Published by De Gruyter

Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts

Edited by: Vivian Liska

ISSN: 2199-6962

Editorial Board: Robert Alter, Steven E. Aschheim, Leora Batnitzky, Richard I. Cohen,Mark H. Gelber, Moshe Halbertal, Christine Hayes, Moshe Idel, Menachem Lorberbaum, Samuel Moyn, Ilana Pardes, Alvin Rosenfeld, David Ruderman

e-ISSN 2199-6970

Overview
Volumes

New Book Series

By focusing on the Jewish textual traditions the book series Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts examines both the continuity of a tradition through its transmission of canonical, classical and contemporary texts, as well as the ways that a tradition must continuously adapt itself to respond to new intellectual, historical, social and political contexts. Since there is no reading that is not also an interpretation, imbuing the past with concerns of the present day, the volumes in this series will examine the Jewish textual tradition through questions of its transmissibility, focusing on how these texts give rise to new commentaries, translations and adaptations. By attending to the evolving, topical concerns of Judaism, understood as a living textual tradition, and by fostering dialogue between literary, philosophical, political and religious perspectives, the book series, which consists of original scholarship and proceedings of international conferences, reflects contemporary concerns of Jewish Studies in the broadest sense.

Editorial Board

Prof. Robert Alter (University of California, Berkeley)
Prof. Steven E. Aschheim (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Prof. Leora Batnitzky (Princeton University, Princeton)
Prof. Richard I. Cohen (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Prof. Mark H. Gelber (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva)
Prof. Moshe Halbertal (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Prof. Christine Hayes (Yale University, New Haven)
Prof. Moshe Idel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Prof. Samuel Moyn (Columbia University, New York)
Prof. Ilana Pardes ((Hebrew University, Jerusalem)
Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld (Indiana University, Bloomington)
Prof. David Ruderman (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)
Prof. Bernd Witte, (Heinrich Heine Universität, Düsseldorf)

Author / Editor information

Vivian Liska, University of Antwerp, Belgium, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

Supplementary Materials

Editorial Board

Topics

Book Ahead of Publication 2025

Jewish Law

New Perspectives

Suzanne Last Stone, Yonatan Y. Brafman

Volume 26 in this series

More Cite

New Perspectives on Jewish Law combines the detailed work characteristic of scholarship on Jewish law with an orientation towards its broader academic and cultural significance. It shifts the study of Jewish law from its focus on legal doctrine and history to legal theory, achieving in the process a more sophisticated understanding of law that will benefit both the legal academy and Jewish studies. By employing the framework of legal theory, it similarly corrects an over-emphasis on the metaphysical presuppositions and philosophical implications of Jewish law, which has tended to cast it as exceptional relative to other legal systems. Moreover, it answers to old-new anxieties about law, often symbolized by Judaism, raised by contemporary feminists and by philosophers who are animated by recent interpretations of Paul through actual engagement with the Jewish legal tradition.

The volume consists of three parts. The first focuses on the critique of positivism, its implications, and the new directions that it opens up for the analysis of Jewish law. The second part takes stock of recent methodological developments in the study of Jewish legal texts and investigates the relation between Jewish law and the disciplines, including history, literary theory, ritual studies, the digital humanities, as well as traditional approaches to Jewish learning. It concludes with a reflection on these interdisciplinary contributions from the perspective of legal theory. The third part explores the connections among Jewish law, philosophy, and culture critique. It assesses the relation or lack thereof between Jewish law and modern Jewish thought, and examines specific issues of philosophical interest, including truth and normativity. It also investigates the image of Jewish law in the contemporary critique of law as well as how Jewish law could productively contribute to that debate. It concludes with a reflection on these studies from the perspective of philosophy of law.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9783110454970
ISBN:: 9783110454970
ISBN:: 9783110452891
ISBN:: 9783110336948
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Media Studies
Subject:: Media History
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: General Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Ahead of Publication 2024

