A Matter Of Geography A New Perspective On Medieval Hebrew Poetry

A Matter of Geography deals with medieval secular Hebrew poetry from Spain and elsewhere, based on a “center and periphery” model. It delineates how Spanish school strove for centrality, as well as how the poets from elsewhere coped with it.

The year 1492 has long divided the study of Sephardic culture into two distinct periods, before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. David A. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to the 16th centuries and shows that this literature was shaped by two interwoven experiences of diaspora: first from the Biblical homeland Zion and later from the ancestral hostland, Sefarad. Jewish in Spain and Spanish abroad, these writers negotiated Jewish, Spanish, and diasporic idioms to produce a uniquely Sephardic perspective. Wacks brings Diaspora Studies into dialogue with medieval and early modern Sephardic literature for the first time.

This volume is a collection of studies in the cultural history of al-Andalus in honor of Ross Brann on his 70th birthday.

The Jewish population of early modern Italy was characterised by its inner diversity, which found its expression in the coexistence of various linguistic, cultural and liturgical traditions, as well as social and economic patterns. The contributions in this volume aim to explore crucial questions concerning the self-perception and identity of early modern Italian Jews from new perspectives and angles.

Around the Point is a unique collection that brings to readers the works of almost thirty scholars dealing with Jewish literature in various Jewish and non-Jewish languages, such as Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, Serbian, Polish, and Russian. Although this volume does not cover all the languages of Jewish letters, it is a significant endeavor in establishing the realm of multilingual international study of Jewish literature and culture. Among the questions under discussion, are the problems of the definition of Jewish identity and literature, literary history, language choice and diglossy, lingual and cultural influences, intertextuality, Holocaust literature, Kabbala and Hassidism, Jewish poetics, theatre and art, and the problems of the acceptance of literature.

A collection of seventeen essays on pre-modern Hebrew poetry in honor of Wout van Bekkum. The articles in this volume all seek to examine how the religious, cultural, and social context in which the poet functioned impacted on and is visible, either explicitly or more elliptically, in their poetical oeuvre. For this purposes a broad understanding of "world" has been accepted, including both the natural world and the constructed one (society, culture, language) as well as the spiritual and emotional world. History, a pillar of the man-made constructed world, has been used to determine the boundaries: from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and—in instances where the topic connects to older traditions—to Early Modern Judaism, i.e. pre-modern Hebrew (and Aramaic) poetry. The articles in this volume, in the breadth of their temporal and spatial range and their multiplicity of approaches and methodologies, highlight the richness of contemporary scholarship on Hebrew poetry. The volume invites the reader to engage with this astonishing body of poetry, while providing a glimpse into the world of the payṭanim, and the cultures and societies from which they drew their ininspiration and to which they made such important contributions.

A radical revisitation of Immanuel of Rome’s celestial tour, Mahberet Ha-Tofet Ve-ha-‘Eden.

Bilingual Europe makes clear that Latin played an important role in European culture for a much longer period than we thought and it explores how and why this was so.