A discussion group that’s open to all AJS members
Rachel Rafael Neis deposited Eyeing Idols: Rabbinic Viewing Practices in Late Antiquity in the group
Interdisciplinary, Theoretical and New Approaches to Jewish Studies on AJS Commons 4 weeks, 1 day agoThis article introduces a new perspective, the history of vision, into the study of rabbinic literature. Specifically it examines how rabbinic visual regimes dealt with those objects and images that it designated as idols. It argues that rabbis took seeing seriously and that they developed a set of strategies to shape the viewing of problematic…[Read more]
Rachel Rafael Neis deposited ‘Their Backs toward the Temple, and Their Faces toward the East:’ The Temple and Toilet Practices in Rabbinic Palestine and Babylonia in the group
Interdisciplinary, Theoretical and New Approaches to Jewish Studies on AJS Commons 4 weeks, 1 day agoThis article treats the cultural meaning of rabbinic toilet rules from their Tannaitic instantiation through to later developments in Palestine and Mesopotamia. It argues that these rules draw their corporeal and mental bearings from the Jerusalem temple, in inverse and opposite directions to prayer deportment. It shows how the juxtaposition of…[Read more]
Rachel Rafael Neis deposited The Seduction of Law: Rethinking Legal Studies in Jewish Studies in the group
Interdisciplinary, Theoretical and New Approaches to Jewish Studies on AJS Commons 1 month agoThis essay considers the category of “Jewish law” in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and historiographic assessment of the ways that Judaism’s link to law has come to appear as obvious. Considering that our present concepts of law are invariably linked to a geographically and temporally parochial “mythology of modern law,” the essay sounds…[Read more]
Rachel Rafael Neis deposited Religious Lives of Image-Things, Avodah Zarah, and Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine in the group
Interdisciplinary, Theoretical and New Approaches to Jewish Studies on AJS Commons 7 months agoDrawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on…[Read more]
Marc Bregman deposited “God Made Himself into a Serpent before Moses” in the group
Interdisciplinary, Theoretical and New Approaches to Jewish Studies on AJS Commons 1 year, 2 months ago“God made Himself into a Serpent before Moses”
A Unique Midrashic Tradition on Exodus Chapters III-IV (Parashat Va-Era)
from an Early Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Genizah Fragment
