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Ismar Elbogen (1874–1943) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) were both pioneers in Jewish thought and culture. Elbogen authored the most comprehensive study on Jewish liturgy, while Rosenzweig’s magnum opus The Star of Redemption has emerged as one of the twentieth century’s most innovative and elusive works of Jewish thought. Even though Rosenzweig is not known for his work on or appreciation for the Wissenschaft des Judentums, this article will explore this overlooked aspect of his thought by exploring the influence of Ismar Elbogen. Commentaries to Rosenzweig’s views on prayer are numerous, yet none mention the work of Elbogen. This is a problem. By comparing Elbogen’s work on Jewish liturgy with Rosenzweig’s writings on prayer in the Star, we are able to demonstrate how methods seminal to the Wissenschaft des Judentums helped articulate several of Rosenzweig’s most innovative contributions to Jewish thought.
The St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy (PFA RAN) contains two manuscript biographies of Daniel Chwolson, the Russian-Jewish Orientalist, advocate of Jewish scholarship, and bridge builder to the Breslau Jewish Theological Seminary. They were written by his pupil and colleague, Pavel Kokovtsov, and his grandson Yevgeny Chwolson, respectively. These two texts are studied against the background of published texts and popular opinion of Chwolson in late Imperial Russia. Apart from some details, these manuscripts offer limited additional information as factual sources, most of their contents being mere variation of published texts. However, the biography of Chwolson written by his grandson is a valuable source on the reception of Chwolson and illustrates the potential of further mythological appreciation of his personality and works in the Soviet time as a defense strategy for Chwolson’s family. It also contains crucial information on the fate of Chwolson’s archive.
Due to the lack of acceptance of Wissenschaft des Judentums in academia, modern Jewish scholarship in the nineteenth century organized itself along networks of institutions such as rabbinical seminaries, contacts with related disciplines like Oriental Studies, and personal relationships. This last pathway of communication was essential for the cohesion of modern Jewish scholarship. Therefore, my essay portrays the correspondence between David Kaufmann and Leopold Zunz as an example of this channel of communication. By analyzing the exchange of letters and personal encounters between the two scholars, particular attention will be paid to the following questions: How were the letters transmitted until today? What were the main topics of the correspondence between these representatives of two generations of Wissenschaft des Judentums? Which were the positions of Kaufmann and Zunz towards the present and future of modern Jewish scholarship? How did Kaufmann become the first biographer of Zunz?
This article examines the works of Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893) on the history of mysticism and the Kabbalah, which were written during his fourteen-year residence in Leipzig. It argues that studying the Spanish Kabbalists allowed Jellinek to work through ideas concerning the development of Jewish theology and the interplay of Jewish and non-Jewish philosophical perspectives. The article briefly describes Jellinek’s early education and attraction to Leipzig; his first writings on Kabbalah; and concludes with an analysis of his larger philological and genealogical projects on the authorship and literary background of the Zohar. Though Jellinek’s later prominence as a rabbi and preacher in Vienna has had the tendency to obscure his years in Leipzig, it was Jellinek’s work in Saxony that laid the groundwork for most of his subsequent scholarship on Jewish mysticism. This article is a brief introduction to this research and one more step toward revealing the still too often forgotten Wissenschaft interest in the history of Jewish mysticism.
Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler (1892–1953) is often portrayed as antagonistic to secular studies. However, his writings show more of an intellectual hierarchy that places Torah wisdom at the top and all other wisdom a distant second. R. Dessler expended great effort promoting Torah scholarship while generally refraining from disparaging secular studies. Looking at the writings of his predecessors in the Mussar (moralist) movement, one can see that there was no disapproval of worldly education there, either: In fact, R. Dessler and his predecessors were well-educated in many secular disciplines. This essay looks to places R. Dessler’s attitude toward Wissenschaft des Judentums within the context of his life’s mission to advance talmudic study and his consequent unwillingness to countenance anything that detracted from furthering the learning of Torah. I argue that, whereas his extreme opposition to Wissenschaft was the result of his aversion to its aims, methods and conclusions, his nuanced relationship to Orthodox Wissenschaft was the result of the hierarchy through which he viewed secular as opposed to talmudic study.
