Tag Archives: Ashkenaz

(Christianity) The Trial of the Talmud (Documents)

Posted on June 20, 2022 by zjb

What were the actual talmudic texts that Christians found so irksome? What do we actually learn about Talmud from its most caustic critics, the elite Christian accusers from the High Medieval Age? The Trial of the Talmud Paris 1240 is … Continue reading →

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The Hasidic Seder Plate is an Objet de Fantasie

Posted on April 19, 2022 by zjb

I’ll post more later from Batsheva Goldman-Ida’s Hasidic Art and Kabbalah, but I want to share these three pictures in particular for the Passover holiday. In part, I’m choosing these three photographs because they are themselves rather remarkable. The photographs by … Continue reading →

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(Still Lachrymose) The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom (Robert Chazan)

Posted on April 12, 2022 by zjb

Invaluable for students of Jews and Jewish Studies is the focus Robert Chazan puts on Christians and Christendom in this neat little survey. The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000-1500 is maybe the best one-stop-shop historical study explaining what happened … Continue reading →

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(Post-Diasporist) Poyln (Alter Kacyzne)

Posted on March 23, 2021 by zjb
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A Painful Question re: Rabbis & Racism & Judaism & Israel

Posted on May 1, 2019 by zjb

You can read here about the remarks by Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, the head of the Bnei David academy in Eli, and Rabbi Giora Redler, also at Bnei David, about enslaving Arabs and in support of racism and Hitler. I’ll start … Continue reading →

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(Poland) Kahal & Kabbalah (Ashkenaz)

Posted on April 3, 2019 by zjb

Salo Baron makes a brief appearance in Gershon Hundert’s excellent historical study, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. Following Baron’s lead, Hundert’s thesis runs against the lachrymose versions of Jewish historiography as regards “the ghetto.” … Continue reading →

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(Leviticus 11) Kashrus (Hertz Pentateuch)

Posted on March 31, 2019 by zjb

The discussion about the dietary laws in the Hertz Pentateuch commentary has a few interesting things about it. There is the sociological assertion that kashrut has proved historically to be “an important factor in the preservation of the Jewish race.” … Continue reading →

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(Uneven Interdependent) Lay & Rabbinic Authority (Jacob Katz)

Posted on March 27, 2019 by zjb

An important point of history for Jewish philosophers interested in law, Halakha, and rabbinic authority, who pine for times when Jewish culture was corporate in character, and also for scholars of religion who have bought into the post-secular mantra that … Continue reading →

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(Hasidism) A Political Community? A Religious Community?

Posted on March 26, 2019 by zjb

Thinking about the importance of politics and the figure of community in Spinoza and Mendelssohn, and thinking out loud about Hasidism. Asking you the reader if you think the various groups of hasidim forming around the baalei-shem in the 18th … Continue reading →

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(Doubts) Ashkenaz & Philosophy

Posted on March 25, 2019 by zjb

Continuing to go out on a limb and meant to pick up a challenge posed by colleague-friends about the need for Modern Jewish Studies and Jewish Philosophy and Thought to take into account the life and thought world of Eastern … Continue reading →

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