Karl Kraus 1933

Citing Violence, Inciting Critique

Gal Hertz, Ron Mieczkowski, Ariel S. Linden

Volume 25 in this series

More Cite

The book provides new perspectives on the historical context surrounding Kraus' writing during the Third Reich as well as an analysis of the Third Walpurgnis Night. The contributions place Kraus’s work in dialogue with a broader spectrum of critical voices, including Adorno, Klemperer and Arendt. Revisiting Kraus from these new perspectives contributes to a better understanding of this major intellectual of the first half of the 20^th century.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9783111364599
ISBN:: 9783111364599
ISBN:: 9783111364803
ISBN:: 9783111364377
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Modern Jewish Literature
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2024

Forgiveness and Resentment in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity

Jewish Voices in Literature and Film

Idit Alphandary

Volume 24 in this series

More Cite

The author's starting point is the interweaving of forgiveness and resentment in the works of Jewish writers after the Holocaust, most especially Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry, to make sense of the catastrophe and to point to a way forward for both victims and perpetrators. The insights of these two writers and of several Jewish novelists and poets, including Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan, and Aharon Appelfeld, are used to develop accounts of forgiveness and resentment in other cases of mass atrocity around the world. The author offers a critical rereading of primary sources that aim to separate resentment from nonviolent resistance, and forgiveness from reconciliation. Forgiveness and resentment are not, as they might first appear, mutually exclusive. Together with Arendt, Améry, and Walter Benjamin, it is argued that it is through the interaction between them that victims of mass atrocity become agents of personal and cultural change. Together, forgiveness and resentment interrupt the present, reframe the past, and shape the future. They can reduce the chasm that separates memory and trust by fashioning new connections between identity and alterity, which can open paths to truly ethical coexistence for victims and perpetrators, and their descendants.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111317694
ISBN:: 9783111317694
ISBN:: 9783111317816
ISBN:: 9783111242330
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Genres and Media in Cultural Studies
Subject:: Film
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Modern Jewish Literature
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2023

Interpreting Antisemitism

Studies and Essays on the German Case

Shulamit Volkov

Volume 23 in this series

More Cite

Being a historian of Germany and of the German-Jews in modern times, the author has written numerous essays on the history and historiography of Antisemitism in this country. Some of them are rather well-known, such as the essay on "Antisemitism as a Cultural Code", and others were printed in peripheral journals and Festschrifts or were never published in English. Since the phenomenon of Jew-hating is now once again an issue discussed by scholars and non-scholars alike, both in Europe and in the United States, and especially since it now arouses particular interest in the context of the Palestinian fight against Israel, it seems timely to re-publish these essays in a slightly revised form, and attach to them an extended introduction as well as a follow-up essay at the end, updating old notions, reformulating some and adding commentary on controversies that are being conducted today regarding the term Antisemitism, its various contexts and the phenomenon it signifies. Freshly looking at Antisemitism in Germany before, during and after National-Socialism seems to be needed at this point in time.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110762280
ISBN:: 9783110762280
ISBN:: 9783110762259
ISBN:: 9783110762303
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Antisemitism
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2023

The Sacred Power of Language in Modern Jewish Thought

Levinas, Derrida, Scholem

Shira Wolosky

Volume 22 in this series

More Cite

Judaic cultures have a commitment to language that is exceptional. Language in many form – texts, books and scrolls; learning, interpretation, material practices that generate material practices – are central to Judaic conduct, experience, and spirituality. In this Judaic traditions differ from philosophical and theological ones that make language secondary. Traditional metaphysics has privileged the immaterial and unchanging, as unchanging truth that language can at best convey and at worst distort. Such traditional metaphysics has come under critique since Nietzsche in ways that the author explores. Shira Wolosky argues that Judaic traditions converge with contemporary metaphysical critique rather than being its target. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Levinas, Scholem and others, the author examines traditions of Judaic interpretation against backgrounds of biblical exegesis; sign-theory as it recasts language meaning in ways that concord with Judaic textuality; negative theology as it differs in Judaic tradition from those which negate language itself; and lastly outline a discourse ethics that draws on Judaic language theory.

This study is directed to students and scholars of: Judaic thought, religious studies and theology; theory of interpretation; Levinas and other modern Jewish philosophical writers, placing them in broader contexts of philosophy, theology, and language theory. It is shown how Jewish discourses on language address urgent problems of value and norms in the contemporary world that has challenged traditional anchors of truth and meaning.

