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Is there an idiosyncratically Jewish hermeneutic? Did such ever obtain in Jewish history? Is there an idiosyncratically Jewish theology? Did such ever obtain in Jewish history? Did the two ever obtain at once and together in Jewish history? The answer to all of these questions is: Yes. Come and explore -- with an idiosyncratically odd interpreter of things Jewish -- a special brief moment in the history of Jewish letters. One is speaking of roughly 75 CE to roughly 95 CE. Come and explore what was birthed in that time period. Come and explore how what was birthed in that time period came to be rejected and suppressed on the day of the coiled snake. Come and explore how, miraculously, what was rejected and suppressed ended up being re-inscribed in the final redaction of the Bavli, rendering that written production as the quintessential expression of what is idiosyncratically Jewish.
So. Think about this. Once this foreigner is brought into the House of Israel ((albeit a foreigner who emerged from the House of Israel)) and then comes to rule it, the House of Israel itself ended up becoming, in fact, a collective apostate alienated from its burning living center. In the following I acknowledge the paradox involved in what I am saying given what is said in the Gemaric commentaries about Akher. But again, think it through. What would it mean to be an apostate from an institution which itself has apostatized? In this sense Elisha ben Abbuyah becomes the model for a grand teshuvah whose contours, as we shall see, are radically paradoxical: RETURN! O BACKSLIDING CHILDREN Today -- to pick up one of those figures used in Hagigahs attempt to give cautious approval of such rehabilitation for Elisha ben Abbuyah -- Judaism is a shell whose kernel has virtually disappeared. If nothing changes nothing changes. Judaism will implode in upon itself and disappear. If you are able to see the mortal danger into which Judaism has strayed you will be able to garner the imagination to read -- as though for the very first time -- the forthcoming thrice-articulated verse-and-commentary. It was first stated by Hashem to Akher. It was then twice repeated by Akher to Meir. You need to turn the telescope around to understand its true import. Think again of the logic entailed by the apostate who apostatizes from an apostatizing Institution. Just how long will it take for you to get it? Till its too late? RETURN! O BACKSLIDING CHILDREN! [whispering for proper effect]: except for Akher It is not Akher who needs to return.
This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis’ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one’s self and one’s body and, more broadly, the relations between one’s self and one’s human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.
How did Jews perceive the first Christians? By what means did they come to appreciate Christianity as a religion distinct from their own? In The Christian Schism in Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Professor Joshua Ezra Burns addresses those questions by describing the birth of Christianity as a function of the Jewish past. Surveying a range of ancient evidences, he examines how the authors of Judaism's earliest surviving memories of Christianity speak to the perspectives of rabbinic observers who were conditioned by the unique circumstances of their encounters with Christianity to recognize its adherents as fellow Jews. Only upon the decline of the Church's Jewish demographic were their successors compelled to see Christianity as something other than a variation of Jewish cultural expression. The evolution of thought in the classical Jewish literary record thus offers a dynamic account of Christianity's separation from Judaism counterbalancing the abrupt schism attested in contemporary Christian texts.
In A Common Justice Uriel I. Simonsohn examines the legislative response of Christian and Jewish religious elites to the problem posed by the appeal of their coreligionists to judicial authorities outside their communities. Focusing on the late seventh to early eleventh centuries in the region between Iraq in the east and present-day Tunisia in the west, Simonsohn explores the multiplicity of judicial systems that coexisted under early Islam to reveal a complex array of social obligations that connected individuals across confessional boundaries. By examining the incentives for appeal to external judicial institutions on the one hand and the response of minority confessional elites on the other, the study fundamentally alters our conception of the social history of the Near East in the early Islamic period. Contrary to the prevalent scholarly notion of a rigid social setting strictly demarcated along confessional lines, Simonsohn's comparative study of Christian and Jewish legal behavior under early Muslim rule exposes a considerable degree of fluidity across communal boundaries. This seeming disregard for religious affiliations threatened to undermine the position of traditional religious elites; in response, they acted vigorously to reinforce communal boundaries, censuring recourse to external judicial institutions and even threatening transgressors with excommunication.