Enlisted History
(2018)
Zeev Jawitz (1847–1924) was active in all spheres of culture: history, language, literature and pedagogy, all the while striving for harmonization with the Orthodox outlook. He understood that a people returning to its homeland needed a national culture, one that was both broad and deep, and that the narrow world of the Halakhah would no longer suffice. His main work was the multi-volume Toldot Israel (History of Israel, published 1895–1924) which encompasses Jewish history from its beginning – Patriarchs – until the end of the 19th century. His historical writing, with its emphasis on internal religious Jewish sources, the unity and continuity of Jewish history, and respect of Orthodox principles, comes as an alternative to the historiography of the celebrated historian Heinrich Graetz. The alternative that Jawitz tried to substitute for Wissenschaft des Judentums, was influenced not only by Orthodox ideology, which he supported, but also by his nationalist ideology. He saw himself and his disciples as the “priests of memory,” presenting the true and immanent history and character of the Jewish nation as a platform to the Jewish future in the land of Israel.
The article examines the work of Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevy, arguably the most significant Orthodox response to the Wissenschaft des Judentums school of historiography. Halevy himself exemplified the Orthodox struggle against Wissenschaft, yet his work expressed a commitment to modern historiographical discipline that suggested an internalization of some of the very same premises adopted by Wissenschaft. While criticizing the representatives of Wissenschaft, Halevy was, at the same time, fighting for the internalization of its innovative characteristics into Orthodox society. He saw himself as a leader of a movement working towards the development of Orthodox Jewish studies and his application of modern historiographic principles from an Orthodox worldview as creating critical Orthodox historiography. Halevy’s approach promotes an understanding of Orthodoxy as a complex phenomenon, of which the struggle against modern secularization is just one of many characteristics.
Students of computer science studies enter university education with very different competencies, experience and knowledge. 145 datasets collected of freshmen computer science students by learning management systems in relation to exam outcomes and learning dispositions data (e. g. student dispositions, previous experiences and attitudes measured through self-reported surveys) has been exploited to identify indicators as predictors of academic success and hence make effective interventions to deal with an extremely heterogeneous group of students.
This study adopts a cognitive approach to the analysis of the use of the Spanish imperfecto as a construal form for the conceptualization of state of affairs in certain journalistic texts. In doing so, the main focus of the study is to investigate cognitive processes like modalization and subjectivization, which are related to the speaker’s standpoint and to his subjective, not grammatically motivated, decision to use the imperfective instead of the perfective form. By the help of the corpus programmes GlossaNet and CREA (corpus of the Real Academia Española) we analyze the imperfective use of some Spanish verbs, which are semantically perfective in nature so that the normative use would require a perfective form. In other words, we investigate how the speaker/journalist construes a reality or situation to be expressed by means of the imperfecto and show that this use of the imperfect is typical for journalistic discourse.
The present paper discusses the relationship between evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity and argues that the two semantic-functional categories need not be mutually exclusive. In the use of certain means of expression and in certain contexts, both evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity may be conveyed simultaneously. I thereby differentiate between two meanings of intersubjectivity, namely ‘intersubjectivity1’ and ‘intersubjectivity2’. Intersubjectivity1 refers to the notion of common or general knowledge: certain means of expression are seen as being intersubjectively used when the speaker shares or assumes sharing knowledge with the interlocutor. Intersubjectivity2 is related to particular discourse functions of certain means of expression in interactional settings, paying attention to the speaker-hearer constellation.
