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Analyzes the myth of Judas Iscariot in the Gospels, its development in Christian tradition and folklore, and its antisemitic significance from the ancient period up to modern times. The image of Judas Iscariot as the evil betrayer of Jesus has been an important source of antisemitism among Christians, even those who do not accept the fundamental beliefs of the Christian religion. Argues that the myth of Judas as the betrayer is not supported by the New Testament. Suggests that Judas was identical with Jude the Apostle; he has been saddled with a degrading myth that is an insult to his loyalty and integrity.

"Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped—and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each contribution considers factors—demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological—that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each essay, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities"--

Referring to the chosen-ness of the Jewish people, Paul, the Apostle, ?For God's free gifts and his calling are irrevocable? (Rom. 11: 29). This messenger to the Gentiles understood the unique calling of his people, Israel. So does Daniel Juster. In The Irrevocable Calling, he expands Paul's words, showing how Israel was uniquely chosen to bless the world and how these blessings can be enjoyed today.

Preface Introduction Part I. Models in Kabbalah and Hasidism 1. The Weakening of the Lurianic Kabbalah in the Eighteenth Century 2. Models in Jewish Mysticism 3. The Mystico-Magical Model Part II. Drawing Down 4. Mystical and Magical Prayer in Hasidism 5. Mystical and Magical Study in Hasidism 6. Zaddiq as "Vessel" and "Channel" in Hasidism Concluding Remarks Appendix A: Psychologization of Theosophy in Kabbalah and Hasidism Appendix B: Rabbi Yisrael of Ryzhin Who Cries Appendix C: On Intentional Transmission of Power Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Appendix of Hebrew Quotes Subject Index Index of Works Cited Author Index

Ever wonder why Christmas is on Dec. 25 or why the Catholic Church set this date for the Nativity? The Talmud states that the truest Jewish prophets were born during Passover and died during Passover. Since the gospels inform us that Jesus was crucified during a Passover, it can be reasoned that, as a Jewish prophet, he was also born during a Passover. Therefore, Jesus lived an integral life, or one of perfection with time. This is not a new idea. Many of the early Church Fathers thought about this concept, but the political climate of the period halted its full development--that is, until now.

This book represents the first wide-scale presentation of a major Jewish mystic, the founder of the ecstatic Kabbalah. It includes a description of the techniques employed by this master, including the role of music. There is a discussion of the characteristics of his mystical experience and the erotic imagery by which it is expressed. Based on all the extant manuscript material of Abulafia, this book opens the way to a new understanding of Jewish mysticism. It points to the importance of the ecstatic Kabbalah for the later developments in mystical Judaism.

"This is the first book describing the roles of Western Jews in South Asian political affairs, medicine, painting, architecture and religion. A time-line summarizes their contributions and those of the Indian Jews to the Indian subcontinent. Many of these foreign Jews left behind their Jewish identities. Others remained Jews, but functioned as individuals unconcerned with implementing any 'Jewish agenda'." --

"Martha Shelley didn't start out in life wanting to become a gay activist, or an activist of any kind. The daughter of Jewish refugees and undocumented immigrants in New York City, she grew up during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, was inspired by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements that followed, and struggled with coming out as a lesbian at a time when being gay made her a criminal. Shelley rose to become a public speaker for the New York chapter of the lesbian rights group the Daughters of Bilitis, organized the first gay march in response to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, and then cofounded the Gay Liberation Front. She coproduced the newspaper Come Out!, worked on the women's takeover of the RAT Subterranean News, and took a central role in the Lavender Menace action to confront homophobia in the women's movement. Martha Shelley's story is a feminist and lesbian document that gives context and adds necessary humanity to the historical record"--Dust jacket flap.

An inner life of Johannesburg that turns on the author’s fascination with maps, boundaries, and transgressionsThis singular memoir begins with a transgression—the invasion of a private home in Johannesburg. But it is far more than the story of a theft. Lost and Found in Johannesburg is a luminous exploration of place, one in which the author’s and the reader’s assumptions are constantly being tested. As a child growing up in apartheid South Africa, Mark Gevisser was obsessed with maps—and with Holmden’s Register , Johannesburg’s street guide, in particular. He played a game called Dispatcher with this eccentric guide, transporting himself across the city into places that would otherwise be forbidden to him. It was through Dispatcher that he discovered apartheid by realizing that he could not find an access route to the neighboring township of Alexandra and, later, by realizing that Soweto was not mapped at all. This was the beginning of his lifelong obsession with maps and photographs, and what they tell us about borders and boundaries—how we define ourselves by staying within them or by transgressing them. This memoir is an account of getting lost in one’s hometown, and then finding oneself as a gay Jewish South African who was raised under apartheid and who eventually married a man of a different race as the country moved toward freedom. Using maps, shards of memory, photographs, and stories, Gevisser constructs a stunning portrait of race and sexuality, heritage and otherness.

