Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic by Ryan Szpiech (review)

Book review: Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic, written by Ryan Szpiech

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Rabbinic Culture and its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern TimesFrankDanielGoldishMatt <i>Rabbinic Culture and its Critics: Jewish Authority, Dissent and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times</i> Wayne State University PressDetroit, 2008, xv, 480, $49.95ISBN 978-0-8143-3237-5

Male Bonding as Cultural Construction in Alfonso X, Ramon Llull, and Juan Manuel Homosocial Friendship in Medieval Iberia

It is theorized by the author that Post-Biblical Jewish Religious Text should contain many practical psychological insights, given the fact that the authors of such literature were expected to be involved in the life of their communities, to be married with children, and be engaged in an occupation in order to function as religious authorities who were to be taken seriously. Many were physicians. As an exploration of this idea, some of the writings regarding the subjects of pride and humility are explored. A picture of a Jewish religious approach to pathological narcissism appears to emerge from this examination.

Warren Zev Harvey was born in New York in 1943. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1965 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the same institution in 1973. After finishing his graduate studies, he began his teaching career at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he taught between 1971 and 1977. In the late 1970s, he accepted an offer from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has taught there ever since, working his way up the ladder from lecturer to full professor. A specialist in medieval Jewish philosophy, he is the author of Physics and Metaphysics in Hasdai Crescas (1998) and of numerous articles on Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Spinoza, and other medieval and modern Jewish philosophers. In addition, he has served as coeditor of Tarbiz, the Hebrew quarterly for Jewish studies (1992-1996), and as director of Misgav Yerushalayim, the Center for the Study of the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish Heritage (1996-2000). He has also been a visiting professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris; the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; the University of Pennsylvania; Queens College, New York; Yeshiva University; and Yale University.

In contrast to Jewish theological and scholarly studies of Paul, artistic or literary approaches are relatively unknown. This is partly due to the alleged marginality of the Jewish contributors concerned. However, those with complex Jewish identities potentially offer a useful corrective to the impression made by mainstream Jewish religious authorities and popular opinion. The sentiments expressed in Ludwig Meidner’s painting Paul’s Sermon (1919) and Franz Werfel’s play Paul among the Jews (1926) contrast powerfully with those of the classic Jewish view. The sensitive treatments of the Apostle to the Gentiles by Meidner and Werfel point to the importance of a mystical outlook and an emphasis on the commonalities of the Judeo‐Christian experience for Jewish creative responses to Paul.

La question de confiance en matiire de santt (The Trust Issue in the Health Field)