In order to substantiate the theoretical part of the paper, I then present a qualitative analysis of Portuguese, Spanish and English examples, which are taken from the Corpus do Português, Corpus del Español and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
An academic project of translating the Babylonian Talmud into Japanese was initiated by a president of private jewelry company in 1986 and sixteen volumes of it were published with the collaboration of more than ten Japanese scholars of the Bible and Judaism until 2016. In order to make an assessment for possible impacts of this translation on Japanese cultural revitalization, the author tried to perceive the collision and struggles the Talmud has faced in transmitting itself to later generations even to the present days as it has still claimed its universal validity. It will be helpful to envisage Jewish intellectuals of the subsequent generations wondering what it was to live according to the Torah and the Talmud and how they coped with difficulties in facing the collision of foreign cultural impacts especially in the modern era. As the Japanese people had been profoundly influenced by Buddhism before the modern era, the assumption of the similarity between the Buddhist notion of enlightenment through transmission of the ineffable truth and the similar notion of Rabbinic Judaism will help prospect the possible influence of the Jewish scripture. This Buddhist notion had been most successfully developed in the tradition of Zen Buddhism in Japan. Furthermore this notion was fully and more influentially developed in the sphere of education of Japanese military ruling class and their cultural achievements before the modern era. So we suppose that Jewish endeavors in the Talmudic studies facing collisions and struggles against western impacts will give some insights in considering Japanese struggles against, and responses to, the forceful impacts of the modern West upon our traditional value system.
Indian Sufism in Israel
(2018)
This paper explores Indian Sufi influences in Shye Ben Tzur’s music. Ben Tzur is a Jewish Israeli musician who composes Sufi poetry in Hebrew and plays it to qawwālī music, the traditional North Indian Sufi music. Ben Tzur’s songs are devotional and there are many Sufi references that invoke Islamic terminology. His music has been reviewed in numerous newspapers and his Jewish identity, coupled with Sufi themes, evokes questions regarding religious belonging. Even though Ben Tzur openly discusses Sufi influences, his music has remained uncontroversial. This article interprets this as a sign that the symbolic repertoire of Ben Tzur’s music evokes associations with India and not with Islam and more specifically with India as a spiritual rather than religious space. The image of India as a spiritual land manages to subsume references to Islam and render them part of the “mystical East” allowing Ben Tzur’s audience to consume Muslim themes outside Middle Eastern politics.
The success of Buddhism in the West, and in America in particular, since the middle of the twentieth century, gave birth to a new hyphenated religious phenomenon: the Jewish-Buddhists. While a growing number of scholars have been addressing this phenomenon, all of the studies published so far speak of “Jewish-Buddhists” as if they could be described in the same way it was in the seventies. In this paper, I take issue with the monolithic, reified approach towards the phenomenon of the “Jewish-Buddhists”, and will try to show their evolution from their early days at the dawn of the emerging Counter Culture until today. Following findings derived from diachronic and ethnographic fieldworks, conducted since 2009, I will suggest that this evolution has undergone three main phases, which I call the three “ages”: the age of challenging, the age of claiming, and the age of re-claiming.
A New Kind of Jew
(2018)
The article examines Allen Ginsberg’s spiritual path, and places his interest in Asian religions within larger cultural agendas and life choices. While identifying as a Jew, Ginsberg wished to transcend beyond his parents’ orbit and actively sought to create an inclusive, tolerant, and permissive society where persons such as himself could live and create at ease. He chose elements from the Christian, Jewish, Native-American, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, weaving them together into an ever-growing cultural and spiritual quilt. The poet never underwent a conversion experience or restricted his choices and freedoms. In Ginsberg’s understanding, Buddhism was a universal, non-theistic religion that meshed well with an individualist outlook, and worked toward personal solace and mindfulness. He and other Jews saw no contradiction between enchantment with Buddhism and their Jewish identity.
