Abraham Ibn Ezra: on Seeing God's Back
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Readings on the Encounter Between Jewish Thought and Early Modern Science
HISTORY 449 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA W 3:30pm-6:30 pm Fall, 2016 GOD AND NATURE: READINGS ON THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN JEWISH THOUGHT AND EARLY MODERN SCIENCE INSTRUCTOR: David B. Ruderman OFFICE HRS: M 3:30-4:30 pm;W 1:00-2:00 OFFICE: 306b College Hall Email: [email protected] SOME GENERAL WORKS ON THE SUBJECT: Y. Tzvi Langerman, "Jewish Science", Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 11:89-94 Y. Tzvi Langerman, The Jews and the Sciences in the Middle Ages, 1999 A. Neher, "Copernicus in the Hebraic Literature from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century," Journal History of Ideas 38 (1977): 211-26 A. Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David Gans (1541-1613) and His Times, l986 H. Levine, "Paradise not Surrendered: Jewish Reactions to Copernicus and the Growth of Modern Science" in R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky, eds. Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences (Boston, l983), pp. 203-25 H. Levine, "Science," in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, eds. A. Cohen and P. Mendes-Flohr, l987, pp. 855-61 M. Panitz, "New Heavens and a New Earth: Seventeenth- to Nineteenth-Century Jewish Responses to the New Astronomy," Conservative Judaism, 40 (l987-88); 28-42 D. Ruderman, Kabbalah, Magic, and Science: The Cultural Universe of a Sixteenth- Century Jewish Physician, l988 D. Ruderman, Science, Medicine, and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe, Spiegel Lectures in European Jewish History, 7, l987 D. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe, 1995, 2001 D. Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry’s Construction of Modern Jewish Thought, 2000 D. -
Religion and Science in Abraham Ibn Ezra's Sefer Ha-Olam
RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN ABRAHAM IBN EZRA'S SEFER HA-OLAM (INCLUDING AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF THE HEBREW TEXT) Uskontotieteen pro gradu tutkielma Humanistinen tiedekunta Nadja Johansson 18.3.2009 1 CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................... 3 1.1 Abraham Ibn Ezra and Sefer ha-Olam ........................................................................ 3 1.2 Previous research ......................................................................................................... 5 1.3 The purpose of this study ............................................................................................. 8 2 SOURCE, METHOD AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ....................................... 10 2.1 Primary source: Sefer ha-Olam (the Book of the World) ........................................... 10 2.1.1 Edition, manuscripts, versions and date .............................................................. 10 2.1.2 Textual context: the astrological encyclopedia .................................................... 12 2.1.3 Motivation: technical handbook .......................................................................... 14 2.2 Method ....................................................................................................................... 16 2.2.1 Translation and historical analysis ...................................................................... 16 2.2.2 Systematic analysis ............................................................................................. -
Abraham Ibn Ezra's “Yesod Mora”
139 Abraham ibn Ezra’s “Yesod Mora” By: H. NORMAN STRICKMAN Rabbi Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra (1092–1164) was one of the outstanding scholars produced by medieval Sephardic Jewry. He was a poet, mathematician, astrologer, and grammarian. Above all he was one of medieval Jewry’s greatest Bible commentators. Abraham ibn Ezra was born in 1092 C.E.1 in Tudela, Spain and passed away in 1164. It is unclear whether he died in Lon- don,2 Calahorra3 or Rome.4 1 According to a statement found in several codices, Ibn Ezra (hence- forth “I.E.”) died on Monday, the first day of Adar 1 4927 (January 23, 1167) at the age of seventy-five. If this date is accepted, then I.E. was born in 1092. See M. Friedlander, The Commentary of Ibn Ezra on Isaiah (London, 1873), p. xxvii, n. 54. However, Heinrich Graetz believes that I.E. was born between 1088 and 1089. See Heinrich Graetz, Divre Yeme Yisra’el, ed. and trans. S. P. Rabino- witz, vol. 4 (Warsaw, 1916), p. 212. 2 E.Z. Melamed, Mefareshei ha-Mikrah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1978), p. 520. 3 Abraham Zakuta, Sefer ha-Yuhasin . _____________________________________________________ H. Norman Strickman is Rabbi emeritus of Marine Park Jewish Center, professor of Jewish Studies at Touro College, and past president of the Rabbinic Board of Flatbush. He received his M.H.L. from Yeshiva University, a PhD from Dropsie Universi- ty and was ordained at Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Semi- nary. He is the recipient of the Histadrut Ha-Ivrit prize in He- brew Literature and his writings have appeared in Jewish Quar- terly Review, Midstream, Bitzaron and Ha-Darom. -
Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies
Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies Table of Contents Ancient Jewish History .......................................................................................................................................... 2 Medieval Jewish History ....................................................................................................................................... 4 Modern Jewish History ......................................................................................................................................... 8 Bible .................................................................................................................................................................... 17 Jewish Philosophy ............................................................................................................................................... 23 Talmud ................................................................................................................................................................ 29 Course Catalog | Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies 1 Ancient Jewish History JHI 5213 Second Temple Jewish Literature Dr. Joseph Angel Critical issues in the study of Second Temple literature, including biblical interpretations and commentaries, laws and rules of conduct, historiography, prayers, and apocalyptic visions. JHI 6233 Dead Sea Scrolls Dr. Lawrence Schiffman Reading of selected Hebrew and Aramaic texts from the Qumran library. The course will provide students with a deep -
Adult Education 2017
Adult Education 2017 Texts ● Culture ● Language ● Faith In troduction Dear Members and Friends, The ACT Jewish Community is proud to present 2017’s Adult Education program. In 2016 we had the opportunity to learn from a variety of amazing scholars, including visiting professors, authors, journalists, and culminating with our Scholar in Residence, Eryn London. This year, we have the opportunity to present a fantastic program that explores the full spectrum of Jewish life and learning. Throughout this document, you will find general information and explanations of each course on offer along with a timetable of all of our programs. Each course will be marked with one or more of the following four symbols; - Torah Scroll – This implies that there is a textual element to this course - Chamtza – This implies there is a cultural element to the course - Aleph – These courses will primarily be language based - Ten Commandments – These courses will include Jewish Laws and Customs and will focus on the religious aspect of Judaism As always, our programs are designed to broadly encompass different ideas, observances, and denominations. Last year we had a record number of attendees, this year we would like to aim for 100% participation. Please do join us, Rabbi Alon Meltzer Week at a Glance Sunday - Shabbat Cooking – 5 Sessions over the course of the year Monday - Jewish Journeys – Weekly (Semester 1) - Midrash for Beginners – Weekly (Semester 2) Tuesday - Paint Night (with wine) – 5 Sessions over the course of the year Wednesday - Café Ivrit – Weekly Thursday - Jewish Philosophy – Weekly (Semester 1) - Poems and Poets – Weekly (Semester 2) Shabbat Cooking Join Rabbi Meltzer for a practical cooking class that will explore different concepts and themes relating to Shabbat laws of the kitchen. -
A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism
Trinity College Trinity College Digital Repository Faculty Scholarship 1998 A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism Jonathan Elukin Trinity College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/facpub Part of the History Commons Copyright © 1998 The Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.. All rights reserved. Journal of the History of Ideas 59.1 (1998) 135-148 A New Essenism: Heinrich Graetz and Mysticism Jonathan M. Elukin Since the Reformation, European Christians have sought to understand the origins of Christianity by studying the world of Second Temple Judaism. These efforts created a fund of scholarly knowledge of ancient Judaism, but they labored under deep-seated pre judices about the nature of Judaism. When Jewish scholars in nineteenth-century Europe, primarily in Germany, came to study their own history as part of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, they too looked to the ancient Jewish past as a crucia l element in understanding Jewish history. A central figure in the Wissenschaft movement was Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891). 1 In his massive history of the Jews, the dominant synthesis of Jewish history until well into the twentieth century, Graetz constructed a narrative of Jewish history that imbedded mysticism deep within the Jewish past, finding its origins in the first-cen tury sectarian Essenes. 2 Anchoring mysticism among the Essenes was crucial for Graetz's larger narrative of the history of Judaism, which he saw as a continuing struggle between the corrosive effects of mysticism [End Page 135] and the rational rabbinic tradition. An unchanging mysticism was a mirror image of the unchanging monotheistic essence of normative Judaism that dominated Graetz's understanding of Jewish history. -
