Our understanding of ancient Jewish history and culture has been transformed in recent years by two kinds of scholarship: first, the patient and meticulous labor of the archaeologists, who have shed fresh light on the origins of the Jews and their relationships with the cultures that surrounded them and at times threatened to destroy them; and second, the work of literary scholars, who have brought to bear the methods of modern literary criticism on the Bible, revealing a literature as rich and complex as any in the ancient world.
This course aims to illuminate both the history and the literature of the ancient Jews, examining their relationships with other peoples and cultures, and showing how the Bible not only served to forge a distinctive Jewish identity, but also enabled the Jews to survive even the most catastrophic encounters with the larger empires of the period. And although we cannot consider the origins of Christianity in detail in this course, we will try to suggest why the religion and culture of the ancient Jews have played such important roles in the subsequent history of Western civilization.
Week 11: "Sepharad: The Jews in Medieval Spain" Thursday Jan 5, 2012
Topics: Convivencia: Jews, Muslims and Christians in Medieval Spain—The Hebrew Poets of Medieval Spain.
REQUIRED READING:
Scheindlin, chapter 4: The Jews in the Islamic World: From the Rise of Islam to the End of the Middle Ages (632 to 1500)
Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Halevi (Jewish Encounters)
Reviews
"[A] well-written, handy little textbook....The book is well supplied with pedagogical aids, including excellent maps, boxes that explore allusions in the text itself in greater depth, a selected bibliography for each chapter, and a thorough index. As such it will be of great use as the first text in introductory surveys of the history of the Jews or the history of Judaism. It will also provide instructors with good foundations upon which to add more detailed material."--Religious Studies Review
"Scheindlin's short book provides a concise and readable summary of more than 3,000 years of Jewish history. It provides the student and general reader with an excellent introduction to the topic."--Marvin Swartz, University of Massachussetts at Amherst
RECOMMENDED READING:
Review
"In a shimmering gem of a new book, the critic and translator Hillel Halkin has brought to life, with vibrant and personal immediacy, the passions, ideas, sensibilities, convictions—and the voice—of this emblematic Jewish spirit. . . . Our own period has seen renewed interest in Halevi, of which Halkin's book, coruscating and compulsively readable, is an undoubted masterwork. It has also witnessed vigorous debates over his legacy. Reviewing each of them before advancing his own bold readings, Halkin brings home both the tantalizing elusiveness of Halevi's life and the vital pertinence of his example." —Jewish Ideas Daily
Review
"Virtually stagnant since late Biblical times, Hebrew poetry and the language itself would be transformed by a succession of poets of genius and their imitators. In Peter Cole's rich new anthology, the extent of their astonishing achievement is fully revealed for the first time in English.... His versions are masterly."--Eric Ormsby, New York Times Book Review
"Perpetually astonishing. The central figures in Peter Cole's anthology are great by any standards.... [They] provoke love in any reader of Hebrew literature, and by [a] miracle of Cole's own creation, in any reader of little or no Hebrew who directly confronts the work of this major poet-translator.... Superb."--Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books
"The book is a treasure trove, a labour of love and exceptional erudition, which will open up to the reader a world of poetry and culture as rich as anything in human civilization."--Times Literary Supplement
Amazon: María Rosa Menocal's wafting, ineffably sad The Ornament of the World tells of a time and place--from 786 to 1492, in Andalucía, Spain--that is largely and unjustly overshadowed in most historical chronicles. It was a time when three cultures--Judaic, Islamic, and Christian--forged a relatively stable (though occasionally contentious) coexistence. Such was this period that there remains in Toledo a church with an "homage to Arabic writing on its walls [and] a sumptuous 14th-century synagogue built to look like Granada's Alhambra." Long gone, however, is the Córdoba library--a thousand times larger than any other in Christian Europe. Menocal's history is one of palatine cities, of philosophers, of poets whose work inspired Chaucer and Boccaccio, of weeping fountains, breezy courtyards, and a long-running tolerance "profoundly rooted in the cultivation of the complexities, charms and challenges of contradictions," which ended with the repression of Judaism and Islam the same year Columbus sailed to the New World. --H. O'Billovich
Week 12: "Ashkenaz: The Jews in the Rhineland" Thursday Jan 12, 2012
Topics: Origins of Yiddish—The Crusades and the Jews
REQUIRED READING:
Reading: Scheindlin, chapter 5: The Jews of Medieval Christian Europe (Ninth Century to 1500)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Review
Booklist:
As fluent in cultural change as he is in etymology, linguist Katz provides a wholly enjoyable and many-faceted history of Yiddish, an essential chapter in the story of Judaism. He chronicles the great Jewish exodus from the Near East north into Europe, where the creators of Yiddish (which simply means Jewish) settled in German-speaking regions, called their new home Ashkenaz (the name of Noah's great-grandson), and forged a vibrant new language by fusing Semitic and Germanic tongues. Ashkenazim became a vibrant trilingual civilization: Yiddish was spoken, and sacred texts were read in Hebrew and Aramaic. But written Yiddish also thrived since women weren't taught to read Hebrew or Aramaic. Katz then follows the Ashkenazi diaspora to Poland and Lithuania, then on to America, tracking the flourishing of Yiddish letters until Yiddish was condemned as too Old World and began to die off. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association.
