Judaism in the Early Modern and Modern Periods

Tristram says "In the belief that this field was not yet exhausted, I spent, accompanied by a small party of friends, in 1863-4, a period of nearly ten months in the examination chiefly of the geology and natural history of the country."

Walenty Potocki was a young Polish nobleman who abandoned wealth, power, and unlimited worldly prospects to convert to new religion - Judaism. Potocki was betrayed by a member of the religious community he embraced and burned at the stake by the Church he left behind in 1749. This book examines eleven versions of this remarkable man’s story and the heated, previously unpublished, correspondence between the Potocki clan and one of his early biographers. Noble Soul is the record of one man’s defining faith, and of the compelling human need for personal spiritual fulfillment.

Lurianic mythology represents an intensely personal view, in which earlier cabalistic symbolism is used to express new and original ideas. The lurianic corpus can be seen as a metaphor for a relation between man and the deity which is not yet fulfilled. The cabalistic myths of his sources express the reality of the relations of being in the lurianic corpus. The lurianic system seeks to reformulate the relation of man and god, concentrating on the way that the being of the deity is revealed in man.

Through literary, historical, archaeological, and engendered readings, this collection of essays presents a multidisciplinary analysis of rabbinic texts. Such a conversation between diverse scholars illuminates the hermeneutical issues generated by the contemporary study of the Talmud and Midrash.

When educator William Rabenort looked at Spinoza he saw an educator. This little book on educational theory is built on the thought of Spinoza.

Noted American philosopher Albert Balz offers his observations on the concepts of idea and essence as reflected in the philosophers Hobbes and Spinoza.

This essay on the history of how the Hebrew Bible was considered during the Reformation period takes the reader into areas largely unexplored. In addition to the Bible, the Kabala is brought into the discussion. Box traces the development up to the advent of the critical study of the Bible which continued to be controversial when his study was published.

A philological study of the usage of Memra, Shekinah, and Metatron in Tragumic and Cabbalistic literature that combats nineteenth century Christian attempts to read these as references to the Second or Third Persons of the Trinity.

Contributions by four of the seven major theoretical innovators in modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, Max Wertheimer, Abraham Maslow, and Noam Chomsky, are explored against the backdrop of their Jewish heritage. The psychological wisdom in Jewish religious practices and culture is highlighted as well, from a psychodynamic perspective.

In this set of articles originally published together in his booklet Orientalia, Lagarde addresses several issues concerning Hebrew studies. The first article, Explanation of Hebrew Words, addresses the use of twelve significant lexemes. Added to this essay is a contribution of Lagarde to the Hebrew reflected in Ephraim the Syrian’s work on Genesis, extant in Armenian. Select passages from Genesis 2 through 38 are given consideration in the light of philological investigation. Together these pieces represent a useful collection of insights into the Hebrew language both through classic philology and through the ecclesiastical interpretation of a scholar in the tradition of Syriac Christianity.