Judaic cultures have a commitment to language that is exceptional. The author examines twentieth century Jewish writers, notably Levinas, Derrida, and Scholem, in whose work the central importance and value of language in Judaic culture is explored in ways that critique and offer alternatives to traditional positions. They provide models that resituate meaning, value, and norms within the materiality, and multiplicity of human experience.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111168760
ISBN:: 9783111168760
ISBN:: 9783111169279
ISBN:: 9783111168630
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Jewish Culture
Subject:: Jewish Culture, other
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Literary Studies, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Ahead of Publication 2024

Stéphane Mosès ›Displacements‹

Selected Essays on German-Jewish Literature and Modernity

Ashraf Noor

Volume 21 in this series

More Cite

Stéphane Mosès explores in Displacements the poetry of Paul Celan and the work of major German-Jewish thinkers in the context of his distinction between normative and critical modernity. The first part contains a translation of his book Approches de Paul Celan, the third part a translation of his lecture series Figures philosophiques de la modernité juive, and the central section contains, alongside a text on Freud, essays on Goethe and Büchner that extend his analysis beyond the Jewish sphere while engaging with the questions of tradition and its fragmentation that he raises there.

Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Ashraf Noor.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.0000/9783110754223
ISBN:: 9783110754223
ISBN:: 9783110754292
ISBN:: 9783110754018
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Romance Literature
Subject:: French Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2022

The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century

Mark H. Gelber

Volume 20 in this series

More Cite

Ruth Klüger (1931 – 2020) passed away on October 5, 2020 in the U.S. Born in Vienna and deported to Theresienstadt, she survived Auschwitz and the Shoah together with her mother. After living in Germany for a short time after the War, she immigrated to New York. She was educated in the U.S. and received degrees in English literature as well as her Ph.D. in German literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught at several American universities. She has numerous scholarly publications to her credit, mostly in the fields of German and Austrian literary history. She is also recognized as a poet in her own right, an essayist, and a feminist critic. She returned to Europe, where she was a guest professor in Göttingen and Vienna. Her memoir, entitled weiter leben (1992), which she translated and revised in an English parallel-text as Still Alive, was a major bestseller and highly regarded autobiographical account of a Holocaust survivor. It was subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages. It has also generated a vigorous critical discussion in its own right. Ruth Klüger received numerous prestigious literary prizes and other distinctions.

The present volume, The Legacy of Ruth Klüger and the End of the Auschwitz Century, aims to honor her memory by assessing critically her writings and career. Taking her biography and writings as points of departure, the volume includes contributions in fields and from perspectives which her writings helped to bring into focus acutely. In the table of contents are listed the following contributions: Sander L. Gilman, "Poetry and Naming in Ruth Klüger’s Works and Life"; Heinrich Detering, "’Spannung’: Remarks on a Stylistic Principle in Ruth Klüger’s Writing"; Stephan Braese, "Speaking with Germans. Ruth Klüger and the ‘Restitution of Speech between Germans and Jews’"; Irène Heidelberger-Leonard, "Writing Auschwitz: Jean Améry, Imre Kertész, and Ruth Klüger"; Ulrike Offenberg, "Ruth Klüger and the Jewish Tradition on Women Saying Kaddish; Mark H. Gelber, "Ruth Klüger, Judaism, and Zionism: An American Perspective"; Monica Tempian, "Children’s Voices in the Poetry of the Shoah"; Daniel Reynolds, "Ruth Klüger and the Problem of Holocaust Tourism"; Vera Schwarcz, "A China Angle on Memory and Ghosts in the Poetry of Ruth Klüger."

