Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort, a learned Jewish-Christian man from Dordrecht

Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort, a learned Jewish-Christian man from Dordrecht

Author: Mascha van Dort

Publisher: Mascha van Dort

Published: 2021-06-12

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 9464028386

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A new, revised edition will be published in 2024. === Biography of Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort, 1712 - 1761. Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort was a learned Jewish-Christian man born in Holland in 1712. He converted in 1745 in Aachen from Judaism to Christianity, and went to Sri Lanka in 1754 to work as a preceptor of Oriental Languages at the Seminary in Colombo for the Dutch East India Company. He wrote three books in German about conversion. However he is most famous as the translator of the excerpts of the Chronicles of the Jews from Cochin, India, and the Hebrew translation of the Quran, which resides in the Library of Congress in Washington. He also allegedly possessed a manuscript called the Iggeret Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, now in possession of The Royal Danish Library. Until now information about his life was scarcely available. This book aims to give more insights into his life, and to provide context to the aforementioned books and the manuscript. It reveals among many other things that van Dort also translated the Hebrew New Testament, residing in the Cambridge Library. Ir. Mascha van Dort (1968) studied Applied Physics at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands. In her work she is inspired to learn more about what makes people tick, in different cultures and different times. She uses a fact based approach and did research in over 14 different archives across the globe to find out everything there is to know about Leopold, while analyzing it afterwards in a framework which connects historical context and environment, personal needs and attitudes to actions and behavior. The book offers unique insights into Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort’s character and uncovers new facts about the background of his works. With contributions of professor Hanne Trautner-Kromann and colorful images of 18th century drawings and paintings of Dordrecht, Aachen, Colombo and Cochin. Hebrew translations and explanations by professor Meir Bar-Ilan.


Iggeret Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai

Iggeret Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai

Author: Hanne Trautner-Kromann

Publisher: Valdemar

Published: 2022-09-01

Total Pages: 102

ISBN-13: 8797188816

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The Judaica Department of The Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark, contains a copy of a letter from the year 53, written by Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, who warns the Jews in Rome against Paul and Christianity. It was thought that the original letter belonged to the learned Leopold Immanuel Jacob van Dort from The Netherlands, who took the letter with him to the holy community of Gogin - גוגין – presumably Cochin on the Malabar Coast in South Western India. However, judging from the content and later ideas and particular words, the letter must be much younger and cannot have been written by Jochanan ben Zakkai. The manuscript itself contains an autograph by the scholar Salomo Dubno, presumably from around 1800. The analysis of the letter shows that it is composed according to the classical rhetorical pattern and that the main purpose is to warn the Jews against apostasy and especially to encourage them to keep their Jewish faith. It has not proven possible to date or place the letter with certainty, but it might be as late as from the 18th century. Hopefully, another scholar will some day be able to solve the enigmas of this remarkable letter, which falls within the tradition of Medieval Jewish polemics against Christianity.


The Last Utopia

The Last Utopia

Author: Samuel Moyn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-05

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0674256522

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Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.


The Golden Cord

The Golden Cord

Author: Charles Taliaferro

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2012-12-15

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0268093776

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The title of Charles Taliaferro’s book is derived from poems and stories in which a person in peril or on a quest must follow a cord or string in order to find the way to happiness, safety, or home. In one of the most famous of such tales, the ancient Greek hero Theseus follows the string given him by Ariadne to mark his way in and out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. William Blake's poem “Jerusalem” uses the metaphor of a golden string, which, if followed, will lead one to heaven itself. Taliaferro extends Blake’s metaphor to illustrate the ways we can link what we see, feel, and do with deep spiritual realities. Taliaferro offers a foundational case for the recognition of the experience of the eternal God of Christianity, in which God is understood as the fount of all goodness and the subject and object of our best love, revealed through scripture, tradition, philosophical reflection, and encountered in everyday events. He addresses philosophical obstacles to the recognition of such experiences, especially objections from the “new atheists,” and explores the values involved in thinking and experiencing God as eternal. These include the belief that the eternal goodness of God subordinates temporal goods, such as the pursuit of fame and earthly glory; that God is the essence of life; and that the eternal God hallows domestic goods, blessing the everyday goods of ordinary life. An exploration of the moral and spiritual riches of the Christian tradition as an alternative to materialism and naturalism, The Golden Cord brings an originality and depth to the debate in accessible and engaging prose.


Death in Jewish Life

Death in Jewish Life

Author: Stefan C. Reif

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2014-08-27

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 3110377489

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Jewish customs and traditions about death, burial and mourning are numerous, diverse and intriguing. They are considered by many to have a respectable pedigree that goes back to the earliest rabbinic period. In order to examine the accurate historical origins of many of them, an international conference was held at Tel Aviv University in 2010 and experts dealt with many aspects of the topic. This volume includes most of the papers given then, as well as a few added later. What emerges are a wealth of fresh material and perspectives, as well as the realization that the high Middle Ages saw a set of exceptional innovations, some of which later became central to traditional Judaism while others were gradually abandoned. Were these innovations influenced by Christian practice? Which prayers and poems reflect these innovations? What do the sources tell us about changing attitudes to death and life-after death? Are tombstones an important guide to historical developments? Answers to these questions are to be found in this unusual, illuminating and readable collection of essays that have been well documented, carefully edited and well indexed.


Art in History/History in Art

Art in History/History in Art

Author: David Freedberg

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 1996-07-11

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 0892362014

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Historians and art historians provide a critique of existing methodologies and an interdisciplinary inquiry into seventeenth-century Dutch art and culture.


Jewish Christians and Christian Jews

Jewish Christians and Christian Jews

Author: Richard Henry Popkin

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9780792324522

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The appearance of religious toleration combined with the intensification of the search for theological truth led to a unique phenomenon in early modern Europe: Jewish Christians and Christian Jews. These essays will demonstrate that the cross-fertilization of these two religions, which for so long had a tradition of hostility towards each other, not only affected developments within the two groups but in many ways foreshadowed the emergence of the Enlightenment and the evolution of modern religious freedom.


The Taming of Chance

The Taming of Chance

Author: Ian Hacking

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1990-08-31

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9780521388849

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This book combines detailed scientific historical research with characteristic philosophic breadth and verve.