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Isaac On Jewish and Christian Altars: Polemic and Exegesis in Rashi and the Glossa Ordinaria

Devorah Schoenfeld

“Isaac on Jewish and Christian Altars” offers an in-depth examination of two of the most influential Christian and Jewish Bible commentaries of the High Middle Ages. The Glossa Ordinaria and Rashi's ... More

“Isaac on Jewish and Christian Altars” offers an in-depth examination of two of the most influential Christian and Jewish Bible commentaries of the High Middle Ages. The Glossa Ordinaria and Rashi's commentary were standard texts for Bible study in the High Middle Ages, and Rashi's influence continues to the present day. Although Rashi's commentary and the Glossa developed at the same time with no known contact between them, they shared a way of reading text and tradition that shaped their interpretations of the central religious narrative of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Even their polemical readings of the text as a covenant with their own people to the exclusion of the other came out of a shared way of reading both the biblical text and their own tradition. The book examines the development and sources of each commentary and offers a detailed comparison, one that illustrates the similarities between Rashi and the Gloss that derive not merely from their shared late antique heritage but also from their common twelfth-century context, and the Jewish-Christian polemic in which they both, implicitly or explicitly, take part.Less

Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean

Ryan Szpiech (ed.)

Exegesis and scriptural commentary is at the heart of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Evolving in all three Abrahamic traditions as a multifaceted practice—at once social, ... More

Exegesis and scriptural commentary is at the heart of medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Evolving in all three Abrahamic traditions as a multifaceted practice—at once social, devotional, intellectual, creative, and educational—it constituted an essential aspect of expression and belief. At the same time, because it dealt with issues such as the nature of the canon, the limits of acceptable interpretation, and the meaning of salvation history from the perspective of faith, exegesis was elaborated in the Middle Ages along the fault-lines of inter-confessional disputation and polemical conflict. This collection of thirteen essays explores the nature of medieval exegesis during the High and especially the Late Middle Ages (roughly from the 11th to the 15th Centuries) as a discourse of cross-cultural and inter-religious conflict in all three traditions, paying particular attention to the exegetical production of scholars in the Western and Southern Mediterranean. It includes essays on medieval textual commentary from a number of perspectives, including Islamic-Christian relations, medieval Dominican intellectual culture, Jewish-Christian polemics and disputations, as well as a number of thematic chapters on the role of gender metaphors and gendered language in polemical and exegetical commentaries. Together, these thirteen chapters by leading experts shed new light on medieval scriptural commentary and on inter-religious encounters and conflicts.Less

Pauline Ugliness: Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul

Ole Jakob Løland

Paul has been rediscovered outside of the apostle’s traditional religious reading circles, particularly among radical leftist philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. ... More

Paul has been rediscovered outside of the apostle’s traditional religious reading circles, particularly among radical leftist philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek. This is the first book to historically and philosophically situate the forerunner of this recent philosophical turn to Paul, the Jewish rabbi and philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923–1987). Paul becomes an effective tool for Taubes to position himself within European philosophical debates of the twentieth century, a position he gains through Nietzsche’s polemical readings of the ancient apostle as well as through Freud’s psychoanalysis. Taubes performs a powerful deconstruction of dominant conceptions of the apostle, such as the view that Paul is the first Christian who broke definitively with Judaism and drained Christianity of its political potential. As a Jewish rabbi steeped in a philosophical tradition marked by European Christianity, Taubes is able to emphasize Paul’s Jewishness as well as the political explosiveness of the apostle’s revolutionary doctrine of the cross. For Taubes, the Pauline movement was the birth of a politics of ugliness, the invention of a revolutionary notion trenchantly critical of the “beautiful” culture of the powerful, a movement which sides definitively with the oppressed—the “crucified”—against the strong. Building on Nietzsche’s and Taubes’s insights, Løland suggests future directions that readings of Paul the apostle might lead in light of recent biblical scholarship on Paul and current discussions of the Pauline epistles within reading circles of the continental philosophers.Less

Revelation 1-3 in Christian Arabic Commentary: John's First Vision and the Letters to the Seven Churches

Bulus al-Bushi and Ibn Katib Qaysar

Stephen J. Davis, T.C. Schmidt, and Shawqi Talia (eds)

This book, the first of the CATT series, presents excerpts from two thirteenth-century Christian Arabic Commentaries on the Apocalypse of John, written by the Egyptian authors Būlus al-Būshī and Ibn ... More

This book, the first of the CATT series, presents excerpts from two thirteenth-century Christian Arabic Commentaries on the Apocalypse of John, written by the Egyptian authors Būlus al-Būshī and Ibn Kātib Qayṣar, focusing on their treatment of Revelation 1–3. The introduction and first three chapters consist of historical and theological introductions to this literature. Chapter one focuses on Būlus al-Būshī, foregrounding issues of Christology and Christian-Muslim encounter. Chapters two and three focus on Ibn Kātib Qayṣar’s more expansive commentary, including an exploration of his theories of visions, angels, prophets, and dreams. Chapters four and five present the translations themselves, with critical notes that provide readers with insights into Arabic terminology and the medieval reception of the biblical text.Less

Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs

Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg (eds)

This book is edited by a Jew and a Christian who are united by a shared passion for the Bible and a common literary hermeneutic. It joins two biblical scrolls and gathers around them a ... More

This book is edited by a Jew and a Christian who are united by a shared passion for the Bible and a common literary hermeneutic. It joins two biblical scrolls and gathers around them a diverse community of interpreters. It brings together Ruth and the Song of Songs, two seemingly disparate texts of the Hebrew Bible, and reads them through a number of methodological and theological perspectives. Respectful of traditional biblical scholarship, the collection of chapters moves beyond it; alert to contemporary trends, the book returns venerable interpretive tradition to center stage. Most significantly, it is interfaith. Despite the fact that Jews and Christians share a common text in the Hebrew Scripture, the two communities have read their Bibles in isolation from one another, in ignorance of the richness of the other's traditions of reading. This book brings the two traditions into dialogue, enriching established modes of interpretation with unconventional ones. The result is a book that sets rabbinic, patristic, and medieval readings alongside feminist, psychoanalytic, and autobiographical ones, combining historical, literary, and textual criticism with a variety of artistic reinterpretations—wood cuts and paper cuts, poetry and fiction.Less