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110793239
ISBN:: 9783110793239
ISBN:: 9783111518732
ISBN:: 9783110629699
ISBN:: 9783110793277
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Holocaust
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2022

The Marrano Way

Between Betrayal and Innovation

Agata Bielik-Robson

Volume 19 in this series

More Cite

The Marrano phenomenon is a still unexplored element of Western culture: the presence of the borderline Jewish identity which avoids clear-cut cultural and religious attribution and – precisely as such – prefigures the advent of the typically modern "free-oscillating" subjectivity. Yet, the aim of the book is not a historical study of the Marranos (or conversos), who were forced to convert to Christianity, but were suspected of retaining their Judaism "undercover." The book rather applies the "Marrano metaphor" to explore the fruitful area of mixture and cross-over which allowed modern thinkers, writers and artists of the Jewish origin to enter the realm of universal communication – without, at the same time, making them relinquish their Jewishness which they subsequently developed as a "hidden tradition." The book poses and then attempts to prove the "Marrano hypothesis," according to which modern subjectivity derives, to paraphrase Cohen, "out of the sources of the hidden Judaism": modernity begins not with the Cartesian abstract ego, but with the rich self-reflexive self of Michel de Montaigne who wrestled with his own marranismo in a manner that soon became paradigmatic to other Jewish thinkers entering the scene of Western modernity, from Spinoza to Derrida. The essays in the volume offer thus a new view of a "Marrano modernity," which aims to radically transform our approach to the genesis of the modern subject and shed a new light on its secret religious life as surviving the process of secularization, although merely in the form of secret traces.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110768275
ISBN:: 9783110768275
ISBN:: 9783110768343
ISBN:: 9783110768244
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2022

Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis

Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel

Volume 18 in this series

More Cite

Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis examines the centrality of "birth" in Jewish literature, gender theory, and psychoanalysis, thus challenging the centrality of death in Western culture and existential philosophy. In this groundbreaking study, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel discuss similarities between Biblical, Midrashic, Kabbalistic, and Hasidic perceptions of birth, as well as its place in contemporary cultural and psychoanalytic discourse. In addition, this study　shows how birth functions as a vital metaphor that has been foundational to art, philosophy, religion, and literature. Medieval Kabbalistic literature compared human birth to divine emanation, and presented human sexuality and procreation as a reflection of the sefirotic structure of the Godhead – an attempt, Kaniel claims, to marginalize the fear of death by linking the humane and divine acts of birth. This book sheds new light on the image of God as the "Great Mother" and the crucial role of the Shekhinah as a cosmic womb.　

Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis won the Gorgias Prize and garnered significant appreciation from psychoanalytic therapists in clinical practice dealing with birth trauma, postpartum depression, and in early infancy distress.　

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688023
ISBN:: 9783110688023
ISBN:: 9783111520575
ISBN:: 9783110688108
ISBN:: 9783110687491
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Culture
Subject:: Jewish Culture, other
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2021

The Formation of the Talmud

Scholarship and Politics in Yitzhak Isaac Halevy’s Dorot Harishonim

Ari Bergmann

Volume 17 in this series

More Cite Download EPUB Download PDF

This book examines the talmudic writings, politics, and ideology of Y.I. Halevy (1847-1914), one of the most influential representatives of the pre-war eastern European Orthodox Jewish community. It analyzes Halevy’s historical model of the formation of the Babylonian Talmud, which, he argued, was edited by an academy of rabbis beginning in the fourth century and ending by the sixth century. Halevy's model also served as a blueprint for the rabbinic council of Agudath Israel, the Orthodox political body in whose founding he played a leading role.　

Foreword by Jay M. Harris, Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University and the author of How Do We Know This? Midrash and the Fragmentation of Modern Judaism, among other works.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110709834
ISBN:: 9783110709834
ISBN:: 9783110709964
ISBN:: 9783110709452
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Theology and Religion
Subject:: Old Testament / Ancient Near East
Subject:: Language and Textual History
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Tsimtsum and Modernity

Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology

Agata Bielik-Robson, Daniel H. Weiss

Volume 16 in this series

More Cite

This volume is the first-ever collection of essays devoted to the Lurianic concept of tsimtsum. It contains eighteen studies in philosophy, theology, and intellectual history, which demonstrate the historical development of this notion and its evolving meaning: from the Hebrew Bible and the classical midrashic collections, through Kabbalah, Isaac Luria himself and his disciples, up to modernity (ranging from Spinoza, Böhme, Leibniz, Newton, Schelling, and Hegel to Scholem, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Jonas, Moltmann, and Derrida).