Description
In the Year 1096 presents a clear, highly readable chronicle of the events of 1096. Noted teacher and historian Robert Chazan brings readers to critical moments in Jewish history, illuminating the events themselves, their antecedents, and their far-reaching consequences. Equally important, his book assesses the significance of the events of 1096 within the larger framework of Jewish history, including both the scope of persecution and the record of Jewish resistance.
Week 13: "The Jews in Medieval France and England" Thursday Jan 19, 2012
Topics: Expulsion from France—Expulsion from England
RECOMMENDED READING:
Review
This thoughtful and elegant work is guided by an overriding big idea: with respect to childbirth and nurturing, Jewish parents in medieval France and Germany developed many practices very similar to their Christian neighbors. The strength of Baumgarten's work arises from two achievements. One is her wide and wise reading of the historical literature on gender and society in medieval Europe. The other is her sensitive use of a wide range of original sources, including manuscripts as yet unavailable or little used in Jewish social history. This book will be read with pleasure and benefit by all those interested in medieval and early modern Europe. (Miri Rubin, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London )
Description:
From Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, comes a magical book that introduces us to the towering figure of Rashi—Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki—the great biblical and Talmudic commentator of the Middle Ages. Wiesel brilliantly evokes the world of medieval European Jewry, a world of profound scholars and closed communities ravaged by outbursts of anti-Semitism and decimated by the Crusades. The incomparable scholar Rashi, whose phrase-by-phrase explication of the oral law has been included in every printing of the Talmud since the fifteenth century, was also a spiritual and religious leader: His perspective, encompassing both the mundane and the profound, is timeless. Wiesel's Rashi is a heartbroken witness to the suffering of his people, and through his responses to major religious questions of the day we see still another side of this greatest of all interpreters of the sacred writings. Both beginners and advanced students of the Bible rely on Rashi's groundbreaking commentary for simple text explanations and Midrashic interpretations. Wiesel, a descendant of Rashi, proves an incomparable guide who enables us to appreciate both the lucidity of Rashi's writings and the milieu in which they were formed.
Week 14: "The Sephardic Dispersion" Thursday Jan 26, 2012
Topics: Venice and Amsterdam—Jews in the Ottoman Empire
LECTURE NOTES:
REQUIRED READING:
Scheindlin, chapter 6: The Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East (1453 to 1948)
and
Adina Hoffman, Peter Cole
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza
Schocken
ISBN 0805242589
Description
"One May day in 1896, at a dining-room table in Cambridge, England, a meeting took place between a Romanian-born maverick Jewish intellectual and twin learned Presbyterian Scotswomen, who had assembled to inspect several pieces of rag paper and parchment. It was the unlikely start to what would prove a remarkable, continent-hopping, century-crossing saga, and one that in many ways has revolutionized our sense of what it means to lead a Jewish life. In Sacred Trash, MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and acclaimed essayist Adina Hoffman tell the story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried scholarly treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of nine hundred years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Hoffman and Cole bring modern readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography and part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed on the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption."
