Language:
English
Year of publication:
2012-
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als Posen, Felix The Posen Digital Library
DDC:
909/.04924
Keywords:
Jews Encyclopedias Civilization
;
Jews Encyclopedias Intellectual life
;
Jews Encyclopedias History
;
Judaism Encyclopedias History
;
Aufsatzsammlung
;
Quelle
;
Juden
;
Kultur
;
Geschichte
Abstract:
The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization tackles an enormous challenge: to make accessible in English a rich and varied sampling of the many dimensions of Jewish experience from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board, The Posen Library embarked on this task by creating an anthology of primary sources of Jewish culture and civilization, translating them from dozens of languages. It includes a vast array of genres, including fiction and nonfiction, visual and material culture, political and religious texts. The job of the anthologizer is far from easy. Not only does it involve sifting through many potential historical, philosophical, religious, legal, literary, exegetical, political, folkloristic, popular, and artistic documents, images, and artifacts that might be chosen and extracted. It also requires conceptualizing key themes that characterize each period under consideration. And that process introduces questions about the production of Jewish culture and civilization. Is Jewish culture global? Or is it an aggregate of many local Jewish cultures? Are there essentially Jewish qualities to Jewish culture? Or is Jewish culture itself a dialectic between adaptation and resistance? Or perhaps Jewish culture should be regarded as something that is produced mostly in dialectical relationship to itself. The editors of the ten volumes of The Posen Library have answered these questions differently. Some have stressed the experience of Judaism as a minority culture in constant contact and occasional conflict with majority civilizations. Others have emphasized the remarkable internal dynamic of Jewish creativity, responding to developments across time and space. Still others have noted the importance of geography and related local political structures, dividing Jews from each other and fostering rather separate and even insular modes of cultural creativity. Historically, any number of distinctive and parallel Jewish civilizations have flourished, some sharing cultural practices and traditions, some with little in common beyond core religious laws and beliefs. Working answers to such fundamental questions as “what is Jewish culture and civilization” are embedded in the multitude of entries selected by individual volume editors and their expert advisory boards. Each volume’s selections, carefully extracted from longer works, allow a reader to savor a myriad of juxtapositions of sources that often illuminate the familiar through the unfamiliar, or, conversely, introduce what is new and unexpected by placing it in conversation with what is well known. Insofar as any culture is itself a composite of multiple peoples, nations, languages, traditions, and beliefs, The Posen Library’s volume editors have emphasized the heterogeneity of Jewish culture and civilization.
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
,
Published electronically as the "Posen Digital Library" - open access
,
Später herausgegeben von Deborah Dash Moore
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