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684353
ISBN:: 9783110684353
ISBN:: 9783110684421
ISBN:: 9783110684285
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: History of Knowledge
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Philosophy
Subject:: Philosophy of Religion
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2021

Levinas and Literature

New Directions

Michael Fagenblat, Arthur Cools

Volume 15 in this series

More Cite Download EPUB Download PDF

The posthumous publication of Emmanuel Levinas’s wartime diaries, postwar lectures, and drafts for two novels afford new approaches to understanding the relationship between literature, philosophy, and religion. This volume gathers an international list of experts to examine new questions raised by Levinas’s deep and creative experiment in thinking at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and religion. Chapters address the role and significance of poetry, narrative, and metaphor in accessing the ethical sense of ordinary life; Levinas's critical engagement with authors such as Leon Bloy, Paul Celan, Vassily Grossman, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Blanchot; analyses of Levinas’s draft novels Eros ou Triple opulence and La Dame de chez Wepler; and the application of Levinas's thought in reading contemporary authors such as Ian McEwen and Cormac McCarthy. Contributors include Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Kevin Hart, Eric Hoppenot, Vivian Liska, Jean-Luc Nancy and François-David Sebbah, among others.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110668926
ISBN:: 9783110668926
ISBN:: 9783111088426
ISBN:: 9783110629668
ISBN:: 9783110668995
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Romance Literature
Subject:: Romance Literature, general
Subject:: Philosophy
Subject:: Philosophy of Religion
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2020

Canonization and Alterity

Heresy in Jewish History, Thought, and Literature

Gilad Sharvit, Willi Goetschel

Volume 14 in this series

More Cite

This volume offers an examination of varied forms of expressions of heresy in Jewish history, thought and literature. Contributions explore the formative role of the figure of the heretic and of heretic thought in the development of the Jewish traditions from antiquity to the 20^th century. Chapters explore the role of heresy in the Hellenic period and Rabbinic literature; the significance of heresy to Kabbalah, and the critical and often formative importance the challenge of heresy plays for modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Freud, and Derrida, and literary figures such as Kafka, Tchernikhovsky, and I.B. Singer. Examining heresy as a boundary issue constitutive for the formation of Jewish tradition, this book contributes to a better understanding of the significance of the figure of the heretic for tradition more generally.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671582
ISBN:: 9783110671582
ISBN:: 9783110992403
ISBN:: 9783110668179
ISBN:: 9783110667936
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2020

The Visitation of Hannah Arendt

Michal Ben-Naftali

Volume 13 in this series

More Cite

The Visitation of Hannah Arendt is an attempt to literally enact Arendt’s notion of "natality". Arendt, known to a large extent through her engagement with the public sphere and with political discourse, is invited here to pay intimate visitations to four different figures: an anonymous student, the poetess Dahlia Ravikovich, the ghost of Stefan Zweig and Michal, Saul’s daughter. The intellectual visitation, as a complex process of both mimesis and rejection, is revealed to be a natality, a rebirth in spirit. The book presents an aesthetic-semiotic reading of Arendt by traversing the ensemble of her work. A special chapter is dedicated to Eichmann in Jerusalem.　　　　

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110663471
ISBN:: 9783110663471
ISBN:: 9783110664300
ISBN:: 9783110663099
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: General Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2020

Spiritual Homelands

The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others

Asher D. Biemann, Richard I. Cohen, Sarah E. Wobick-Segev

Volume 12 in this series

More Cite

Homeland, Exile, Imagined Homelands are features of the modern experience and relate to the cultural and historical dilemmas of loss, nostalgia, utopia, travel, longing, and are central for Jews and others. This book is an exploration into a world of boundary crossings and of desired places and alternate identities, into a world of adopted kin and invented allegiances.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110637564
ISBN:: 9783110637564
ISBN:: 9783110777468
ISBN:: 9783110637618
ISBN:: 9783110637366
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Exile Literature
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2021