Competing Tropes of Eleventh-Century Andalusi Jewish Culture*
Competing Tropes of Eleventh-Century Andalusi Jewish Culture* Ross Brann Judaism and the Jews, whose very names are determined by ties of memory to a particular place (Judea), embraced the concept of diaspora out of political, religious, and historical necessity. Following the exile of Judean elites to Babylonia in 587 BCE, the idea of diaspora became enmeshed in a complex bundle of remembered and imagined experiences such as destruction and dispossession along with decidedly ahistorical aspirations such as redemption and return.1 Diaspora thus became a critical feature of the dialectic of Jewish history in that it described the current state of the Jews' dispersion and sense of rupture with a past "pristine age" yet reinforced their expectation and hope that it was destined to come to an end with the "ingathering of the exiles." Jews of very different literary, intellectual, and spiritual orientations treated Exile/Diaspora as the central trope of Jewish experience. How was this trope handled in Andalusi-Jewish culture?2 Here, I am concerned * This essay is a revised version of a talk presented at the University of California (Berkeley), the University of Washington (Seattle), King's College (London), Yale University, and Cornell University. 1 "Scattering," "dispersal" [Ezekiel 36:19: "I scattered them among the nations, and they were dispersed through the countries"], and recuperation [Ezekiel 36:24: "I will take you from among the nations and gather you from all the countries, and I will bring you back to your own land"] are already inscribed as tropes in the biblical literature of the first exile after 587 BCE. -
(303) 735-4768 292 UCB Fax: (303) 735-2080 Boulder, CO 80309 Humanities 286
ELIAS SACKS University of Colorado Boulder [email protected] Department of Religious Studies phone: (303) 735-4768 292 UCB fax: (303) 735-2080 Boulder, CO 80309 Humanities 286 EMPLOYMENT AND EDUCATION 2012 – present Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Jewish Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Religious Studies Associate Faculty Director, Program in Jewish Studies (2013 – present) 2007 – 2012 Ph.D., Princeton University, Department of Religion Field: Religion, Ethics, and Politics (M.A., 2010; Ph.D., 2012) Dissertation Committee: Leora Batnitzky, Jeffrey Stout, Daniel Garber 2006 – 2007 M.A., Columbia University, Department of Religion 2005 – 2006 Visiting Graduate Student, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rothberg School 1999 – 2003 A.B., summa cum laude, Harvard University, Committee on the Study of Religion PUBLICATIONS Peer-Reviewed Books Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters “Poetry, Music, and the Limits of Harmony: Mendelssohn’s Aesthetic Critique of Christianity,” in Sara Levy’s World: Bach, Gender, and Judaism in Enlightenment Berlin, eds. Nancy Sinkoff and Rebecca Cypess, Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press, forthcoming 2018 – accepted) “Worlds to Come Between East and West: Immortality and the Rise of Modern Jewish Thought,” in Olam Ha-zeh v’Olam Ha-ba: This World and the World to Come in Jewish Belief and Practice, ed. Leonard Greenspoon, Studies -
Ibn Ezra's Interpretation of the Garden of Eden
165 Ibn Ezra’s Interpretation of the Garden of Eden: Reality, Allegory, or a Combination of the Two? By: H. NORMAN STRICKMAN Chapters two and three of Genesis deal with the Garden of Eden. They describe the Garden, the creation of Adam and Eve, their sin and their expulsion from the Garden. Abraham Ibn Ezra (“I.E.”) concludes his explanation of the Biblical account of the Garden of Eden with the fol- lowing comments: Note, whatever we find recorded in Scripture is true. There is no doubt that it happened exactly as described in Scripture. Neverthe- less, it also has a secret meaning. It alludes to the following: From the light of the Intellect came desire. From the second [came] that which ascends above. For the movement of desire is in front. The leaves from the fig tree also prove this. The third is called “the test.” For at first there is [a] potentiality that is not actualized. The one who understands this secret will understand the meaning of the river that divided into four parts. This is the secret of the Garden of Eden and the garments of skin. This secret also teaches that man has the potential to live forever. The intelligent will understand that this is the ultimate purpose of man’s [life on earth].1 ודע כי כל מה שמצאנו כתוב הוא אמת. וכן היה ואין בו ספק, ויש :See I.E. to Gen. 3:24 1 לו סוד , כי מאור השכל יצא החפץ , ומהשני העולה למעלה , כי תנועות החפץ לפנים היא גם H. Norman Strickman is Rabbi Emeritus of Marine Park Jewish Center, professor of Jewish Studies at Touro College, and past president of the Rabbinic Board of Flatbush. -
