Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
416
result(s) for
"CHRISTIAN POLEMICS"
Sort by:
Hasdai Cresques’s Impact on Fifteenth-Century Iberian Jewish Philosophy and Polemics
Hasdai Crescas fue un importante pensador, autor y líder comunitario judío de finales del siglo XIV y principios del XV, cuyas obras son estudiadas con detalle en el mundo académico. No obstante, su impacto sobre la comunidad judía tradicional ha sido casi inexistente. Nunca terminó su obra legal, la que podría haber tenido impacto en los judíos tradicionales. Sus escritos filosóficos conservados son difíciles de seguir; solo sobrevive una de las dos polémicas anticristianas vernáculas, en una traducción/paráfrasis hebrea. Aunque Crescas fue bien recordado en el siglo posterior a su muerte, ya en este período se pueden detectar las razones de su posterior olvido. Un examen de la historia de la recepción de la obra de Crescas en el siglo XV demuestra hasta qué punto sus posiciones polémicas, dogmáticas y filosóficas fueron mayoritariamente rechazadas, más allá de que tuvo partidarios, fundamentalmente entre sus alumnos más cercanos. No es de extrañar, entonces, que en los siglos posteriores, la memoria de Crescas fuera casi borrada de la conciencia comunitaria judía.
Journal Article
“Gathering the Dispersed of Israel”: The Evolution of a Kabbalistic Prayer Addendum for Tiqqun Qeri
This article traces the evolution of a kabbalistic prayer supplication that was designed to purify male Jews from pollution caused by improper seminal emission. In doing so, it focuses on the metaphysical rationale behind it, its function, and its metamorphosis from a highly technical practice into a mainstream devotional practice. It addresses how notions of sexual pollution (qeri) were contextualized in Lurianic Kabbalah and how they were later embedded in kabbalistic manuals and prayer books. Furthermore, the article examines Jewish-Christian and inner- Jewish debates that emerged in connection with the effects of spilling semen in vain. Special attention is paid to possible social factors that may have impacted the increased anxiety about male bodily fluids and “misguided” desires. In addition to the available research on the theological and general historical background of the prohibition of wasting seed, the following analysis offers a microhistory of this short yet highly influential text.
Journal Article
The Hebrew Sources of Tortosa’s Disputation
The Disputation or Cathechesis of Tortosa with its sixty-nine sessions (February 7, 1413-November 12, 1413) was the longest of the Jewish Christian encounters in the Middle Age. Stirred by the Avignonesian Pope Benedict XIII, Geronimo de Sancta Fide, olim Yehoshua ha-Lorki, summoned a group of Catalan and Aragonese rabbis to inform them that the Messiah was already came. Not only the Papal notaries recorded the excruciating debates, but also two Hebrew sources: the anonymous and fragmentary letter published by Halberstam in 1868 and the chapter 40 of the Shebet Yehuda. They encompass the first nine sessions carried out orally, before the Pope requested for written texts to be debated lately. Since these sources disagree on many details, this paper aims at examining them anew. That examination has shown that the anonymous account is more accurate than the fictional report of the Shebet Yehuda as far as the internal chronology of the sessions, the speeches of the Jewish delegates and their identities are concerned. The internal evidence leads us to subscribe with Riera i Sans in ascribing its authorship to Bonastruc Desmestre from Girona, who was at Tortosa on request of the Pope. He probably knew other Jewish chronicle and added some new materials from the Vikkuach Ramban, Salomon Ibn Verga, the author of Shebet Yehuda, built upon this chronicle and created a fictional account around Vidal Benveniste or the ‘ideal’ portrait of the Pope and added some materials from the Latin Protocols or from unknown Jewish sources.
Journal Article
Gregory Thaumaturgus and Early Christian Apologetics
Abstract
Gregory Thaumaturgus has only occasionally been discussed in relation to early Christian apologetics. The paper provides a new step in this direction by exploring the points of contact between Gregory's Address to Origen and previous apologetic literature. As the analysis below will indicate, the Address shows parallels with several apologetic texts from the second and early third century, both in terms of content and style. By discussing the apologetic topics and strategies found in the Address, I will argue that Gregory intended to respond, at least indirectly, to some of the main charges raised against Christians by their pagan opponents. Such an approach not only sheds light on the content and purposes of the Address, but also illuminates the historical and literary background against which Gregory wrote his text.
