Jewish Studies

A collection of papers on the discovery of Istanbul and the Sephardic Jews by Spanish travellers in the 19th century.

A study of the Jewish community in Istanbul and how it was transformed by the Ottoman reform movement of the nineteenth century.

A complete and detailed description of the Hebrew manuscript collection of the University of Leyden, primarily the collections of the distinguished Levin Warner, Dutch ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

A splendid dictionary intended for the early Rabbinic commentaries and exegesis of the Hebrew Testament: the Gemara, the Mishnah, and the Talmud.

This work details the life of Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo and his guidance on the conduct of the spiritual life, with an introduction surveying the life and works of Philo and the critical writing on his philosophy.

Lily Montagu’s Shekhinah outlines Lily Montagu’s theological writing, particularly her appropriation of the feminine aspect of the divine presence, Shekhinah, and provides a much needed corrective to the androcentric Anglo-Jewish historiography that has ignored, marginalized, and completely erased the founder of the Liberal Jewish movement in England. Luke Devine’s book is vital reading for students of Anglo-Jewry, First-Wave feminism, Jewish feminism, Liberal Judaism, and Jewish mysticism.

This coursebook is designed for students who have completed at least one year of college study in Biblical Hebrew. It helps students make the transition from the basic grammar books to use of the comprehensive reference grammars and to more advanced analysis of Biblical Hebrew. Constant reference is made to recent works of grammar, and also to the grammatical comments of the medieval Jewish exegetes. A central theme is that medieval and modern Biblical Hebrew scholars have reached essentially similar conclusions, even if the medievals lacked modern terminology.

This book is the definitive critical analysis of the Jewish feminist theological project in the United States, its principal theologians and its foundational, embryonic, and more elaborated sacral discursive. The monograph critically examines each of the diverse theologians, their varied perspectives, and individual contributions, and asks will a prescriptive Jewish feminist theology ever be a reality?

Too many incoming students are fluent in English but unable to discuss the language grammatically. Introductory language courses and textbooks often assume a proficiency and familiarity with grammatical terms that is not possessed by the students. This guide delivers an understanding of English grammar starting from simple concepts and presupposing no background or vocabulary. This book is designed as a textbook and a reference for students beginning a New Testament Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic or Latin course.

This text narrates the travels of Rabbi Petachia, a medieval rabbi from Regensburg, Germany, who set out to visit Baghdad, Susa, and Palestine.

A handy grammar of the Aramaic of the Targum, the Talmud, the Midrashim and the Aramaic passages of the New Testament, with notes on where the older dialect of Ezra and Daniel differs.

Melilah is an interdisciplinary peer-review journal concerned with Jewish law, history, literature, religion, culture and thought in the ancient, medieval and modern eras. Contributors (2010) include Simon Mayers, Z. Yaakov Wise, Ed Kessler, Hyam Maccoby, and Glenda Abramson.

This anthology on Eve brings together an international group of scholars to discuss how this character has been interpreted by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In a time when the history of women is being reassessed, it is natural that women look to the paradigmatic female figure. This treatment of Eve covers her wide range of roles as mother of our race, victim, stooge, wife, companion, independent thinker, and “helper”. A venerated figure by many modern feminists and a denigrated figure by those who blame her for original sin, no reader will leave these pages indifferent to the first woman.

Three interpretative trends address the vision at the ratification of the Sinai covenant in Exod. 24:10. Traditions relate whether God or a throne was seen, as well as the consequences for this vision for the leaders and history of the Israelites.

This study investigates how the Rabbis handled the Book of Chronicles, highlighting issues including intermarriage. While genealogical lists contain intermarriage in Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah is generally opposed. Ezra did compose some of the lists and intermarriage was acceptable only under certain conditions.

This paper explores the Israeli Haredi community’s social construction of the male body.

Athas challenges the past assumptions by Book of Daniel scholars, especially with regard to the symbolism in Chapter 9. This exegesis provides a theory for chronological interpretation that includes dates for calculating the seventy weeks mentioned in Daniel's vision.

Melilah is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal concerned with Jewish law, history, literature, religion, culture and thought in the ancient, medieval and modern eras. Contributors (2009) include Cynthia Crewe (abstract only), Dvir Abramovich, Phillip Mendes, and Elliot Cohen.

This book examines the Old Testament language about Israel’s relationship with God in the light of Assyrian royal propaganda. Unpacking this language’s meaning in both Assyrian and biblical contexts, it shows Israel borrowed language from Assyrian vassal treaties to describe its covenant with God, and this book reveals what “covenant” meant, and that it is not “covenant” at all, but “grace.” The broader theological implications of this discovery are explored in dialogue with contemporary theologians. The book takes seriously the study of text in its ancient context in order to highlight the theological content and its modern relevance.

This eclectic collection contains 16 articles on a variety of topics within Qumran Studies from a conference held in memory of the late Professor Alan Crown. Essays cover the impact of the Qumran discoveries on the study of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to the study of the scrolls themselves and the community organizations presupposed in them, focusing as well on topics as diverse as sexuality, scribal practice and the attitude to the Temple in the scrolls.

Cultural memory is the shared reproduction and recollection of what has been learned and retained, normally treated as “the cultural heritage”. The purpose of this book, the first product of the research program Cultural Memory in Biblical Exegesis, is to study how memory is inscribed and embodied in biblical culture and its surrounding area. The essays in this volume seek to open new investigations into cultural memory in biblical and cognate studies, and to include a plethora of methods and perspectives such as the relationship between cultural memory approach and post-colonialism, globalism and epistemology.

The Sentences of the Syriac Menander appears in two Syriac manuscripts in the British Library, a full version in one codex, and a far shorter version, only a small fraction thereof, in another. This book presents a commentary on the text in its complete version focusing on parallels from both Jewish tradition and the Greco-Roman world, showing that the text is not, as it claims, the work of the Greek author Menander, but rather a work of Jewish Wisdom Literature composed in Syriac, possibly in the ancient city of Edessa itself, and preserved within Christian monastic circles.

The narrative of Noah’s flood in Genesis draws perennial interest from scholars and the general public. Too often, however, historical and exegetical studies of the text, the story’s reception, and discussion of theological appropriation remain aloof from each other, if not at odds. This volume takes the influential nature of the flood story as an ideal opportunity to bring some of these methods into dialogue.

A multidisciplinary study of W.G. Sebald's concerns in German-Jewish history, traces, displacement, and memory of an evocative past, as can be found in his writings on the city of Manchester.

This anthology brings to English-language readers the riches of the Judaeo-Persian literary tradition produced by the Jewish community of Iran between the eighth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the translations were prepared specifically for this anthology from unpublished manuscripts. Extensive notes accompany each selection to clarify its meaning in Jewish and Islamic history and legend.