Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Two basic approaches have shaped the identity discourse since antiquity. The essentialist view assumes that a person's identity does exist "somewhere," and the discourse on identity is an attempt to disclose it. People do not create their identity, they only realize it. The opposite, deconstructionist view, assumes that the identity is only a linguistic fiction; we have no identity outside our concrete history, which reflects a constantly ongoing dynamic change. The present book offers a third option. It accepts that identity is not a priori datum that precedes our existence but claims we do have a set historical cultural identity it calls "primary," expressing a permanent foundation of our biography. On its basis, we build our concrete identity. Engaging in a critical analysis, the book exposes the foundations and the borders of the identity field. As a test case that illustrates its claims, it presents the discourse on Jewish identity. Lively, vigorous, and widely recorded, this discourse conveys many nuances of the tension between continuity and change and is thus uniquely fit to convey the significance of the identity discourse.

Jews --- Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- Semites --- Judaism --- Identity --- Philosophy.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book looks at the philosophical consideration of Jewish existence in our time, as reflected in Jewish education, its alternative visions, its purposes and instrumentalities, the values it should serve, and the personal and social character it ought to foster. Prevalent conceptions and practices of Jewish education are neither sufficiently reflective nor thoroughgoing enough to meet the multiple challenges that the world now poses to Jewish existence and continuity. New efforts are needed to develop an education of the future that will honor the riches of the Jewish past and grasp the opportunities of fruitful interactions with the general culture of the present. To promote such efforts, six leading scholars in this book formulate their variant visions of an ideal Jewish education for the contemporary world. This book also translates these visions into educational practice and, finally, articulates a vision abstracted from a case study of a school's ongoing practice.

Jews --- Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- Semites --- Judaism --- Education --- Philosophy. --- Arts and Humanities --- Religion

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

In 70 CE, the Jews were an agrarian and illiterate people living mostly in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia. By 1492 the Jewish people had become a small group of literate urbanites specializing in crafts, trade, moneylending, and medicine in hundreds of places across the Old World, from Seville to Mangalore. What caused this radical change? The Chosen Few presents a new answer to this question by applying the lens of economic analysis to the key facts of fifteen formative centuries of Jewish history. Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein offer a powerful new explanation of one of the most significant transformations in Jewish history while also providing fresh insights into the growing debate about the social and economic impact of religion.

Jews --- Judaism --- Religions --- Semites --- Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- History --- Economic conditions --- Religion

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Nineteenth-century Europe saw an unprecedented rise in the number of synagogues. Building a Public Judaism considers what their architecture and the circumstances surrounding their construction reveal about the social progress of modern European Jews. Looking at synagogues in four important centers of Jewish life-London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin-Saskia Coenen Snyder argues that the process of claiming a Jewish space in European cities was a marker of acculturation but not of full acceptance. Whether modest or spectacular, these new edifices most often revealed the limits of European Jewish integration. Debates over building initiatives provide Coenen Snyder with a vehicle for gauging how Jews approached questions of self-representation in predominantly Christian societies and how public manifestations of their identity were received. Synagogues fused the fundamentals of religion with the prevailing cultural codes in particular locales and served as aesthetic barometers for European Jewry's degree of modernization. Coenen Snyder finds that the dialogues surrounding synagogue construction varied significantly according to city. While the larger story is one of increasing self-agency in the public life of European Jews, it also highlights this agency's limitations, precisely in those places where Jews were thought to be most acculturated, namely in France and Germany. Building a Public Judaism grants the peculiarities of place greater authority than they have been given in shaping the European Jewish experience. At the same time, its place-specific description of tensions over religious tolerance continues to echo in debates about the public presence of religious minorities in contemporary Europe.

Synagogue architecture --- Jews --- Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- Semites --- Judaism --- Jewish architecture --- History --- Identity

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The history of Iranian Jews after the establishment of the Safavid State in Iran in 1501 C.E. has formed the subject of growing academic and broader interest over the last few decades. However, despite the significant increase in the quantity and quality of the publications in this area, some of the main aspects and periods in the history of Iranian Jews have received little or no systematic treatment. Dealing with some broad but closely related areas of history, community, society, and culture among the Jews of nineteenth-century Iran, the present book provides sources of information as well as discussions and explanations related to some of the main conditions and realities that shaped the lives of the Iranian Jews prior to their accelerated transformation in the course of the twentieth-century. Included among the eight sections and over forty annotated and analyzed sources in the book are those that shed light on some of the major areas of Jewish life in nineteenth-century Iran. This volume is also available in paperback .

Jews --- Hebrews --- Israelites --- Jewish people --- Jewry --- Judaic people --- Judaists --- Ethnology --- Religious adherents --- Semites --- Judaism --- History --- Social conditions --- Iran --- Ethnic relations.