A Hebrew Alexander Romance According to MS London, Jews' College No. 145
A Hebrew Alexander Romance According to MS London, Jews' College No. 145

Author: Leo (Archipresbyter)

Publisher: Peeters Publishers

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9789068313956

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The reader is presented here with a study of the text of a Hebrew manuscript which is a medieval version of the Alexander Romance or the legendary history of Alexander the Great. The Hebrew text in this unique manuscript, known as MS London, is a translation of the Historia de Preliis Alexandri Magni, a widespread Latin version on the Alexander Romance. The Latin text was very useful for establishing an almost complete text of the London version and for identifying names and terms. A comparison of our text with other Hebrew sources on Alexander was of similar help in establishing a correct reading. The introduction which precedes the text and the English translation offers a survey of research into the history and development of Alexander traditions in Greek, Latin and Hebrew literature as well as a detailed analysis of the present text concerning its language, style and themes. This study is concluded by selective notes to the text and indices on personal and geographical names and foreign terms with their Latin equivalents.

The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 6, The Middle Ages: The Christian World
The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 6, The Middle Ages: The Christian World

Author: Robert Chazan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1108340199

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Volume 6 examines the history of Judaism during the second half of the Middle Ages. Through the first half of the Middle Ages, the Jewish communities of western Christendom lagged well behind those of eastern Christendom and the even more impressive Jewries of the Islamic world. As Western Christendom began its remarkable surge forward in the eleventh century, this progress had an impact on the Jewish minority as well. The older Jewries of southern Europe grew and became more productive in every sense. Even more strikingly, a new set of Jewries were created across northern Europe, when this undeveloped area was strengthened demographically, economically, militarily, and culturally. From the smallest and weakest of the world's Jewish centers in the year 1000, the Jewish communities of western Christendom emerged - despite considerable obstacles - as the world's dominant Jewish center by the end of the Middle Ages. This demographic, economic, cultural, and spiritual dominance was maintained down into modernity.

Folktales of the Jews, Volume 1
Folktales of the Jews, Volume 1

Author: Dov Noy

Publisher: Jewish Publication Society

Published: 2006-09-03

Total Pages: 769

ISBN-13: 0827608292

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Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion begins the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. It is the first volume in Folktales of the Jews, the five-volume series to be released over the next several years, in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg's classic, Legends of the Jews. The 71 tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives, Named in Honor of Dov Noy, The University of Haifa (IFA), a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the Sephardic culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This volume and the others to come will be monuments to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.

Zutot 2004
Zutot 2004

Author: Shlomo Berger

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2007-05-28

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1402054548

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The yearbook Zutot serves as a platform for small but incisive contributions on Jewish Studies. It covers Jewish Culture in its broadest sense, encompassing various academic disciplines such as literature, languages and linguistics, philosophy, art, sociology, politics, and history. It also reflects binary oppositions such as religious and secular, high and low, written and oral, male and female culture.

The Persian Alexander
The Persian Alexander

Author:

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-10-27

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 1838609598

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Alexander the Great (356-333 BC) was to capture the imagination of his contemporaries and future generations. His image abounds in various cultures and literatures - Eastern and Western - and spread around the globe through oral and literary media at an astonishing rate during late antiquity and the early Islamic period. The first Iskandarnama, or 'The Book of Alexander', now held in a private collection in Tehran, is the oldest prose version of the Alexander romance in the Persian tradition. Thought to have been written at some point between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries by an unknown author, the lively narrative recasts Alexander as Iskandar, a Muslim champion - a king and prophet, albeit flawed but heroic, and remarkably appropriated to Islam, though the historic Alexander lived and died some 1,000 years before the birth of the faith. This new English translation of the under-studied text is the first to be presented unabridged and sheds fresh light onto the shape and structure of this vital document.In so doing it invites a reconsideration of the transformation of a Western historical figure - and one-time mortal enemy of Persia - into a legendary hero adopted by Iranian historiographic myth-making. Evangelos Venetis, the translator, also offers a textual analysis, providing much-needed context and explanations on both content and subsequent reception. This landmark publication will be invaluable to students and scholars of classical Persian literature, ancient and medieval history and Middle East studies, as well as to anyone studying the Alexander tradition.

Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World
Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-05-13

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9004291970

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The volume demonstrates the cultural centrality of the oral tradition for Iranian studies. It contains contributions from scholars from various areas of Iranian and comparative studies, among which are the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian tradition with its wide network of influences in late antique Mesopotamia, notably among the Jewish milieu; classical Persian literature in its manifold genres; medieval Persian history; oral history; folklore and more. The essays in this collection embrace both the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods, both verbal and visual media, as well as various language communities (Middle Persian, Persian, Tajik, Dari) and geographical spaces (Greater Iran in pre-Islamic and Islamic medieval periods; Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan of modern times). Taken as a whole, the essays reveal the unique blending of oral and literate poetics in the texts or visual artefacts each author focuses upon, conceptualizing their interrelationship and function. Contributors are: Frantz Grenet, Jo-Ann Gross, Charles G. Häberl, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Reuven Kiperwasser, Ulrich Marzolph, Margaret A. Mills, Ravshan Rahmoni, Karl Reichl, Julia Rubanovich, Shaul Shaked, Raya Shani, Dan Y. Shapira, Maria E. Subtelny, Gabrielle R. van den Berg, Yuhan S.-D. Vevaina, Naama Vilozny, Mohsen Zakeri, and Tsila Zan-Bar Tsur.

Seekers of the Naked Truth
Seekers of the Naked Truth

Author: Paul LeValley

Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass

Published: 2018-01-01

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 8120841697

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Why would I spend a good portion of my time over the last 35 years gathering information on the Gymnosophists? The story begins even earlier. As an undergraduate student in the Flint College of the University of Michigan, I pursued an English major with a strong history minor-always looking for something between the two, and rarely finding it. Then in my practice teaching, I happened into one of the early experimental high school courses in Interdisciplinary Humanities. With the exciting interrelationships between art, literature, music, philosophy and history, I said YES-this was what I had been looking for. So I pioneered in teaching high school Humanities for the next few years. Interdisciplinary Humanities was a bottom-up movement. Gradually, colleges began offering Masters programs to give teachers the rich background they needed. I decided I was not tied to Michigan where it was cold; I would find the best Masters program in Humanities anywhere in the world, and go there. Well, it turned out that the best Masters program in the world was at Wayne State University in Detroit, of all places. Unlike other programs that were really just double majors, Wayne offered truly interdisciplinary classes. Moreover, they offered an Eastern track and a Western track. Knowing that I would never find that Eastern track anywhere else, I studied interdisciplinary courses in the cultures of India, China, Japan, and Egypt. (The middle-eastern professor was on sabbatical when I was there.) I especially liked India-perhaps because I had already travelled around the world, and India impressed me the most.

The Book of Conviviality in Exile (Kitāb al-īnās bi-ʾl-jalwa)
The Book of Conviviality in Exile (Kitāb al-īnās bi-ʾl-jalwa)

Author: Michael G. Wechsler

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-03-20

Total Pages: 684

ISBN-13: 9004284524

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This volume presents a critical edition of the Judaeo-Arabic translation and commentary on the book of Esther by Saadia Gaon (882–942). This edition, accompanied by an introduction and extensively annotated English translation, affords access to the first-known personalized, rationalistic Jewish commentary on this biblical book. Saadia innovatively organizes the biblical narrative—and his commentary thereon—according to seven “guidelines” that provide a practical blueprint by which Israel can live as an abased people under Gentile dominion. Saadia’s prodigious acumen and sense of communal solicitude find vivid expression throughout his commentary in his carefully-defined structural and linguistic analyses, his elucidative references to a broad range of contemporary socio-religious and vocational realia, his anti-Karaite polemics, and his attention to various issues, both psychological and practical, attending Jewish-Gentile conviviality in a 10th-century Islamicate milieu.

The Jews of Provence and Languedoc
The Jews of Provence and Languedoc

Author: Ram Ben-Shalom

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2024-05-08

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1837641412

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This exhaustive history of Provençal Jewry examines the key aspects of Jewish life in Provence over some 1,500 years of cultural florescence with far-reaching consequences. A seminal examination of the crucial role of the Jews of Provence in shaping medieval Jewish culture in the Mediterranean basin.