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In many churches nowadays, there has been a standardized approach to premarital counseling for couples involving social, pastoral, and psychological perspectives. In contrast, many rabbis and other Jewish officials still concentrate on legal aspects alone. The need for resolving important issues on the verge of wedlock is too often left to secular experts in law, psychology, or counseling. However, in recent years, this lack of formal training for marriage preparation has also been acknowledged by the Jewish clergy in order to incorporate it in the preparatory period before the bond is tied. This case study focuses on Jewish and Roman Catholic conceptions of marriage, past and present. We intend to do a comparative analysis of the prerequisites of religious marriage based on the assumption that both Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church have a distinct legal framework to assess marriage preparation.
The Jewish population of early modern Italy was characterised by its inner diversity, which found its expression in the coexistence of various linguistic, cultural and liturgical traditions, as well as social and economic patterns. The contributions in this volume aim to explore crucial questions concerning the self-perception and identity of early modern Italian Jews from new perspectives and angles.
In Time and the Other Johannes Fabian analysed how modern conceptions of time were “not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spatialized.” According to Fabian, this was particularly visible in modern anthropology which “promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time – some upstream, others downstream.”3 Anthropologists attributed otherness to a distant past which was traditionally associated with cultural retardation, i.e. a lower degree of development, progress, and civilization. Cultural difference was expressed in terms of temporal distance while temporal distance was attributed to spatial remoteness. The result was a phenomenon that Fabian coined “the denial of coevalness” which pointed towards “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.
The abrahamic religions
(2023)
United in Diversity
(2023)
What are the future perspectives for Jews and Jewish networks in contemporary Europe? Is there a new quality of relations between Jews and non-Jews, despite or precisely because of the Holocaust trauma? How is the memory of the extermination of 6 million European Jews reflected in memorial events and literature, film, drama, and visual arts media? To what degree do European Jews feel as integrated people, as Europeans per see, and as safe citizens? An interdisciplinary team of historians, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and literary theorists answers these questions for Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany. They show that the Holocaust has become an enduring topic in public among Jews and non-Jews. However, Jews in Europe work self-confidently on their future on the "old continent," new alliances, and in cooperation with a broad network of civil forces. Non-Jewish interest in Jewish history and the present has significantly increased over decades, and networks combatting anti-Semitism have strengthened.
New Relations in the Making?
(2023)
Zimzum
(2023)
The Hebrew word zimzum originally means “contraction,” “withdrawal,” “retreat,” “limitation,” and “concentration.” In Kabbalah, zimzum is a term for God’s self-limitation, done before creating the world to create the world. Jewish mystic Isaac Luria coined this term in Galilee in the sixteenth century, positing that the God who was “Ein-Sof,” unlimited and omnipresent before creation, must concentrate himself in the zimzum and withdraw in order to make room for the creation of the world in God’s own center. At the same time, God also limits his infinite omnipotence to allow the finite world to arise. Without the zimzum there is no creation, making zimzum one of the basic concepts of Judaism.
The Lurianic doctrine of the zimzum has been considered an intellectual showpiece of the Kabbalah and of Jewish philosophy. The teaching of the zimzum has appeared in the Kabbalistic literature across Central and Eastern Europe, perhaps most famously in Hasidic literature up to the present day and in philosopher and historian Gershom Scholem’s epoch-making research on Jewish mysticism. The Zimzum has fascinated Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers, and writers like no other Kabbalistic teaching. This can be seen across the philosophy and cultural history of the twentieth century as it gained prominence among such diverse authors and artists as Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Jonas, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harold Bloom, Barnett Newman, and Anselm Kiefer.
This book follows the traces of the zimzum across the Jewish and Christian intellectual history of Europe and North America over more than four centuries, where Judaism and Christianity, theosophy and philosophy, divine and human, mysticism and literature, Kabbalah and the arts encounter, mix, and cross-fertilize the interpretations and appropriations of this doctrine of God’s self-entanglement and limitation
This year’s edition of the Yearbook of the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg (ZJS) highlights innovative approaches to the study of Sephardic history in colonial and postcolonial contexts beyond Europe. The authors intertwine the particularities of their case studies with reflections on patterns of belonging, memorial cultures, and a transnational network of connections spanning from early modern times to the twentieth century.
In the context of the early modern Atlantic world, two essays explore the notion of a Sephardic empire among Portuguese Jewish communities as well as transatlantic entanglements in and beyond the Danish Caribbean. In the frameworks of Spain as well as (post-)colonial Egypt and Morocco, three articles reflect on Jewish citizenship, modes of belonging, and present-day commemorative events of Jewish history across the Mediterranean and beyond.
These collected contributions are the outcome of activities at the ZJS dedicated to Sephardic Studies during the academic year 2020—21.
Miguel de Luna as arbitrista
(2023)
This article deals with Miguel de Luna, a Morisco from Granada, who is most famous for his involvement in the Lead Books of Sacromonte affair. In the following pages I will, however, focus on a facet of his life that has been rather neglected. Rather than recount again his activities as translator for Arabic, I will shed light on his work as physician and claim that his medical paper on the benefits of bathing and the reopening of public baths in Granada may very well put him in league with the arbitristas, a group of intellectuals who advised the monarch in economic and financial matters.