Judaism I. Группа авторов

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      8.3 Judaism III: Culture and Modernity

      23 Jewish Philosophy and Thought

      Dr. Ottfried Fraisse of Martin Luther University at Halle-Wittenberg surveys Jewish thought beginning with the second century BCE through the eleventh century CE. Starting in Alexandria, Egypt, Fraisse considers the work of Philo and situates it within Hellenistic Platonism. In the footsteps of Plato’s Timaeus, Philo understands God as the first cause by which universe exists.

      Fraisse leaps ahead to ninth century CE Baghdad. There, Muslim traditions provided space for Islam, for Christianity and Judaism, but also for the philosophical literature of Greek authors. Still, Jewish thought was not always receptive towards Muslim thought: occasionally it was an independent force. Nevertheless, Muʿtazilite kalām was used by Sa‘adia Gaon (died 942), his successor in the academy of Sura, Samuel Ben Hophni (died 1013), and also by Karaite opponents like Yūsuf al-Baṣīr (died 1014) in Jerusalem.

      Moses ben Maimon (1138–1204), known as Maimonides, had standing as a thinker and as a scholar of halakhah. This made him the most important reformer of Jewish tradition. The threefold claim of his work is (1) to re-shape the self-image of Jews through philosophical spirituality, (2) to make non-Jewish philosophical knowledge an integral part of Jewish tradition, and (3) to insist upon the notion of causal reality as a central medium of divine revelation. According to Maimonides, philosophical rationalism should be an integral part of man’s quest for the salvation of his soul. The sharpest philosophical attack on Maimonideanism came through Ḥasdai Crescas (died 1410), in Saragossa. Crescas attacked (1) Aristotelian philosophy and (2) Maimonides’ theory of human happiness.

      For Sephardic Jews coming into the Ottoman Empire in the course of the 16th century, secular sciences were so important that Aristotle continued to be studied. Increasingly, philosophy became an aid to kabbalistic theology, with a special interest in the mystical »cleaving« (devequt) of the human soul to God. From the 17th century onwards, the concept of Jewish philosophy changed in Europe. Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and Salomon Maimon (ca. 1753–1800) combined an internal with an external perspective: between German and Hebrew. Jewish self-understanding and extra-Jewish perspectives have multiplied in the past 200 years.

      24 Judaism, Feminism, and Gender

      Dr. Gwynn Kessler of Swarthmore College provides a literary history of feminist Judaism in the U.S., beginning in the early 1970s. During this time, the first American female rabbis were ordained. Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review (Summer, 1973) and The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives (1976), represent watersheds in feminist Jewish scholarship, incorporating sections on »History,« »Community,« »Life Cycle,« »Women and Jewish Law,« »Israel,« and »Jewish Texts.«

      In Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (1979), Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow write, »The image of God as male was at once the most obvious and most subtle sexist influence in religion.« Throughout the 1980s, Jewish feminists developed theologies, rituals, examined women in halakhah, redeemed marginal figures from the Bible, confronted antisemitism in the larger women’s movement, and incorporated diverse feminist Jewish identities.

      Scholarly books about Judaism, women, and gender published in the 1990s heralded the achievement of the goals of Jewish feminism—acknowledging women’s existence in, and contributions to Jewish history, literature, and culture. By the end of the decade, no field within Jewish Studies remained untouched.

      During these years, men wrote scholarly monographs that built on and reflected tensions with Women’s Studies and feminist theories. The field increased focus on gender (as opposed to women) as a social construct. Women’s Studies and the developing Masculinity, Gay and Lesbian, Gender, and Sexuality Studies grappled with the »history of sexuality.«

      Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (1997) contains eight-hundred biographies of individual Jewish women and 110 topical essays. In 1998, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues published its inaugural issue, displaying multi-disciplinary breadth. Nashim stands alongside Lilith magazine and Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and our Friends as anchors of Jewish feminist scholarship.

      Concurrent with the growth in feminist Jewish scholarship, the 1990s witnessed an expansion of Jewish feminist organizing. At the beginning of the 21st century, women, among them women of color, »out« lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jews have been ordained as rabbis in all progressive denominations. Nevertheless, struggles for justice and equality persist.

      25 Halakhah (Jewish Law) in Contemporary Judaism

      Dr. Elliot Dorff of the American Jewish University, Los Angeles, describes the changes that the Enlightenment brought to the authority of Jewish law, the legal theories of modern Jewish movements, and specific examples of moral and ritual issues shaped by Jewish law. He considers medical ethics, interpersonal relations, social justice, environmental ethics, dietary laws, and ways of marking the Jewish life cycle and calendar.

      Jews were expelled from Western Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. From then until the twentieth century, most of the world’s Jews lived in Eastern Europe and in Muslim lands. Jews in those areas were governed by Jewish law, enforced by Jewish courts, backed up by governments. When the Enlightenment philosophy of individual rights became the governing philosophy in Western Europe and America in the late eighteenth century, most of the world’s Jews did not live in such countries.

      In the first half of the nineteenth century, all three of the modern Jewish movements—Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform—developed in Germany, each with its distinctive approach to how Jews should live. Now, Jews had to repair to the civil courts for justice, while marriage and divorce were subject to civil law. The early Reform movement maintained that Jewish law was authoritative only for the Jewish people living under Jewish rule in ancient Israel.

      Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, founder of Modern Orthodox Judaism, asserted that young Jews in Germany were not obeying Jewish law because they did not know much about it. He established schools for adult education, translated the Bible into German, and wrote books to describe and justify Jewish law. What is now called the Conservative Movement or »Masorti,« began when Rabbi Zacharias Frankel and his colleagues left the organization of Reform rabbis in 1845. They believed that Jewish identity is not solely a matter of religion and morals, but also of community. Their emphasis was to become important as Conservative Judaism took root in America and became a movement that focused on the communal aspects of identity, including commitment to Jewish law.

      26 Jewish engagement(s) with Modern Culture

      Dr. Joachim Schlör of the University of Southhampton writes that modern culture offers perspectives beyond traditional ways of living and thinking. The idea to open the Jewish community of Berlin to new horizons by the translation of the Hebrew Bible into German, the daily use of the German language, the creation of a »free school« with instruction in worldly topics, reform of synagogue services, and a weakening of rabbinical authority, provoked resistance within the community.

      Jacob Katz contended that a major criterion for determining when modernity began was when Jews began to think in cultural patterns taken from the non-Jewish world. »Port Jews« from Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Bordeaux, and Venice, down to Sarajevo and Constantinople established reformed communities with an interest in education and integration. Odessa became a creative centre for modern Jewish literature not just in Yiddish and in Hebrew, but also in Russian. Ideas born in Odessa travelled from Warsaw to Berlin, New York, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv.

      Urbanization was most important for Jewish encounters with modern culture: free schools, access to libraries and museums, theatre and concerts, and the chance to make one’s life outside of the traditional community. In Berlin, this chance was taken by those who became »German Jews« and saw themselves on the path to emancipation and integration within wider society. The city provided the immigrant from