Edmond Jabès and the Archaeology of the Book

Text, Pre-Texts, Contexts

Tsivia Wygoda Frank

Volume 11 in this series

More Cite

This book offers a fresh reflection on The Book of Questions by the French-Egyptian Jewish writer Edmond Jabès and its readings, and proposes to re-contextualize　Jabès' enigmatic prose through the lens of the author’s manuscripts. Addressed are the main prisms through which Jabès’ oeuvre has been read since its publication in 1963: Jewishness, the Shoah, intertextuality with Midrash and Kabbalah, hermeticism and interpretation. It analyzes their shapes and their becoming in the work-in-progress, reveals the dynamics and the contexts of their evolution from the pre-texts to the text and beyond, and reflects on the relationship between creation, interpretation, and writing as a process. It seeks to rethink our reading of The Book of Questions and the poetics and hermeneutics of enigmatic writing.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110643022
ISBN:: 9783110643022
ISBN:: 9783110640786
ISBN:: 9783110629552
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Romance Literature
Subject:: French Literature
Subject:: 20th Century
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2019

The Privileged Divine Feminine in Kabbalah

Moshe Idel

Volume 10 in this series

More Cite

This volume addresses the complex topic of the preeminent status of the divine feminine power, to be referred also as Female, within the theosophical structures of many important Kabbalists, Sabbatean believers, and Hasidic masters. This privileged status is part of a much broader vision of the Female as stemming from a very high root within the divine world, then She was emanated and constitutes the tenth, lower divine power, and even in this lower state She is sometime conceived of governing this world and as equal to the divine Male. Finally, She is conceived of as returning to Her original place in special moments, the days of Sabbath, the Jewish Holidays or in the eschatological era. Her special dignity is sometime related to Her being the telos of creation, and as the first entity that emerged in the divine thought, which has been later on generated. In some cases, an uroboric theosophy links the Female Malkhut, directly to the first divine power, Keter. The author points to the possible impact of some of the Kabbalistic discussions on conceptualizations of the feminine in the Renaissance period.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599800
ISBN:: 9783110599800
ISBN:: 9783110736434
ISBN:: 9783110597448
ISBN:: 9783110597608
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Theology and Religion
Subject:: Old Testament / Ancient Near East
Subject:: History of Reception
Subject:: Wisdom and Psalms
Subject:: Wisdom and Psalms, other
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2019

Psalms In/On Jerusalem

Ilana Pardes, Ophir Münz-Manor

Volume 9 in this series

More Cite

This volume explores the ways in which Jerusalem is represented in Psalms – from its position in the context of liturgical and pilgrim songs to its role as metaphor. Jerusalem in the Book of Psalms is the site of scenes of redemption, joy, and celebration of the proximity to God and the house of the Lord. But it is also the quintessential locus of loss, marked by cries over the devastating destruction of the Temple. These two antithetical poles of Jerusalem are expressed in both personal terms as well as within a collective framework. The bulk of the articles are devoted to questions of reception, to the ways in which the geographies of the Book of Psalms have travelled across their native bounds and entered other historical settings, acquiring new forms and meanings.　

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110460803
ISBN:: 9783110460803
ISBN:: 9783110736380
ISBN:: 9783110336917
ISBN:: 9783110459296
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Theology and Religion
Subject:: Old Testament / Ancient Near East
Subject:: History of Reception
Subject:: Wisdom and Psalms
Subject:: Wisdom and Psalms, other
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2018

Fragile Spaces

Forays into Jewish Memory, European History and Complex Identities

Steven E. Aschheim, Knowledge Unlatched

Volume 8 in this series

More Cite Download EPUB Download PDF

This book consists of a range of essays covering the complex crises, tensions and dilemmas but also the positive potential in the meeting of Jews with Western culture. In numerous contexts and through the work of fascinating individuals and thinkers, the work examines some of the consequences of political, cultural and personal rupture, as well as the manifold ways in which various Jewish intellectuals, politicians (and occasionally spies!) sought to respond to these ruptures and carve out new, sometimes profound, sometimes fanciful, options of thought and action. It also delves critically into the attacks on liberal and Enlightenment humanism. In almost all the essays the fragility of things is palpably present and the book touches on some of the ironies, problematics and functions of responses to that condition. The work mirrors the author's ongoing fascination with the always fraught, fragile and creatively fecund confrontation of Jews (and others) with European modernity, its history, politics, culture and self-definition. In a time of increasing anxiety and feelings of fragility, this work may be helpful in understanding how people at an earlier (and sometimes contemporary) period sought to come to terms with a similar predicament.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110596939
ISBN:: 9783110596939
ISBN:: 9783110709766
ISBN:: 9783110593082
ISBN:: 9783110595451
Subject:: Cultural Studies
Subject:: Media Studies
Subject:: Media History
Subject:: History
Subject:: Regional and National History
Subject:: Europe
Subject:: General European History
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: General Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2019

