Jewish Messiahs in a Christian Empire

Jewish Messiahs in a Christian Empire
Author: Martha Himmelfarb
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2017-02-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0674979095

The seventh-century CE Hebrew work Sefer Zerubbabel (Book of Zerubbabel), composed during the period of conflict between Persia and the Byzantine Empire for control over Palestine, is the first full-fledged messianic narrative in Jewish literature. Martha Himmelfarb offers a comprehensive analysis of this rich but understudied text, illuminating its distinctive literary features and the complex milieu from which it arose. Sefer Zerubbabel presents itself as an angelic revelation of the end of times to Zerubbabel, a biblical leader of the sixth century BCE, and relates a tale of two messiahs who, as Himmelfarb shows, play a major role in later Jewish narratives. The first messiah, a descendant of Joseph, dies in battle at the hands of Armilos, the son of Satan who embodies the Byzantine Empire. He is followed by a messiah descended from David modeled on the suffering servant of Isaiah, who brings him back to life and triumphs over Armilos. The mother of the Davidic messiah also figures in the work as a warrior. Himmelfarb places Sefer Zerubbabel in the dual context of earlier Jewish eschatology and Byzantine Christianity. The role of the messiah’s mother, for example, reflects the Byzantine notion of the Virgin Mary as the protector of Constantinople. On the other hand, Sefer Zerubbabel shares traditions about the messiahs with rabbinic literature. But while the rabbis are ambivalent about these traditions, Sefer Zerubbabel embraces them with enthusiasm.

Reconfiguring the Land of Israel

Reconfiguring the Land of Israel
Author: Constanza Cordoni
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2024-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004696768

This book is about ways in which the land of Israel, the homeland of the most paradigmatic of all diasporas, was envisioned in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the literature of the sages. It is about the Land according to the redefined Judaism that emerged in the centuries following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. This Judaism replaced the temple cult with Torah study - a study that pertained in part to that very temple cult, that became a portable homeland, and that reconfigured the Land.

Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel

Agnon’s Tales of the Land of Israel
Author: Jeffrey Saks
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2021-08-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1725278898

"As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile," S. Y. Agnon declared at the 1966 Nobel Prize ceremony. "But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem." Agnon's act of literary imagination fueled his creative endeavor and is explored in these pages. Jerusalem and the Holy Land (to say nothing of the later State of Israel) are often two-faced in Agnon's Hebrew writing. Depending on which side of the lens one views Eretz Yisrael through, the vision of what can be achieved there appears clearer or more distorted. These themes wove themselves into the presentations at an international conference convened in 2016 by the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies in New York City, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Agnon's Nobel Prize. The essays from that conference, collected here, explore Zionism's aspirations and shortcomings and the yearning for the Land from afar from S. Y. Agnon's Galician hometown, which served as a symbol of Jewish longing worldwide. Contributing authors: Shulamith Z. Berger, Shalom Carmy, Zafrira Cohen Lidovsky, Steven Fine, Hillel Halkin, Avraham Holtz, Alan Mintz, Jeffrey Saks, Moshe Simkovich, Laura Wiseman, and Wendy Zierler

Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests

Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2021-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004500642

Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests is a showcase of new discoveries in an exciting and rapidly developing field: the study of the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. The Arab conquests are shown to have changed both the Arabian conquerors and the conquered.

Conflicts

Conflicts
Author: Liron Mor
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2024-01-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1531505457

Liron Mor’s book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and primary: as an “original sin” that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion of conflict, revealing its colonial implications and proposing that conflicts are always politically constructed after the fact and are thus to be understood in their various specific forms. The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. The book thus offers five figurative conflictual concepts that are derived from the poetics of the works: conflict (judgment/ishtibāk), levaṭim (disorienting dilemmas), ikhtifāʾ (anti/colonial disappearance), ḥoḳ (mediating law), and inqisām (hostile severance). In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.

Geographers

Geographers
Author: T. W. Freeman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1474226566

Geographers is an annual collection of studies on individuals who have made major contributions to the development of geography and geographical thought. Subjects are drawn from all periods and from all parts of the world, and include famous names as well as those less well known, including explorers, independent thinkers and scholars. Each paper describes the geographer's education, life and work and discusses their influence and spread of academic ideas. Each study includes a select bibliography and a brief chronology. The work includes a general index, and a cumulative index of geographers listed in volumes published to date. Published under the auspices of the International Geographical Union.