In his Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (1998), Philip Roth evoked image of demonic possession to describe 1960s in United States. His protagonist, Jewish-American glove manufacturer nicknamed the Swede, finds his suburban dream world shattered when his only child, bright young girl who stutters, becomes an antiwar terrorist and kills several innocent people in stream of Weatherman-like bombings. Following these horrors, Swede finds that he must reflect upon everything he ever did as parent. In end, however, neither he nor his wife takes responsibility for their daughter and instead they choose to blame demons of times. The Swede tells himself that his daughter's violent hatred of America was disease unto itself. And he loved America. Loved being an American. .. But back then he hadn't dared to explain to her why he did for fear of unleashing demon... And by that time he had no influence anyway. In what way was she 'his' any longer if she hadn't been his then? Stuttering, spluttering little bitch! Who fuck did she think she was? (206-07) With such words, Roth portrayed sixties not as political or personal emancipation-what Hunter S. Thompson called high and beautiful wave (68)-but rather as demonic nihilism and anarchy. This force had set children against their parents and ended what Roth's fellow novelist John Updike called the great American ride (3).In truth, when Roth used possession as metaphor for sixties, he was returning to worn theme in American popular culture: namely, large literature about demonology and paranormal that first appeared in mid-sixties and by late had become veritable industry. Unlike Roth, these writers asked their readers to treat their stories not figuratively but literally; they should follow established horror genre conventions by suspending conventional verisimilitude and by accepting supernatural as possible reality.1 To achieve this effect, writers set their stories in contemporary US society and suggested that demonic forces had turned American dream into living hell. At first blush, as Stephen King observed, genre was a finely honed focusing point for that entire youth explosion that took place in late sixties and early seventies (169).In what follows, I show how popular writers used demonic possession to get beyond basic theme of generational conflict and instead dramatize deeper crisis in American society. In these works, authors painted picture in which everywhere in America traditional authority was falling apart and all old values had dissipated. It was an ethos that theologian Paul Tillich once described, as demonic-the urge to destroy cultural form. In so doing, these books proffered what I shall be calling metaphysical critique of postsixties values. Here, they took memories of sixties counterculture and political radicalism and literally demonized both of them. According to this vision, supernatural forces had instigated whole sixties phenomenon. Worse yet, traditional authorities were somehow unwilling or unable to contain threat-or were collaborating with it.Three pivotal books, I argue, shaped this metaphysical critique: Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967), William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971), and David Seltzer's The Omen (1976). These three books-which critics and historians rarely analyze as group-were commercial blockbusters and quickly became successful films, thereby broadening their cultural reach.2 In each tale, demonology underscored specific crisis in values: namely, how legitimate or traditional authority was seemingly collapsing in American society. This felt collapse manifested itself in marked sub-theme about two professional groups usually associated with social order and respectability: doctors and priests. Yet, in this case, neither professional group seemed able to control social disorder, or they were instead portrayed as contributing to problem. …

Lukas G. Grzybowski. <i>The Christianization of Scandinavia in the Viking Era. Religious Change in Adam of Bremen’s Historical Work</i>

Eighteenth century New England Protestants were among the first people in North America to invest the Jewish Kabbalah with meaning, and their doing so brought unintended consequences. As they sought insight into the origins and implications of the same Hebrew Bible that so heavily informed their “errand into the wilderness,” prominent ministers such as Cotton Mather and Ezra Stiles explored Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah confirmed common assertions that the Old Testament predicted and foreshadowed the teachings of Christ. As it revealed the imminence of God in the printed page, however, it also offered a new model for Christian scholarship.

Porten, B. &amp; A Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Newly copied, edited and translated into Hebrew and English. Volume 1. Letters (The Hebrew University, Department of the History of the Jewish People, Texts and Studies for Students), Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1986. Pp. ix + vii + 143. Cloth, §35.00

For my purposes, the Jews’ historical experience with the Arabo-Islamic social environment is the requisite background for any interrogation of Hebrew literary culture in medieval Iberia. That foundational encounter with Arabic and Islam had a profound impact on the Jews’ linguistic, aesthetic, and religious intellectual values and ventures; by 900, all of the Jews west of the Iranian plateau spoke Arabic as their mother tongue and their literary production, including on strictly religious matters, was conducted primarily in Arabic. However, such a narrow perspective limited to linguistic performance and routine would be insufficient to capture the significance of the irresistible and dynamic force Arabic became in Jewish life and ironically in the production of Hebrew literary culture, especially in Iberia. Rina Drory’s groundbreaking work endeavored to define the distinctive position of the Jewish text composed in Arabic during the classical age of Islam by proposing a new taxonomy of the Jews’ two distinct linguistic-literary systems under Islam, with Arabic employed for communicative purposes and Hebrew for ceremonial expression. While Drory’s instrumentalist scheme is extremely insightful it does not account for what we might call literary identity informed by linguistic practice. This essay will endeavor to explain anew the rich complexity of the ways in which Jewish writers in medieval Iberia turned Arabic into Hebrew.

