The Invention Of Hebrew

Download or read book The Invention of Hebrew written by Seth L. Sanders and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How choosing a language created a people

Download or read book The Invention of the Jewish People written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2010-06-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

Download or read book The Invention of the Land of Israel written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.

Download or read book The Hebrew Book in Early Modern Italy written by Joseph R. Hacker and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of printing had major effects on culture and society in the early modern period, and the presence of this new technology—and the relatively rapid embrace of it among early modern Jews—certainly had an effect on many aspects of Jewish culture. One major change that print seems to have brought to the Jewish communities of Christian Europe, particularly in Italy, was greater interaction between Jews and Christians in the production and dissemination of books. Starting in the early sixteenth century, the locus of production for Jewish books in many places in Italy was in Christian-owned print shops, with Jews and Christians collaborating on the editorial and technical processes of book production. As this Jewish-Christian collaboration often took place under conditions of control by Christians (for example, the involvement of Christian typesetters and printers, expurgation and censorship of Hebrew texts, and state control of Hebrew printing), its study opens up an important set of questions about the role that Christians played in shaping Jewish culture. Presenting new research by an international group of scholars, this book represents a step toward a fuller understanding of Jewish book history. Individual essays focus on a range of issues related to the production and dissemination of Hebrew books as well as their audiences. Topics include the activities of scribes and printers, the creation of new types of literature and the transformation of canonical works in the era of print, the external and internal censorship of Hebrew books, and the reading interests of Jews. An introduction summarizes the state of scholarship in the field and offers an overview of the transition from manuscript to print in this period.

Download or read book The Story of Hebrew written by Lewis Glinert and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Story of Hebrew explores the extraordinary hold that Hebrew has had on Jews and Christians, who have invested it with a symbolic power far beyond that of any other language in history. Preserved by the Jews across two millennia, Hebrew endured long after it ceased to be a mother tongue, resulting in one of the most intense textual cultures ever known. Hebrew was a bridge to Greek and Arab science, and it unlocked the biblical sources for Jerome and the Reformation. Kabbalists and humanists sought philosophical truth in it, and Colonial Americans used it to shape their own Israelite political identity. Today, it is the first language of millions of Israelis. A major work of scholarship, The Story of Hebrew is an unforgettable account of what one language has meant and continues to mean.

Download or read book The Invention of God written by Thomas Römer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who invented God? When, why, and where? Thomas Römer seeks to answer these questions about the deity of the great monotheisms—Yhwh, God, or Allah—by tracing Israelite beliefs and their context from the Bronze Age to the end of the Old Testament period in the third century BCE. That we can address such enigmatic questions at all may come as a surprise. But as Römer makes clear, a wealth of evidence allows us to piece together a reliable account of the origins and evolution of the god of Israel. Römer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological, and exegetical work and on recent discoveries in archaeology and epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe—the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah—that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven and earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism. A masterpiece of detective work and exposition by one of the world’s leading experts on the Hebrew Bible, The Invention of God casts a clear light on profoundly important questions that are too rarely asked, let alone answered.

Download or read book The Invention of Ancient Israel written by Keith W. Whitelam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Invention of Ancient Israel shows how the true history of ancient Palestine has been obscured by the search for Israel. Keith W. Whitelam shows how ancient Israel has been invented by scholars in the image of a European nation state, influenced by the realisation of the state of Israel in 1948. He explores the theological and political assumptions which have shaped research into ancient Israel by Biblical scholars, and contributed to the vast network of scholarship which Said identified as 'Orientalist discourse'. This study concentrates on two crucial periods from the end of the late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, a so-called period of the emergence of ancient Israel and the rise of an Israelite state under David. It explores the prospects for developing the study of Palestinian history as a subject in its own right, divorced from the history of the Bible, and argues that Biblical scholars, through their traditional view of this area, have contributed to dispossession both of a Palestinian land and a Palestinian past. This contoversial book is important reading for historians, Biblical specialists, social anthropologists and all those who are interested in the history of ancient Israel and Palestine.