RECOMMENDED READING:
Review
"Beautifully crafted. What seem like separate issues—Spinoza's pioneering advocacy of complete freedom of thought in religious matters; the turmoil in the Jewish community; the fateful events in Amsterdam in the closing years of Spinoza's life; the philosophical developments of the seventeenth century; Spinoza's idea of a philosophical religion utterly purged of all anthropomorphism, even to the extent of denying that God is a 'person' in any sense—come together as if by themselves (the sure sign of a fine artist!) to answer my puzzle: how to understand Spinoza the human being, a man for whom reason itself was a kind of salvation." —Hilary Putnam, New York Observer
Anna Foa,
The Jews of Europe after the Black Death
University of California Press
ISBN 0520087658
Description
Anna Foa's richly innovative history of Jewish life in Europe from the fourteenth through the nineteenth century breaks through the boundaries of traditional narratives. Instead of featuring a long series of catastrophes and cataclysms and the Jews' responses to them, Foa concentrates on the creative aspects of Jewish life, and on continuities and correspondences among very different local Jewish communities. Foa's illuminating overview of the issues and debates that have dominated the study of Western European Jewish society more than justifies her blending of narrative history with thematic investigations. This is, perhaps surprisingly, the story of a stability that underlies and survives change. In a new afterword, prepared expressly for the English edition, Foa talks about the twentieth century's two transforming phenomena, Zionism and the Holocaust, and the ways they have changed Jewish identity and historiography.
Steven Nadler,
Rembrandt's Jews
University of Chicago Press
ISBN 0226567370
Booklist:
Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was home to a remarkable Jewish community unique in all of Europe. Nadler has made this intriguing world his specialty, first in his acclaimed Spinoza: A Life (1999), and now in this enlightening inquiry into the depiction of Jews in Dutch art. Using Rembrandt's profoundly human portraits of his Jewish neighbors and depictions of Old Testament stories as his base, Nadler elucidates both the inner dynamics of Jewish Amsterdam and its interactions with the city at large. Rembrandt was not alone in his interest in Jewish life, and Nadler's disquisition on why Dutch theologians studied Judaica, and on why Dutch artists eschewed the blatant anti-Semitism found elsewhere in Europe, is profoundly intriguing. Nadler portrays both Rembrandt and Menasseh ben Israel, a friend of the artist whom Nadler believes was a crucial resource for Rembrandt's knowledge of Jewish culture and possibly "the most famous Jew in all of Europe." Rich in compelling detail and surprising disclosures, Nadler's discourse greatly deepens our understanding of the role of art in both Dutch and Jewish history. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Spinoza
Week 15: "Polin: Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Poland" Thurs Feb 2, 2012
Topics:
The Jews in Medieval France and England
Glückel's World
The Jews in Medieval PolandREQUIRED READING:
Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of the Polish Jews, chapters 1-2
Kirkus Reviews
Hoffman, author of the much-admired memoir Lost in Translation (1989), here returns to her dual roots, Jewish and Polish--and her history of the intertwined fates of the two peoples shows that they can indeed be complementary, not oppositional. Hoffman's goal is larger than her distillation of history- -acute and pointed, but a bit too schematic--can fully support. But her thesis is a fascinating one: that Poland, with historically large populations of Germans, Ukrainians, Jews, and other ethnic groups, was truly a multicultural society that can serve as an object lesson in how to achieve (or not achieve) a balance between minority group identity and ``a sense of mutual belonging.'' Where she does succeed fully is in her attempt to ``complicate and historicize the picture'' of Jewish-Polish relations in order to get beyond stereotyped views of Poles as congenitally anti-Semitic and of Jews as economic exploiters. Hoffman offers a nuanced view that excuses no act of hatred or violence yet considers, for instance, the difference between peasants' superstitious belief that Jews were lucky and genuine anti-Semitism, or how the endless conquering and division of Poland increased tensions and mistrust between Poles and Jews. Hoffman traces the history of Jews in Poland back to its origins in medieval times, before fervent Polish nationalism was born and the country was a beneficent refuge for Jews. She then focuses in on one shtetl, or village, Brask, as a microcosm of the waxing and waning of relations between the two peoples. In Brask, Polish peasants and Jewish craftsmen and merchants lived side by side: Poles attended cantorial concerts, and Jewish musicians played at Polish weddings; Poles incorporated Yiddish phrases into their speech, and Jews adopted the dress of Polish gentry. And yet, Hoffman concludes, each was seen as fundamentally ``Other.'' But Hoffman is optimistic that the gulf can be--and is being- -crossed. This insightful overview points out how we can begin to understand a complex past and apply those lessons in the future. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.RECOMMENDED READING:
