Genesis Rabbah, the earliest rabbinic commentary on the book of Genesis, was composed in Roman Palestine around the fifth century CE and continued to be studied throughout medieval and modern times. In this volume, an international team of scholars explores the literary formation and textual transmission of this work as well as the historical, cultural, religious, and political contexts in which it was composed. -- From back cover.

Analysing the political relations between the Kingdom of Poland and the hasidic movement, this book examines plans formulated by the government and by groups close to government circles regarding hasidim, and describes how a hasidic body politic developed in response. Marcin Wodzinski demonstrates that the rise of hasidism was an important factor in shaping the Jewish policy of both central and provincial authorities and shows how the creation of socio-political conditions that were advantageous to the hasidic movement accelerated its growth. While concentrating on the dynamic that developed in the Kingdom of Poland, the discussion is informed by a consideration of the relationship between the state and the hasidic movement from its inception in the Polish - Lithuanian Commonwealth. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that, whereas most analyses of political culture concentrate on states and societies with well-established electoral systems of representation, Wodzinski focuses on the under-researched area of political relations between a non-democratic state and a low-status community lacking authorized representation. Applying concepts more often associated with cultural history, his analysis draws a distinction between the terms of reference of high-level political debate and the actual implementation of policy middle- and low-level officials. Similarly, in analysing hasidic responses he differentiates between high-level hasidic representations in the state and the grassroots politics of the community. This combination enables a broad contextualization of the whole subject, integrating the social and cultural history of Polish Jewry with that of Polish society in general.

"The author has constructed a chronicle of the life of Ilia Zdanevich (known as Iliazd), an important writer and artist in Russian and French modernism, and enriched this chronicle with commentary on the process of writing a biography and a discussion of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The author originally researched Iliazd with the help of his widow many years ago, and she revisited her notes taken at that time with an experienced scholar's critical distance"--

126p hardback, purple dustjacket, index, nice fresh copy, this copy published in the year 1969

Originally published in 1971, this book outlines the period of Germany's belated industrial revolution and suggests why German literature does not, before the 1880s, contribute to the tradition of European realism. It considers the alternatives to realism offered in three genres of drama, poetry and prose fiction.

This groundbreaking new work is the first full critical edition and English translation of the Hebrew book Sefer ha-Pardes [The Book of the Orchard], written at the end of the thirteenth century by the Provençal Jewish author Jedaiah ha-Penini. It is purportedly an example of musar: a compilation of wise epigrams and meshalim [parables] that teach moral lessons on different topics, such as the service of God, friendship, the deceitfulness of the world, medicine, logic, music, magic, and poetry. However, it is in reality a compendium of sayings that reveal the author's personal views and feelings on a variety of religious topics, secular sciences, and their practitioners. David Torollo presents a fluent and illuminating English-Hebrew parallel text based on four sixteenth-century witnesses: three manuscripts and a printed edition. A rigorous study accompanies and contextualises the Hebrew work, exploring Sefer ha-Pardes's transmission and reception in different places over time; its structure and content; its place in the intellectual environment and literary tradition of Provence; and possible lines of enquiry for future research. This essential new work offers a significant contribution to scholarship in the field of Medieval Hebrew Hispano-Provencal literature.

Mandel's essays scrutinize the leap from modern to postmodern writing. Mandel also examines individual writers such as Gary Geddes, Leonard Cohen, P.K. Page, Frank Davey, Margaret Atwood and John Glassco."The quality of Mandel's criticism is uniformly high. He grinds no particular literary axe, speaks for no school but the school of intelligent inquiry."--Books in Canada

This book explores two millennia of south Indian Tamil civilization, with a special emphasis on the way Tamil speakers and literati understood the unique features of their language and the major cultural themes articulated in Tamil over this long time span. Tamil is one of the great world languages, with its 80 million speakers, its ancient, classical past, and the profound richness of its cultural traditions, which spread throughout South Asia and beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and, today, to a large Tamil Diaspora scattered around the globe. Presented in the format of a south Indian musical composition, the chapters take the reader through the whole of Tamil cultural history, from its beginnings at the end of the first millennium B.C. through the stunning poems of love and war known as "Sangam Poetry", the burst of intense religious movements in the mid-first-millennium A.D., the Chola period of imperial expansion, and into late-medieval and modern times, including present-day Tamil politics and the vast cultural production of Chennai, Madurai, and Tanjavur. The treasures of the Tamil language deserve a wide audience--thus the book is aimed at readers with no special knowledge of India no less than at speakers and connoisseurs of Tamil. Translated verses and spicy stories of poets, lovers, musicians, warriors and kings fill the pages of this book, which paints a wide-angle, panoramic canvas of one of the most creative civilizations in the history of South Asia as it evolved and transformed itself from the distant past up to our own generation.--

This volume contains fifteen essays in honor of Professor Joseph Yahalom who served as a lecturer at the Hebrew University from 1974 until he became full professor in 1985. The completion of his Warburg price awarded thesis in 1973 marked the start of a long and successful academic career in both Hebrew and Jewish studies, with much emphasis on poetry and poetics. Yahalom s continuing interest in and research on ancient Piyyut led to a number of editions of Hebrew and Aramaic texts as well as to studies on the early Palestinian vocalization system and the language of Piyyut based on the Genizah findings. In 1983, Yahalom was elected a member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. In 2003, he received the Yizhak Ben-Zvi award for his lifetime study of Jewish history and Hebrew literature. Yahalom s research on Hebrew medieval liturgical poetry focused on a period of roughly one thousand years, from the days of early Byzantium until the final days of Jewish presence on the Iberian Peninsula and the Sephardic diaspora. His bibliography testifies to his expertise of understanding Hebrew verse, laying much emphasis on the interaction between the Jewish and surrounding cultures, which concur with Yahalom s overall convictions and views about Jewish literature in context.

Text: English, German, Hebrew