This article concerns the Islamic community in contemporary Russia and the dynamic identities of Muslim migrants there. The focus of this study is the religious and wider social practices of those Muslim migrants who are considered leaders of local micro-communities, enjoy respect within their religious community, and have steadfast religious authority within their circles. These practices are considered in their local religious and migrant contexts through the prism of such concepts as religious individualism, everyday lived Islam, and tactical religion. The author shows multiple ties that emerge between the region’s Muslims, specifically between unofficial local leaders, and other believers who need this authority to elaborate their everyday Muslim practices in the context of migration and the authority crisis in Russian Islam. This study emphasizes the importance of the everyday in the formation of individual religiosity and shows how a local Muslim environment builds up around certain key figures outside the mosque.

Reviewed by: The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins by Leslie Morris Todd Samuel Presner Leslie Morris. The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture outside the Margins. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 248 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001090 Bridging the fields of cultural studies, transnational literary and visual studies, translation studies, and urbanism, The Translated Jew is a theoretically rich and strikingly original contribution to Jewish studies. Situated outside the contours of conventional national literary and ethnic studies, Morris argues that "the Jewish" is always already translated in multiple cultural and historical contexts, which give rise to new mappings for the study of Jewish culture and identity. Placing translation at the center of her analysis, Morris undertakes a reassessment of German Jewish textuality by focusing on what she calls the "trans-Jewish." More than merely the act of "moving" from one language to another, the trans-Jewish is [End Page 218] about the continual accrual and dispersion of meaning that exceeds the referents "German" and "Jewish." In this sense, "trans" refers to translation, transnationality, and transformation—all processes that productively deterritorialize the object of study (the text, the work of art, the cultural artifact) as well as the very notion of Jewishness. As such, Morris problematizes the linkage between place and language—a connection that has been productively undone, she notes, by other scholars such as Werner Sollors and Marc Shell—to imagine modes of analysis that are unbound from assumptions that govern the study of national literatures. The theoretical framework of Morris's book is formed by a complex dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Hélène Cixous, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Yosef Yerushalmi, Roland Barthes, and many others. Her aim is to open up new conceptual and imaginative spaces of inquiry between Jewish studies and German studies by exploring zones of contact, intertextuality, transnationality, and translation. "Jewishness," like "Germanness," is hardly a given or authentic object of inquiry, Morris argues, but is instead something that is formed through various acts of translation, transmission, and movement. Rather than simply arguing this idea, she performs it through the original interweaving and staging that make up the structure of the book's chapters. Much more than an astute bricolage, the book coheres around a remarkably rich and highly nuanced set of cultural analyses of German and Jewish textuality, in its broadest possible sense, during the postwar period. To wit, she not only analyzes works of literature and poetry (such as that of W. G. Sebald, Paul Celan, and Rose Ausländer) but also delves into the interplay between urban spaces (Berlin's Sculpture Park) and public art practices, digital art, memory politics, and multidirectional translation (such as the works of Alfred Kazin and Daniel Blaufuks). As a whole, the book reconceives of the status of the "Jewish" literary, visual, and urban text (itself an unstable signifier and object of analysis) in ways that are provocative for literary studies writ large. Placing the Jewish text outside of the predefined and predetermined strictures of national literature, Morris focuses on the "klezmerical" dimensions of the object, unbounded and translated into the broadest possible range of cultural contexts. As she demonstrates so cogently in her chapter on Berlin's Sculpture Park, for instance, the indeterminate translation and movement of cultural objects and signifiers give rise to generative paradigms of entanglement between "Jewish" and "German" and, thus, new ways of thinking about cultural memory, public art, digital media, and urban spaces. This is also the approach she pursues in her "tangential" analyses of literary and visual texts that variously confront the representation of the Holocaust, such as the works of W. G. Sebald, Raymond Federman, Kazin, and Blaufuks. As such, she opens up and dismantles the hyphen between "German-Jewish" in ways that interrogate the basic categories of author and identity in the post-Holocaust world. As Morris argues, that which is "German" is already "Jewish," and that which is "Jewish" is already "German." By showing that the overdetermined space between the very words and concepts "German" and "Jewish" represents a kind of third space of encounter, Morris looks to the ways that fields and objects of study are intimately interwoven, and...