The 1920s witnessed a growing appearance of individual American Jews–
largely from wealthy and prominent families – who received training by Asian teachers and pursued Buddhist practices in Asian-founded Buddhist groups. Some of these American Jews gained prominence and leadership status in Buddhist communities and also ran their own semi-established Buddhist groups, with limited success. The social position and material success of these Jewish Buddhists allowed them the time and means to study and practice Buddhism. This paper illustrates these developments through the story of Julius Goldwater, a member of the prominent German Jewish family that included Senator Barry Goldwater. After encountering Buddhism in Hawaii and being ordained in Kyoto, Goldwater moved to Los Angeles to become one of the first European-American Jodo Shinshu ministers in America. This paper demonstrates how he was an early convert, teacher, and wartime proponent of American Buddhism.
This article deals with contact between East Asian thought and modern Hebrew Literature from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century, until today. In the first part, the article suggests that from a historiographical perspective, one may outline three waves of contact between these two cultural phenomena, at opposite ends of Asia. In the first wave, which began in the early twentieth century, Asian influence on Hebrew literature written in Europe was mediated mainly through the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The second wave, which emerged in the 1950s, relates to the influence of the leaders of the Beat Generation, who, in turn, were influenced by modernist poetry in English, which was colored by contact with Asian poetry. The third wave is part of the glocal New Age phenomenon and its appropriation of certain Buddhist traits.
The second part of the article presents several theoretical possibilities of symbioses between cultures, as they appear within language.
The third part presents the symptomatic example of the work of contemporary Hebrew writer Yoel Hoffmann, who appears to be a representative of the second wave; however, his work maintains dialogue with the first wave, and its current popularity is part of the third wave. Hoffmann’s work serves as an example of how to apply the theoretical possibilities presented in the second part of the article, as an instance of literary contact between two cultures and their respective languages.
This paper describes an almost forgotten chapter in the relatively short history of Jewish- Buddhist interactions. The popularization of Buddhism in Germany in the second half of 19th century, effected mainly by its positive appraisal in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, made it a common referent for both critics of Judaism and Christianity as well as their defenders. At the same time, Judaism was viewed by many as a historically antiquated religion and Jewish elements in Christianity were regarded as impediments to the progress of European religiosity and culture. Schopenhauerian conception of “pessimistic” Buddhism and “optimistic” Judaism as the two most distant religious ideas was proudly appropriated by many Jewish thinkers. These Jews portrayed Buddhism as an anti-worldly and anti-social religion of egoistic individuals who seek their own salvation (i. e. annihilation into Nothingness), the most extreme form of pessimism and asceticism which negates every being, will, work, social structures and transcendence. Judaism, in contrast, represented direct opposites of all the aforementioned characteristics. In comparisons to Buddhism, Judaism stood out as a religion which carried the most needed social and psychological values for a healthy modern society: decisive affirmation of the world, optimism, social activity, co-operation with others, social egalitarianism, true charitability, and religious purity free from all remnants of polytheism, asceticism, and the inefficiently excessive moral demands ascribed to both Buddhism and Christianity. Through the analysis of texts by Ludwig Philippson, Ludwig Stein, Leo Baeck, Max Eschelbacher, Juda Bergmann, Fritz-Leopold Steinthal, Elieser David and others, this paper tries to show how the image of Buddhism as an antithesis to Judaism helped the German Jewish reform thinkers in defining the “essence of Judaism” and in proving to both Jewish and Christian audiences its enduring meaningfulness and superiority for the modern society.
This article explores the little-known author Friedrich Korn (1803–1850). Korn developed a theory of universal revelation which, among other things, claimed that the Jewish people descended from India. His theory is an amalgamation of the Romantic ideas about India, the historical criticisms as expounded by David Friedrich Strauß, and the desire to see his own conversion from Judaism to Protestantism as congruent with the historical progress of religion. Situating Korn in the intellectual context and theological debates of his time allows us to take a closer look at how he tried to reconcile many opposing stances, namely arguing for a genealogical lineage between India and the Jewish people, while calling for the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity, and steadfastly believing in universal revelation, while holding on to the tools of historical criticism. These different positions made Korn an untimely author, out of sync with his peers and the scholarly attitude towards Judaism, India, and religion in general.