Antony Polonsky
The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 1, 1350 to 1881
Littman Library Of Jewish Civilization
ISBN 1874774641
Description
In his three-volume history, Antony Polonsky provides a comprehensive survey - socio-political, economic, and religious - of the Jewish communities of eastern Europe from 1350 to the present. Until the Second World War, this was the heartland of the Jewish world: nearly three and a half million Jews lived in Poland alone, while nearly three million more lived in the Soviet Union. Although the majority of the Jews of Europe and the United States, and many of the Jews of Israel, originate from these lands, their history there is not well known. Rather, it is the subject of mythologizing and stereotypes that fail both to bring out the specific features of the Jewish civilization which emerged there and to illustrate what was lost. Jewish life, though often poor materially, was marked by a high degree of spiritual and ideological intensity and creativity. Antony Polonsky recreates this lost world - brutally cut down by the Holocaust and less brutally but still seriously damaged by the Soviet attempt to destroy Jewish culture. Wherever possible, the unfolding of history is illustrated by contemporary Jewish writings to show how Jews felt and reacted to the complex and difficult situations in which they found themselves. This first volume begins with an overview of Jewish life in Poland and Lithuania down to the mid-eighteenth century. It describes the towns and shtetls where the Jews lived, the institutions they developed, and their participation in the economy. Developments in religious life, including the emergence of hasidism and the growth of opposition to it, are described in detail. The volume goes on to cover the period from 1764 to 1881, highlighting government attempts to increase the integration of Jews into the wider society and the Jewish responses to these efforts, including the beginnings of the Haskalah movement. Attention is focused on developments in each country in turn: the problems of emancipation, acculturation, and assimilation in Prussian and Austrian Poland; the politics of integration in the Kingdom of Poland; and the failure of forced integration in the tsarist empire. *** Volume 2 will cover the period 1881-1914; Volume 3 covers 1914-2005.
Week 16: "Court Jews and Port Jews" Thursday Feb 9, 2012
Topics: Shylock and Shakespeare—The Jews and Early Modern Capitalism
LECTURE NOTES:
FILM
The Merchant of Venice
RECOMMENDED READING:
Jerry Z. Muller,
Capitalism and the Jews,
Princeton University Press
ISBN 0691144788
Review
In his slim essay collection Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller presents a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune. . . . While this book is ostensibly about 'the Jews,' Muller's most chilling insights are about their enemies, and the creative, almost supernatural, malleability of anti-Semitism itself. For centuries, poverty, paranoia and financial illiteracy have combined into a dangerous brew--one that has made economic virtuosity look suspiciously like social vice. -- Catherine Rampell, New York Times Book Review
John Gross,
Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy,
Touchstone
ISBN 0671883860
Review
From Library Journal: Amazingly, Shylock is in only five scenes in the Merchant of Venice. Yet, as pointed out by Gross, the theater critic for the London Sunday Telegraph , his impact and significance transcend his physical presence, so much so that his name and "pound of flesh" idea are almost universally known. In the first part of this character/cultural study, Gross examines the antecedents of Shylock and the play, and his development within the play. The second part considers "interpretations" both theatrical and literary in England and America until World War II; the third part considers Shylock more broadly as a touchstone (e.g., how his "type" is used by the Victorians--Trollope's Lopez, Dickens's Riah, Ruskin's use of him in Munera Pulveris ). There's not much new here--Shylock and Merchant of Venice have both consumed tons of interpretive ink--but the book is readable and puts a lot of sundry information in one place. For collections heavy in Shakespeariana and/or Judaica. - Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Week 17: "The False Messiah" Thursday Feb 16, 2012
Topics: Kabbalah: Understanding Jewish Mysticism—Sabbatai Zevi
LECTURE NOTES:
RECOMMENDED READING:
Review
Immensely important and fascinating. . . . A monumental work of historical scholarship, which recounts in minute detail a moving tragedy of vast dimensions. -- Review