Journal Article
The Lulav: Early Modern Polemical Ethnographies and the Art of Fencing
In recent years, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of scholarship in general and, more specifically, to the emergence of critical historical and anthropological literature from and within ecclesiastical scholarship. However, few studies have discussed the Jewish figures who took part in this process. This paper analyzes the role played by historiographical and ethnographical writing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian Jewish–Christian polemics. Tracing various Christian polemical ethnographical depictions of the Jewish rite of shaking the lulav (sacramental palm leaves used by Jews during the festival of Sukkot), it discusses the variety of ways in which Jewish scholars responded to these depictions or circumvented them. These responses reflect the Jewish scholars’ familiarity with prevailing contemporary scholarship and the key role of translation and cultural transfers in their own attempts to create parallel works. Furthermore, this paper presents new Jewish polemical manuscript material within the relevant contexts, examines Jewish attempts to compose polemical and apologetic ethnographies, and argues that Jewish engagement with critical scholarship began earlier than scholars of this period usually suggest
Journal Article
Meshovah niẓaḥat: Jewish-Christian Polemics in Kaf naki by Rabbi Khalifa Ben-Malka of Agadir
The fifth part of Rabbi Khalifa Ben-Malka's Kaf naki (Clean Hand), Meshovah niẓaḥat (Triumphant Response) portrays a series of interreligious disputations that he conducted with Christian colleagues in Agadir during the first half of the eighteenth century. A study of Meshovah niẓaḥat reveals that, while these debates represent a direct continuation of medieval interreligious polemic, occasionally the traditional arguments took on a new garb—for example, those proofs relying on the era's geographic or scientific discoveries. Ben-Malka was well-versed in the intricacies of theological debate and was familiar with the most sophisticated tools the medieval polemical tradition had to offer, as well as with post-medieval Jewish anti-Christian literature. His writing opens a window onto eighteenth-century Jewish-Moroccan intellectual history while simultaneously raising a number of questions. Further study will be necessary to paint a fuller and more diverse picture.
Journal Article
“Meat from the Heavens”: The Prohibition on Meat Consumption Imposed on Adam and the Jewish-Christian Polemic
Toward the end of the Noahide commandment pericope in the Talmud (b. Sanh. 56–60), we find a sugya (pericope) featuring the prohibition on meat consumption imposed on Adam and its permission to the Noahides. This unique sugya pieces together halakic and haggadic sources that reinterpret the Garden of Eden story and address the complex relationship between humans and animals. This article will examine this sugya, focusing on its closing story, which describes a pietist who merits a gift of heavenly flesh. I will demonstrate that the story has many levels of meaning, grounded in both its immediate and wider contexts, and claim that it conceals a polemic with a similar Christian story (Acts 10), which describes impure meat that descends from the sky, undermining the cultural and halakic divisions between Jews and non-Jews. The comparison between the two stories reveals opposing worldviews with regard to law and lawlessness, utopia and redemption.
Journal Article
Early Judeo-Arabic Birth Narratives in the Polemical Story “Life of Jesus” (Toledot Yeshu)
This is a first-time presentation of the initial section of the Toledot Yeshu (TY) narrative describing the birth and early life of Jesus in Judeo-Arabic, a text with important implications for current research on TY. First, the origin of the birth narrative has been debated in recent scholarship on the Hebrew versions of TY. The existence of this lengthy Judeo-Arabic birth narrative, preserved in two manuscripts belonging to the Russian National Library, as well as the identification of other, earlier Judeo-Arabic manuscript fragments that include the TY birth narrative, demonstrates that the birth narrative formed part of TY significantly earlier than has been previously suggested. Second, the narrative preserved in the Russian manuscripts also demonstrates the relevance of the Judeo-Arabic versions of TY for the understanding of the development of this protean work. Examination of their textual tradition reveals interesting connections with particular Hebrew versions of TY from Europe and can shed light on the question of how the work moved between East and West. Finally, this Judeo-Arabic version of TY is significant in its demonstration of a clever adaptation to its linguistic and cultural surroundings. It incorporates a lengthy introduction—the only one currently known in all of the TY literature—which is a literary tour de force employing contemporaneous Arabic style together with a well-known rabbinic dictum, thereby situating Toledot Yeshu simultaneously in its Islamicate milieu and in Jewish textual and even ritual tradition. The discussion concludes with a transcription and translation of the birth narrative as preserved in these two Russian manuscripts.
Journal Article
The Torah of the Gospel: A Rabbinic Polemic against The Syro-Roman Lawbook
In a famous story in b. Šabb. 116a–b, Imma Shalom and her brother, Rabban Gamaliel, present to a philosopher a dispute concerning the inheritance of the daughter. The judge, having being bribed by Imma Shalom, rules in her favor, against the ruling of the Torah of Moses, arguing that the latter has been abrogated and replaced by the “Torah of the Gospel,” which states that “the son and the daughter inherit equally.” After being bribed by Rabban Gamaliel, the philosopher recants, citing Matt 5:17, where Jesus reaffirms the validity of the Mosaic Law. This article argues that the “Torah of the Gospel” actually refers to The Syro-Roman Lawbook, and that the story is constructed as a response to a radical and new legal supersessionist argument brought forth in this book which is directly linked to the Roman law of equal inheritance. This is the first clear evidence we have that, alongside the New Testament, the Babylonian rabbis also read and engaged directly with Christian books of their time written in Syriac. This has major ramifications on the way we perceive the textual culture of the Babylonian rabbis and their intellectual interactions with East Syrians.
Journal Article