The Early Ibn Ezra Supercommentaries: a Chapter in Medieval Jewish Intellectual History
Tamás Visi The Early Ibn Ezra Supercommentaries: A Chapter in Medieval Jewish Intellectual History Ph.D. dissertation in Medieval Studies Central European University Budapest April 2006 To the memory of my father 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction............................................................................................................................... 7 Prolegomena............................................................................................................................ 12 1. Ibn Ezra: The Man and the Exegete ......................................................................................... 12 Poetry, Grammar, Astrology and Biblical Exegesis .................................................................................... 12 Two Forms of Rationalism.......................................................................................................................... 13 On the Textual History of Ibn Ezra’s Commentaries .................................................................................. 14 Ibn Ezra’s Statement on Method ................................................................................................................. 15 The Episteme of Biblical Exegesis .............................................................................................................. 17 Ibn Ezra’s Secrets ....................................................................................................................................... -
(303) 735-4768 292 UCB Fax: (303) 735-2080 Boulder, CO 80309 University Club 216
ELIAS SACKS University of Colorado Boulder [email protected] Department of Religious Studies phone: (303) 735-4768 292 UCB fax: (303) 735-2080 Boulder, CO 80309 University Club 216 EMPLOYMENT AND EDUCATION 2020 – present Director, University of Colorado Boulder, Program in Jewish Studies 2018 – present Associate Professor, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Religious Studies and Program in Jewish Studies 2012 – 2018 Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Religious Studies and Program in Jewish Studies § Associate Chair, Department of Religious Studies (2017 – 2019) § Associate Director, Program in Jewish Studies (2013 – 2017) 2007 – 2012 Ph.D., Princeton University, Department of Religion Field: Religion, Ethics, and Politics (M.A., 2010; Ph.D., 2012) 2006 – 2007 M.A., Columbia University, Department of Religion 2005 – 2006 Visiting Graduate Student, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rothberg School 1999 – 2003 A.B., summa cum laude, Harvard University, Committee on the Study of Religion PUBLICATIONS Peer-Reviewed Books Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) § 2017 Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award, University of Colorado Boulder Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters “Exegesis and Politics Between East and West: Nachman Krochmal, Moses Mendelssohn, and Modern Jewish Thought,” Harvard Theological Review (forthcoming) “Virtue Between Hebrew and German: The Case of Moses Mendelssohn” (with Grit Schorch), in Jewish Virtue Ethics, eds. Geoffrey Claussen, Alex Green, and Alan Mittleman (SUNY Press, forthcoming) “Poetry, Music, and the Limits of Harmony: Mendelssohn’s Aesthetic Critique of Christianity,” in Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin, eds. -
ELIAS SACKS University of Colorado Boulder [email protected] Department of Religious Studies Phone: (303) 735-4768 292 UC
ELIAS SACKS University of Colorado Boulder [email protected] Department of Religious Studies phone: (303) 735-4768 292 UCB fax: (303) 735-2080 Boulder, CO 80309 Humanities 286 EMPLOYMENT AND EDUCATION 2018 – present Associate Professor, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Religious Studies and Program in Jewish Studies 2012 – 2018 Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Religious Studies and Program in Jewish Studies § Associate Chair, Department of Religious Studies (2017 – present) § Associate Faculty Director, Program in Jewish Studies (2013 – 2017) 2007 – 2012 Ph.D., Princeton University, Department of Religion Field: Religion, Ethics, and Politics (M.A., 2010; Ph.D., 2012) 2006 – 2007 M.A., Columbia University, Department of Religion 2005 – 2006 Visiting Graduate Student, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rothberg School 1999 – 2003 A.B., summa cum laude, Harvard University, Committee on the Study of Religion PUBLICATIONS Peer-Reviewed Books Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) § 2017 Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award, University of Colorado Boulder Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles and Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters “Poetry, Music, and the Limits of Harmony: Mendelssohn’s Aesthetic Critique of Christianity,” in Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin, eds. Nancy Sinkoff and Rebecca Cypess, Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press, 2018), 122-146 “Worlds to Come Between