The Doctrine Of The Messiah In Medieval Jewish Literature 2 Ed

This Is A Solid Scholarly Book About The Messianic Views Of The Greatest Scholars And Thinkers Of The Middle Ages, Saadia, Gaon, Rash, Judah Halevi, To Name A Few.

One of the worl'ds leading scholars of Jewish thought examines the long tradition of Jewish messianism and mystical experience.

This Noble House explores the preoccupation with biblical genealogy that emerged among Jews in the Islamic Near East between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Arnold Franklin looks to Jewish society's fascination with Davidic ancestry, examining the profusion of claims to the lineage that had already begun to appear by the year 1000, the attempts to chart the validity of such claims through elaborate genealogical lists, and the range of meanings that came to be ascribed to the House of David in this period. Jews and Muslims shared the perception that the Davidic line and the noble family of the Prophet Muhammad were counterparts to one another, but captivation with Davidic lineage was just one facet of a much broader Jewish concern with biblical ancestry. Based on documentary material from the Cairo Geniza, the book argues that this "genealogical turn" should be understood as a consequence of Jewish society's dynamic encounter with its Arab-Islamic milieu and constituted a selective adaptation to the importance of ancestry in the dominant cultural environment. While Jewish society surely had genealogical materials and preoccupations of its own upon which to draw, the Arab-Islamic regard for tracing the lineage of Muhammad provided the impetus for deploying those traditions in new and unprecedented ways. On the one hand, the increased focus on ancestry is an instance of medieval Jews reflexively and unselfconsciously making use of the cultural forms of their Muslim neighbors; on the other, it is an expression of cultural competitiveness or even resistance, an implicit response to the claim of Arab genealogical superiority that uses the very methods of the Arab "science of genealogy." To be sure, Franklin notes, Jews were only one of several non-Arab minority groups to take up genealogy in this way. At the broadest level, then, This Noble House illuminates a strategy that various minority populations utilized as they sought legitimacy within the medieval Arab-Islamic world.

Provides sociological analyses of religious developments and identities in both historical and contemporary Jewish communities.

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A collection of twenty-one essays clustered around the theme of apocalyptic—revelations of hitherto undisclosed divine mysteries to human seers, either directly or through the mediation of an interpreting angel. Preliminary essays on the Book of Job, Messianism, and apocalyptic ethics are followed by five studies centred upon Jewish apocalypses composed around the turn of the era, two anonymous, three pseudonymous, and four essays on New Testament writers, two on Paul, one on Mark, and one on John. A reflection upon an early Islamic convert from Judaism, emphasizing the ‘Abrahamic-lexicon’ common to all three religions of the book, is succeeded by essays on two medieval Christian visionaries, Joachim of Fiore and Francis of Assisi. After a further essay on a little known Syriac apocalyptic text the volume concludes with studies of four different aspects of the Book of Revelation itself.