Passages of Belonging

Interpreting Jewish Literatures

Carola Hilfrich, Natasha Gordinsky, Susanne Zepp

Volume 7 in this series

More Cite

In the wake of the spatial and affective turns in Literary Studies in general, and the study of Jewish literatures in particular, this volume shifts focus from the extensity of exile and return to the intensities of sense of place and belonging across a moving landscape of 20th and 20st century literatures, Jewish and other. It brings together contemporary writers and literary scholars who collectively map these intensities onto a bodily word world in transit and textures of habitable, readable space as passage.
Works by Hélène Cixous, Cécile Wajsbrot, Alex Epstein, Almog Behar, and Svetlana Boym explore sites made up of layers of passages, taking configurations of sayability and readability as forms, poetic and political, of inhabiting the material world. The contributions by literary scholars explore the theoretical potential of a mapping of such sites in studies of modalities of belonging and unbelonging in modern and contemporary works of literature.
The volume collects a collaborative investigation of the exigencies and potentialities of sense of place and belonging through literature, Jewish and other. It offers a literary perspective on current debates in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, human geography, architectural theory, and translation studies.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110525519
ISBN:: 9783110525519
ISBN:: 9783110736397
ISBN:: 9783110438611
ISBN:: 9783110523492
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Modern Jewish Literature
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2018

The German-Hebrew Dialogue

Studies of Encounter and Exchange

Amir Eshel, Rachel Seelig

Volume 6 in this series

More Cite

In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, it seemed there was no place for German in Israel and no trace of Hebrew in Germany — the two languages and their cultures appeared as divergent as the directions of their scripts. Yet when placed side by side on opposing pages, German and Hebrew converge in the middle. Comprised of essays on literature, history, philosophy, and the visual and performing arts, this volume explores the mutual influence of two linguistic cultures long held as separate or even as diametrically opposed. From Moses Mendelssohn’s arrival in Berlin in 1748 to the recent wave of Israeli migration to Berlin, the essays gathered here shed new light on the painful yet productive relationship between modern German and Hebrew cultures. 　

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110473384
ISBN:: 9783110473384
ISBN:: 9783110683738
ISBN:: 9783110471359
ISBN:: 9783110471601
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish History and Culture
Subject:: German-Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Judaism
Subject:: Modern Times
Subject:: Jewish Culture
Subject:: Jewish Culture, other
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book 2017

Jewish Aspects in Avant-Garde

Between Rebellion and Revelation

Mark H. Gelber, Sami Sjöberg

Volume 5 in this series

More Cite

This volume deals with the significance of the avant-garde(s) for modern Jewish culture and the impact of the Jewish tradition on the artistic production of the avant-garde, be they reinterpretations of literary, artistic, philosophical or theological texts/traditions, or novel theoretical openings linked to elements from Judaism or Jewish culture, thought, or history.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110454956
ISBN:: 9783110454956
ISBN:: 9783110651775
ISBN:: 9783110336924
ISBN:: 9783110452907
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish History and Culture
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish Culture
Subject:: Jewish Culture, other
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Avantgarde
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2016

Is there a Judeo-Christian Tradition?

A European Perspective

Emmanuel Nathan, Anya Topolski

Volume 4 in this series

More Cite Download EPUB Download PDF

The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ in reference to a tradition, heritage, ethic, civilization, faith etc. has been used in a wide variety of contexts with widely diverging meanings. Contrary to popular belief, the term was not coined in the United States in the middle of the 20th century but in 1831 in Germany by Ferdinand Christian Baur. By acknowledging and returning to this European perspective and context, the volume engages the historical, theological, philosophical and political dimensions of the term’s development. Scholars of European intellectual history will find this volume timely and relevant.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110416596
ISBN:: 9783110416596
ISBN:: 9783110578706
ISBN:: 9783110416671
ISBN:: 9783110416473
Subject:: History
Subject:: Topics in History
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: General Jewish History
Subject:: Theology and Religion
Subject:: Religious Studies
Subject:: Christianity
Subject:: Judaism
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2015