"A Zionist without a copy of this first classic of a militant Jewish renaissance is like a Greek without his Homer. There cannot be the slightest doubt that in the traditions of the Orient, from the Mediterranean littoral to Tashkent and Samarkand, wherever Jews and Moslems live and thrive on their own soil, the story of the author and his Jewish paladins will be linked with those of Suleiman Malek, Iskander, and of the Colonel's countryman of the Lion-Heart. The exploits of Gallipoli, as told in this fascinating volume, will be sung at the shores of the Dead Sea and in the hills of Moab long after the present generation of Zionists will be gathered with their fathers....Col. Patterson tells us that his narrative of the Zionists of Gallipoli has been written during the enforced idleness of a month of illness....Our gallant Colonel, considered as a narrator, seems to have gone to school in Cairo with those improvisatori of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, who enfold tale within tale, ad infinitum. For all that, no good-humored reader will feel like quarreling with the Colonel because his book reminds one of an autobiographical magazine series rather than of military reports. If the latter are more apt to be terse and to the point, books written in the style of the former are likely to be more readable; and if the personality of the author is spread all over the book, overshadowing in spots the fate of the regiment under his care, the reader will be glad to get acquainted with an attractive personality. His chief lineaments, as seen in his self-portrayal, are those of Sergeant George in 'Bleakhouse' - of a brave, obstinate, truth-telling, generous Briton, personal alliance with the fortunes of militant Judea the earnest of a national alliance to come." -The Maccabæan: A Magazine of Jewish Life and Letters "As an expression of admiration for the Jew as soldier and as man, and of strong sympathy with Jewish ideals one cannot speak too highly in its favor. The book is a worthy record of the gallantry and resourcefulness of the officers and men of the Zion Mule Corps, but it is none the less a monument to the kindliness and sympathy of the corps' non-Jewish commanding officer, the author." -The American Jewish Chronicle "It is the story of the famous Zion mule corps and its service in Gallipoli. This corps was the first Jewish military unit formed in 2,000 years and was composed of Russian born refugees from Palestine. Colonel Patterson commanded the corps and writes this account of the campaign as he saw it, its policy and the operations of war in execution of that policy." -Book Review Digest "There is electricity in each page, and fearless criticism provokes as much thought as the intrepid courage. Veteran soldiers have a right to be critics of military affairs; and when Colonel Patterson finds fault with any person or with anything, his phrases bite. They cannot be forgotten. And the motive-power behind them is the conviction that criticism cannot be too direct, because the lives of thousands are imperiled daily in the firing lines." -Saturday Review

"Born to a Jewish mother and Protestant father in 1923 Berlin, Gregory Baum has devoted his career to a humanistic approach to Catholicism. In The Oil Has Not Run Dry, Baum shares recollections about his lifelong commitment to theology, his atypical views, and his evolving understanding of the Catholic Church's message. Baum's reflects on his groundbreaking work with the Second Vatican Council (1962 65) and how it helped to open the Church to a new understanding of outsiders--one that advocated cooperation with world religions in support of peace and justice and respected secular philosophies committed to truth and social solidarity. Later embracing Latin American liberation theology, he became a leading thinker of the Catholic Left in Canada, adopting radical positions that initially earned support from Canadian bishops in the 1970s. Diverging from official Catholic doctrines regarding women and sexual ethics, Baum eventually left the priesthood, but continued to teach theology and remained active in the Church. The Oil Has Not Run Dry also discusses the contrast between Catholicism in Quebec and English-speaking North America, and the ways in which Baum sees Quebec's culture as more marked by social solidarity. This significant difference has inspired his decision to present in his own writings the original development of Catholic thought in Quebec to an English-speaking readership. Gregory Baum is professor emeritus in the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University and the author of Fernand Dumont: A Sociologist Turns to Theology and Truth and Relevance: Catholic Theology in French Quebec since the Quiet Revolution. "--

In this autobiographical novel, the author moves among the dead poets of Stalin's Russia with the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, mingling with the ghosts of writers such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky. The author, herself of Russian descent, reconstructs the lives and fates of Russian, often Jewish, writers during the long age of Soviet terror, re-establishing them at the heart of the European tradition.

"Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Jews were faced with a world in existential chaos--both they and their God were rendered homeless. So the rabbis, aspirants for leadership of the post-destruction Jewish community, appropriated inherited traditions and used them as building blocks for a new religious structure. Not unexpectedly, given the circumstances, this new rabbinic formation devoted considerable attention to matters of space and place. Rabbinic Judaism: Space and Place offers the first comprehensive study of spatiality in Rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity, exploring how the rabbis reoriented the Jewish relationship with space and place following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Drawing upon the insights of theorists such as Tuan and LeFebvre, who define the crisis that "homelessness" represents and argue for the deep relationship of human societies to their places, the book examines the compositions of the rabbis and discovers both a surprisingly aggressive rabbinic spatial imagination as well as places, most notably the synagogue, where rabbinic attention to space and place is suppressed or absent. It concludes that these represent two different but simultaneous rabbinic strategies for re-placing God and Israel--strategies that at the same time allow God and Israel to find a place anywhere. This study offers new insight into the centrality of space and place to rabbinic religion after the destruction of the Temple, and as such would be a key resource to students and scholars interested in rabbinic and ancient Judaism, as well as providing a major new case study for anthropologists interested in the study of space"--

Having left Nazi-occupied Vienna a year ago, thirteen-year-old Jewish refugee Stephie Steiner adapts to life in the cultured Swedish city of Gothenburg, where she attends school, falls in love, and worries about her parents who were not allowed to emigrate.

Discusses social and political conditions bearing on antisemitism and philosemitism in France, Russia, and the American South as background for the Dreyfus Affair, the Beilis ritual murder trial, and the trial and lynching of Leo Frank. Declares that comparison helps to understand each of these affairs. Antisemitism is based on realities enhanced by fantasy: in the 19th century it increased because of the growth in the number and influence of Jews, as well as domestic and international political conditions. In all three trials, official antisemitism played little part either in directing suspicion at the particular defendants or in the prosecution: in all three, there was circumstantial evidence that at first seemed credible. Public debate, however, turned on antisemitism and philosemitism. also describes massive Jewish defense efforts, especially in the USA, in connection with all three trials.

Jews and the American Public Square is a study of how Jews have grappled with the presence of religion, both their own and others, in American public life. It surveys historical Jewish approaches to church-state relations and analyzes Jewish responses to the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The book also explores how the contemporary sociological and political characteristics of American Jews bear on their understanding of the public dimensions of American religion. In addition to a descriptive and analytic approach. the volume is also critical and polemical. Its contributors attack and defend prevailing views, raise critical questions about the political and intellectual positions favored by American Jews, and propose new syntheses. This book captures the current mood of the Jewish community: both committed to the separation of church and state and perplexed about its scope and application. It provides the necessary background for a principled reconsideration of the problem of religion in the public square.

Renowned scholar Alan F. Segal offers startlingly new insights into the origins of rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. These twin descendants of Hebrew heritage shared the same social, cultural, and ideological context, as well as the same minority status, in the first century of the common era. Through skillful application of social science theories to ancient Western thought, including Judaism, Hellenism, early Christianity, and a host of other sectarian beliefs, Segal reinterprets some of the most important events of Jewish and Christian life in the Roman world. For example, he finds: — That the concept of myth, as it related to covenant, was a central force of Jewish life. The Torah was the embodiment of covenant both for Jews living in exile and for the Jewish community in Israel. — That the Torah legitimated all native institutions at the time of Jesus, even though the Temple, Sanhedrin, and Synagogue, as well as the concepts of messiah and resurrection, were profoundly affected by Hellenism. Both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity necessarily relied on the Torah to authenticate their claim on Jewish life. — That the unique cohesion of early Christianity, assuring its phenomenal success in the Hellenistic world, was assisted by the Jewish practices of apocalypticism, conversion, and rejection of civic ritual. — That the concept of acculturation clarifies the Maccabean revolt, the rise of Christianity, and the emergence of rabbinic Judaism. — That contemporary models of revolution point to the place of Jesus as a radical. — That early rabbinism grew out of the attempts of middle-class Pharisees to reach a higher sacred status in Judea while at the same time maintaining their cohesion through ritual purity. — That the dispute between Judaism and Christianity reflects a class conflict over the meaning of covenant. The rising turmoil between Jews and Christians affected the development of both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, as each tried to preserve the partly destroyed culture of Judea by becoming a religion. Both attempted to take the best of Judean and Hellenistic society without giving up the essential aspects of Israelite life. Both spiritualized old national symbols of the covenant and practices that consolidated power after the disastrous wars with Rome. The separation between Judaism and Christianity, sealed in magic, monotheism, law, and universalism, fractured what remained of the shared symbolic life of Judea, leaving Judaism and Christianity to fulfill the biblical demands of their god in entirely different ways.