Two 19th century rabbis born in Vilna and educated in its raditionalist rationalism interacted with India’s temple Hinduism in different ways. Both were fascinated with Hindu worship and images, but David d’Beth Hillel entered temples and disputed with priests, while Jacob Sapir observed from outside, composing written pictures of Hindu images using a biblical vocabulary of abomination. D’Beth Hillel employed Hebrew linguistics to uncover secret meanings of Hindu words. However, both travelers interpreted Hindu religiosity similarly, as idolatrous worship. They explained this Hinduism historically as a survival of Judean idolatry brought to India by Jewish migrants, or as a survival from an ancient culture of idolatry that once filled the world. Both rabbis also perceived Jewish elements in Hinduism, which they explained from Jewish migrations of the past. The similarities in their conceptualizations of Hinduism point to a common Jewish worldview that constructed the world as opposing realms of revelation and idolatry, and also to common theories about how cultural change occurs through survivals, corruptions, and diffusion.
Preface
(2018)
A Case for Serious Play
(2017)
On-demand Musicology
(2017)
Music and Artistic Education
(2017)
Rethinking Music Education
(2017)
In his “Essay on the Fluctuations in the Supplies of Gold” (1838) Humboldt presents a global history of the flow of precious metals from antiquity to the 19th century. This paper traces Humboldt’s economic thinking within his natural and historical research, starting with an outline of his educational background which incorporated late mercantilist and early liberal influences. It then discusses a world map and four charts drawn by Humboldt, which combine historical and contemporary statistical data into a cartographical vision of a global economic circuit. In a next step, the article explores Humboldt’s application of natural and historical research methods in the field of political economy, using the example of his 1838 essay. Finally, the article addresses Humboldt’s discussion of platinum, a precious metal whose limited natural distribution contradicted the idea of free global exchange.
Earth observation data have become an outstanding basis for analyzing environmental
aspects. The increasing availability of remote sensing data is accompanied
by an increasing user demand. Within the scope of the COOPERNICUS-initiative,
the automatic processing of remote sensing data is important for supplying value-
added-information products. The use of additional data like land-water-masks
in the context of deriving value-added information products can stabilize and
improve the product quality of information products.
The authors of this contribution would like to discuss different automated
processing algorithms which are based on land-water masks for value-added
data interpretation. These developments were supported or accompanied by Prof.
Hartmut Asche.
Statistics Canada, Canada’s national statistics agency, offers a suite of spatial
files for mapping and analysis of its various population data products. The following
article showcases possibilities and shortfalls of the existing spatial files
for mapping population data, and provides an overview of the structure of the
available boundary files from the regional to the dissemination block level. Due
to Canada’s highly dispersed population, mapping its distribution and density can
be challenging. Common mapping techniques such as the choropleth method are
suitable only for mapping spatially high resolution data such as data at the dissemination
area level. To allow for mapping of population data at less detailed levels
such as census divisions or provinces, Statistics Canada has created a so-called
ecumene boundary file which outlines the inhabited area of Canada and can be
used to more accurately visualize Canada’s population distribution and density.
Tarkovsky’s legacy
(2016)
Archaeology can be understood as a tool used in the process of identity formation,
contributing to a sense of belonging and unity within a diverse set of communities.
Research was conducted with the intention of analyzing the wide range of perceptions
regarding archaeological sites in the mixed city of Lod, Israel. I explored the impact of
urban cultural heritage on shaping the identity of local Jewish and Arab children, who
were chosen as the youngest active members of society living in the city, and who
participated in the 2013 archaeological excavation season at the Khan al-Hilu. Israel is
an ideal location for such research, due to its nature as simultaneously being the focus
of extensive archaeological excavations as well as being the setting of an intractable conflict. Ancestral attachment to the land serves as a foundation for the collective
identity of both Jews and Arabs. Yet, each community and individual may relate differently
to the surrounding archaeological sites, which is further shaped by their sense of
societal hierarchy and cultural heritage.