The German-Jewish Experience Revisited

Steven E. Aschheim, Vivian Liska, Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem

Volume 3 in this series

More Cite Download EPUB Download PDF

In the past decades the “German-Jewish phenomenon” (Derrida) has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various fields: Jewish studies, intellectual history, philosophy, literary and cultural studies, critical theory. In all its complex dimensions, the post-enlightenment German-Jewish experience is overwhelmingly regarded as the most quintessential and charged meeting of Jews with the project of modernity. Perhaps for this reason, from the eighteenth century through to our own time it has been the object of intense reflection, of clashing interpretations and appropriations. In both micro and macro case-studies, this volume engages the multiple perspectives as advocated by manifold interested actors, and analyzes their uses, biases and ideological functions over time in different cultural, disciplinary and national contexts. This volume includes both historical treatments of differing German-Jewish understandings of their experience – their relations to their Judaism, general culture and to other Jews – and contemporary reflections and competing interpretations as to how to understand the overall experience of German Jewry.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110367195
ISBN:: 9783110372939
ISBN:: 9783110367195
ISBN:: 9783110578614
ISBN:: 9783110393323
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: General Jewish History
Subject:: German-Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Modern Jewish Literature
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2014

Lament in Jewish Thought

Philosophical, Theological, and Literary Perspectives

Ilit Ferber, Paula Schwebel

Volume 2 in this series

More Cite Download EPUB Download PDF

Lament, mourning, and the transmissibility of a tradition in the aftermath of destruction are prominent themes in Jewish thought. The corpus of lament literature, building upon and transforming the biblical Book of Lamentations, provides a unique lens for thinking about the relationships between destruction and renewal, mourning and remembrance, loss and redemption, expression and the inexpressible.

This anthology features four texts by Gershom Scholem on lament, translated here for the first time into English. The volume also includes original essays by leading scholars, which interpret Scholem’s texts and situate them in relation to other Weimar-era Jewish thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, who drew on the textual traditions of lament to respond to the destruction and upheavals of the early twentieth century. Also included are studies on the textual tradition of lament in Judaism, from biblical, rabbinic, and medieval lamentations to contemporary Yemenite women’s laments.

This collection, unified by its strong thematic focus on lament, shows the fruitfulness of studying contemporary and modern texts alongside the traditional textual sources that informed them.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110339963
ISBN:: 978-3-11-033382-4
ISBN:: 978-3-11-033996-3
ISBN:: 9783110553963
ISBN:: 9783110395310
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Literary Studies
Subject:: Topics in Literary Studies
Subject:: Individual Motifs, Motif Research
Subject:: Theology and Religion
Subject:: Old Testament / Ancient Near East
Subject:: History of Reception
Publisher:: De Gruyter

Book Open Access 2015

The Book of Job

Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics

Leora Batnitzky, Ilana Pardes

Volume 1 in this series

More Cite Download EPUB Download PDF

The Book of Job has held a central role in defining the project of modernity from the age of Enlightenment until today. The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics offers new perspectives on the ways in which Job’s response to disaster has become an aesthetic and ethical touchstone for modern reflections on catastrophic events.

This volume begins with an exploration of questions such as the tragic and ironic bent of the Book of Job, Job as mourner, and the Joban body in pain, and ends with a consideration of Joban works by notable writers – from Melville and Kafka, through Joseph Roth, Zach, Levin, and Philip Roth.

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110338799
ISBN:: 978-3-11-033383-1
ISBN:: 978-3-11-033879-9
ISBN:: 9783110553949
ISBN:: 9783110393989
Subject:: Jewish Studies
Subject:: Jewish History
Subject:: Jewish Thought
Subject:: Jewish Literature
Subject:: Jewish Literature, general
Subject:: Theology and Religion
Subject:: Old Testament / Ancient Near East
Subject:: History of Reception
Subject:: Wisdom and Psalms
Subject:: Wisdom and Psalms, other
Publisher:: De Gruyter