Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate

Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate
Author: Yosie Levine
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1802072039

With the social and cultural upheavals of early modern Europe, rabbis had to fight to preserve Jewish tradition. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, chief rabbi of Amsterdam, emerged as one of the leading halakhic authorities of the epoch, and the battles he waged would come to define rabbinic norms in the decades that followed.

Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate

Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate
Author: Yosie Levine
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1802072047

With the social and cultural upheavals of early modern Europe, rabbis had to fight to preserve Jewish tradition. Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, chief rabbi of Amsterdam, emerged as one of the leading halakhic authorities of the epoch, and the battles he waged would come to define rabbinic norms in the decades that followed.

Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East

Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East
Author: Zvi Zohar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2013-06-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1472507398

Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East provides a window for readers of English around the world into hitherto almost inaccessible halakhic and ideational writings expressing major aspects of the cultural intellectual creativity of Sephardic-Oriental rabbis in modern times. The text has three sections: Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and each section discusses a range of original sources that reflect and represent the creativity of major rabbinic figures in these countries. The contents of the writings of these Sephardic rabbis challenge many commonly held views regarding Judaism's responses to modern challenges. By bringing an additional, non-Western voice into the intellectual arena, this book enriches the field of contemporary discussions regarding the present and future of Judaism. In addition, it focuses attention on the fact that not only was Judaism a Middle Eastern phenomenon for most of its existence but that also in recent centuries important and interesting aspects of Judaism developed in the Middle East. Both Jews and non-Jews will be enriched and challenged by this non-Eurocentric view of modern Judaic creativity.

The Rabbinate in Stormy Days

The Rabbinate in Stormy Days
Author: Shaul Mayzlish
Publisher: Gefen Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9789652298935

From his days as a precocious youngster in Lomzha to his service as rabbi of Belfast and Dublin, chief rabbi of the Irish Free State, and then chief rabbi of Mandate Palestine and finally Israel, Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac HaLevi Herzog blazed trails all his life. With a doctorate in literature by age twenty-five as well as degrees in classical and modern languages and mathematics, Rabbi Herzog was fully equipped with the education of the modern secular world as well as a deep immersion in Torah. All of these tools, together with his loving yet uncompromising Jewish faith, were brought to bear throughout a lifetime of leadership that traversed stormy days indeed. World War I, World War II, and the struggle of the fledgling Jewish state for independence made for constant challenges that the rabbi negotiated with grace and wisdom. Throughout his tireless activism lobbying presidents and popes on behalf of Holocaust refugees and then the nascent Jewish state, Rabbi Herzog wrote prolifically on topics in Jewish law in numerous books and papers that are still authoritative today. The rabbis life is a model of the struggle for balance between religious faith and modernity, a path that he navigated with a steadiness and warmth that made him both revered and beloved, in his day and into the present. First published in Hebrew, this portrait of the life of one of modern Judaisms most prominent figures is now available for the first time in English and will introduce the rabbi to a new generation as a model of a person of faith fully participating in modernity.

The First Rabbi

The First Rabbi
Author: I. Harold Sharfman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 776
Release: 1988
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Rabbi Judah Moscato and the Jewish Intellectual World of Mantua in the 16th-17th Centuries

Rabbi Judah Moscato and the Jewish Intellectual World of Mantua in the 16th-17th Centuries
Author: Giuseppe Veltri
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2012-03-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004222464

Judah ben Joseph Moscato (c.1533–1590) was one of the most distinguished rabbis, authors, and preachers of the Italian-Jewish Renaissance. This volume is a record of the proceedings of an international conference, organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies at Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), and Mantua’s State Archives. It consists of contributions on Moscato and the intellectual world in Mantua during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Women and Jewish Marriage Negotiations in Early Modern Italy

Women and Jewish Marriage Negotiations in Early Modern Italy
Author: Howard Tzvi Adelman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2019-12-17
Genre:
ISBN: 9780367893095

This book examines the role of women in Jewish family negotiations, using the setting of Italy from the end of the Renaissance to the Baroque. In ghettos at night and under the scrutiny of inquisitions, Jews flourished. Life and learning were enriched by Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, transalpine Europe, west and east, and Catholic neighbors. Rabbinic discourse represented conflicting customs in family formation and dissolution, especially at moments of crisis for women: forced betrothal; physical, mental and financial abuse; polygamy, and abandonment. In this book, case studies illustrate the ambiguity, drama, and danger to which women were exposed, as well as opportunities to make their voices heard and to extricate themselves from situations by forcing a divorce, collecting or seizing assets, and going to Catholic notaries to bequeath their assets outside traditional inheritance, often to other women. Despite intrusion by rabbis, their ability for coercion was limited, and their threats of punishments reflected the rhetoric of weakness rather than realistic options for implementation. The focus of this text is not what the law says, but rather how it enabled individual Jews, especially women, to speak and to act.

Prince of the Press

Prince of the Press
Author: Joshua Teplitsky
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300234902

David Oppenheim (1664-1736), chief rabbi of Prague in the early eighteenth century, built an unparalleled collection of Jewish books and manuscripts, all of which have survived and are housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. His remarkable collection testifies to the myriad connections Jews maintained with each other across political borders, and the contacts between Christians and Jews that books facilitated. From contact with the great courts of European nobility to the poor of Jerusalem, his family ties brought him into networks of power, prestige, and opportunity that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Containing works of law and literature alongside prayer and poetry, his library served rabbinic scholars and communal leaders, introduced old books to new readers, and functioned as a unique source of personal authority that gained him fame throughout Jewish society and beyond. The story of his life and library brings together culture, commerce, and politics, all filtered through this extraordinary collection. Based on the careful reconstruction of an archive that is still visited by scholars today, Joshua Teplitsky's book offers a window into the social life of Jewish books in early modern Europe.--Publisher's website.

The Ten Lost Tribes

The Ten Lost Tribes
Author: Zvi Ben-Dor Benite
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2013-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199324530

In The Ten Lost Tribes, Zvi Ben-Dor Benite shows for the first time the extent to which the search for the lost tribes of Israel became, over two millennia, an engine for global exploration and a key mechanism for understanding the world.