After the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to 1950, about 2000 Jews remained
in Yemen. These Jews lived in small communities and continued to maintain their
religious environment as it was. In the years that followed, many of them, however, moved from Yemen to Israel with the assistance of the Jewish Agency and the Joint
Distribution Committee (JDC). The community was of a small size and the fact that it
was dispersed throughout the predominantly Muslim areas, created a certain closeness
between the two groups. About ten percent of the Jews chose to convert to Islam, many
of them in groups. In about twenty cases, the husbands chose to convert to Islam while
their wives emigrated to preserve their Judaism. Some of the converts refused to grant
their wives a divorce, because, according to Muslim law, conversion is enough to sever
the marital relationship. This procedure is called ʿAgunot. Meaning, women bound in
marriage to a husband and they no longer lived together, but the husband didn’t formally
‘released’ her from marriage union. The article follows the efforts undertaken
to release the ʿAgunot, and shows that Jewish and Muslim scholars were able to find
solutions to the ʿAgunot problem and, at times, managed to bridge the gap between the
two religions.
In this article we will present a few examples of the theme of “calling for help and redemption” in Arabic and Hebrew poetry, with particular focus on eleventh and twelfth century Muslim Spain. More particularly, we will offer a glimpse into the life and oeuvre of two medieval poets (one Muslim, one Jewish); both were active in Muslim Spain in the same period and shared a similar fate of exile and wandering: on the one hand, the Sicilian Arabic poet Ibn Ḥamdīs (c. 1056–c. 1133) and on the other hand, the Spanish Jewish poet Moses ibn Ezra (1055–1138). We will take into account the impact of exile and wandering on the profusion of the theme of “calling for help and redemption” as well as the related theme of “yearning for one’s homeland” through an analysis and comparison of poetic fragments by the two aforementioned poets as well as additional Andalusian Jewish (Judah ha-Levi) and Muslim (Ibn Khafāja, al-Rundī and Ibn al-Abbār) poets.
The concept of three journeys as a way to denote spiritual development was introduced
by Dhu al-Nun, one of the founding fathers of Islamic mysticism. The use of this
concept was later refined by combining it with the Sufi technique of adding different
prepositions to a certain term, in order to differentiate between spiritual stages. By
using the words journey (Safar) and God (Allah) and inserting a preposition before the
word God, Sufi writers could map the different roads to God or the stations (Maqamat) on this road. Ibn al-'Arabi, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, speaks of three
different ways: from God, toward God and in God. Tanchum ha-Yerushalmi, the Judeo
Arabic biblical commentator from the end of this century, speaks of the three journeys
as three stations of one continuous way. A nearly identical description we can find in
the writing of the Muslim scholar Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, a generation later. Later in
the fourteenth century, in the writing of the Sufi writer al-Qashani, the three travels
become four, although the scheme of three prepositions is preserved. Near the end of
the fourteenth century, in the writings of R. David ha-Nagid, we find only two journeys:
to God and in God. All this tells us that Judeo Arabic literature can help us map
with greater precision the historical development of Sufi ideas.
The figure of Moses constitutes an important link between Jewish and Muslim traditions.
Muslims consider him to be one of the five elite prophets of God, his story therefore
has a prominent place in the Qurʼan. While there are minor differences, the story
of Moses found in the Qurʼan confirms the account of the Torah; the life of Moses thus
is considered a model for all Muslims to follow. Though elements of his story are found throughout the Qurʼan, it is in chapter 7 where it is given in its greatest detail. As the
focus point of this article, chapter 7 discusses many events in Mosesʼ life, which are important for both Muslims and Jews, and reveals his great importance and Godliness. It also demonstrates how truly similar Islamʼs Moses and Judaismʼs Moses are. Therefore,
through an examination of the various elements of the story of Moses as found in
the Qurʼan, this article will show how by following him, Jews and Muslims can come
together in friendship, harmony and peace. Moses is the common ground on which
Jews and Muslims can come together in order to open up a dialogue and further their
shared commitment to the worship of the One God.
Beyond the Crystal-Image
(2016)