Defining Judaism: A Reader

by McCutcheon; Russell T.

• ISBN13: 9781845536084
• ISBN10: 1845536088
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-08-08
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book illustrates the range of theoretical and practical issues involved in defining Judaism for the purposes of comparative and historical studies. The editor holds that sound definitions of religious traditions in general emerge from complex dialogues between "insiders," who define themselves vis a vis "outsiders," and "outsiders," who theorize and generalize about the self-definitions of "insiders." Accordingly, the texts anthologized here include examples of Jewish voices articulating their own "native" self-understanding as well as academic interpretive discourses proposing to place these self-understandings within historical, anthropogical, or phenomenological frameworks.

Author Biography

Aaron W. Hughes is the Gordon and Gretchen Gross Professor of Jewish Studies and the Associate Director of the Institute of Jewish Thought and Heritage at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is the author of the Texture of the Divine: Imagination in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Thought (2004), Jewish Philosophy A-Z(2005), Situating Islam: The Past and Future of an Academic Discipline (Equinox Publishing, 2008), The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (2008), and together with Elliot R. Wolfson, New Directions in Jewish Philosophy (2010).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction: Judaism, Judaisms, Jewish: Toward Redefining Traditional Taxa	p. 1
Historical and Chronological Definitions	p. 15
Orientation	p. 17
Selection from Book One of The Book of Beliefs and Opinions	p. 20
Thirteen Articles of Faith	p. 37
The Paris Sanhedrin: Selection from Answers to Napoleon	p. 45
Selection from Judaism and its History	p. 57
Setting the Problem, Laying the Ground	p. 68
The Contours of Judaism	p. 87
Apartheid Comparative Religion in the Second Century: Some Theory and a Case Study	p. 89
Who Were the Jews? Problems in Profiling the Jewish Community Under Early Islam	p. 117
The Rejudaization of "the Nation"	p. 150
Jews and Germans	p. 189
Re-Definitions	p. 205
The Savage in Judaism	p. 207
Waiting for a Jew: Marginal Redemption at the Eighth Street Shul	p. 241
Expanding the Canon of Jewish Philosophy: Toward an Appreciation of Genre	p. 261
Index of Subjects	p. 289
Index of Names	p. 292
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