Interaction Between Judaism And Christianity In History Religion Art And Literature

This volume contains essays dealing with complex relationships between Judaism and Christianity, taking a bold step, assuming that no historical period can be excluded from the interactive process between Judaism and Christianity, conscious or unconscious, as either rejection or appropriation

This book investigates the complexity, diversity, uniqueness and enduring significance of Jewish life in the Christian Roman Empire, from 312 to 634 C.E. During this period there occurred an unprecedented Jewish cultural explosion, encompassing the compilation and/or composition of such texts as the Palestinian Talmud, the main aggadic midrashim, an extensive magical/mystical literature, the revived apocalypse, a vast corpus of piyyutim and the beginnings of a practically oriented halakhic literature. Furthermore, this was the era of the florition of Jewish art, for it was only in the fourth century that a specifically Jewish iconographic language came into common use in the synagogues and catacombs, the archeological remains of almost all of which date from this period. This volume moves toward a synthesizing and contextualizing view of the Jewish cultural production of late antiquity, examining the interaction of Jews, Christians and pagans and with the emergence of new religious forms generated by such interaction.

The essays collected in this volume present a multi-faceted range of scholarship from late antique synagogues, Jewish funerary art, early Christian and Byzantine mosaics, to Byzantine and Jewish book art, and the representation of the Old Testament in Western manuscripts.

This volume deals with the role of saints and exemplary persons in Judaism and Christianity throughout history to the present time in an interdisciplinary perspective.

Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, focuses on three provinces Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790 - 1840, when the shtetl was "the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews."

Provides the first extensive collection of traditional and academic Jewish approaches to the religions of the world, focusing on those Jewish thinkers that actually encounter the other world religions -that is, it moves beyond the theory of inclusive/exclusive/pluralistic categories and looks at Judaism's interactions with other faiths.

This survey of ancient Jewish art traces Tabernacle implements and their iconographic development from the Second Temple period until late sixth century CE. It examines appearances of seven-branch menorah, Torah ark, and other motifs found in archeological discoveries of burial art synagogue decorations.

How the rise of Christianity profoundly influenced the development of Judaism in late antiquity In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schäfer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.