Week 18: "The Enlightenment and the Jews" Thursday Feb 23, 2012
Topics: Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah—The World of Salomon Maimon
LECTURE NOTES:
REQUIRED READING:
Product Description
Brilliant and bedraggled, the picaresque Jewish philosopher Solomon Maimon was one of the great thinkers of the eighteenth century. Now the definitive English version of Maimon's remarkable Autobiography, the 1888 translation by J. Clark Murray, is available for the first time in paperback, enhanced with a new introduction by Jewish studies scholar Michael Shapiro. Wry and spirited, shrewd and unrepentant, Maimon alternated between nomadic destitution and intellectual swordplay among the Jewish elite of Berlin. The son of a petty merchant in Polish Lithuania, Maimon was a child Talmud prodigy who became increasingly antagonistic toward the Jewish establishment and receptive toward the secular philosophies of Spinoza, Hume, Leibnitz, and Kant. A perpetual outsider, Maimon observed with an equally sharp eye the excesses of his time and the vicissitudes of his own life. Parallel to his own development as a thinker in the company of Moses Mendelssohn and others, Maimon conveys the physically wretched but spiritually vibrant Polish ghetto, the beginnings of Hasidism (which he denounces as antirationalist), and the world of the wealthy Berlin Jewry who enthusiastically embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment. Combining philosophical discourse with personal anecdotes that shift abruptly from the tragic to the hilarious and back, Maimon's Autobiography indelibly portrays one man's devotion to truth on his own terms regardless of the cost to himself or others.RECOMMENDED READING:
Description
Hertzberg develops his daring thesis that the "modern, secular, anti-Semitism was fashioned not as a reaction to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, but within the Enlightenment and Revolution themselves." He finds that modern anti-Semitism owes less to Christian theological mentality than to doctrinaire libertarianism of figures such as Voltaire, d'Holbach, Diderot, and Marat.
Week 19: "Poland and Hasidism" Thursday Mar 1, 2012
Topics: The Hasidic Conquest—Hasidism and Modern Jewish Culture
LECTURE NOTES:
REQUIRED READING
Eva Hoffman, Shtetl, chapter 3.
Reviews
"A book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying or vulgarzing them. It is a narrative about an extraordinary moment in history, of course, but it is also the chronicle of Rodger Kamenetz's discovery of what he says is a more nourishing Judaism." —The New York Times Book Review
"Splendidly written from beginning to end, this is a book that might and should be read for the simple pleasure of watching an honest intellect confront its own image . . . A book that should be read and discussed by those interested in the marvelous complexity and resilience of the human soul." —New Orleans Times-Picayune
RECOMMENDED READING:
Reviews
An invaluable piece of current scholarship on ancient Judaism. . . . This book represents a fresh and unique look at a familiar subject, and it should be required reading for any serious scholar of ancient Judaism, early Christianity, or ancient Mediterranean religions. -- Review
Seth Schwartz's work is a much more complex assessment of ancient Jewish society and culture than that which the one-sided traditional accounts present: it is the first consistent and comprehensive attempt to view Jewish society of Hellenistic and Roman-Byzantine times in the context of the broader socio-political, economic, and religious developments of the ancient eastern Mediterranean world. This allows him to interpret the sparse evidence from Roman Palestine in a much more convincing way than has formerly been done. (Catherine Hezser, Trinity College, Dublin )
Reviews
An invaluable piece of current scholarship on ancient Judaism. . . . This book represents a fresh and unique look at a familiar subject, and it should be required reading for any serious scholar of ancient Judaism, early Christianity, or ancient Mediterranean religions. -- Review
Seth Schwartz's work is a much more complex assessment of ancient Jewish society and culture than that which the one-sided traditional accounts present: it is the first consistent and comprehensive attempt to view Jewish society of Hellenistic and Roman-Byzantine times in the context of the broader socio-political, economic, and religious developments of the ancient eastern Mediterranean world. This allows him to interpret the sparse evidence from Roman Palestine in a much more convincing way than has formerly been done. (Catherine Hezser, Trinity College, Dublin )
Week 20: "Out of the Ghetto: Jewish Emancipation" Thurs Mar 8, 2012
Topics: Berlin Salons—Heinrich Heine
LECTURE NOTES:
RECOMMENDED READING:
Spring Break
March 12 to March 23, 2012
Spring Vacation. No class the week of March 15 (Thurs.) and March 22 (Thurs.).
First class of Spring Quarter is Thursday, March 29, 2012.
