story accounts for much of the scholarly attention paid to the work. Yet, this legend only...
Brandeis University Press, 2017. — 334 p. — (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry). — ISBN: 9781512601121 9781512601848. German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897–1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish...
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