The Zohar Reception And Impact
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The Zohar: Reception and Impact
Author: Boaz Huss
language: en
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Release Date: 2016-05-12
National Jewish Book Awards Finalist for the Nahum N. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship, 2016. From its first appearance, the Zohar has been one of the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books in Jewish culture. Many scholarly works have been dedicated to its mystical content, its literary style, and the question of its authorship. This book focuses on different issues: it examines the various ways in which the Zohar has been received by its readers and the impact it has had on Jewish culture, including the fluctuations in its status and value and the various cultural practices linked to these changes. This dynamic and multi-layered history throws important new light on many aspects of Jewish cultural history over the last seven centuries. Boaz Huss has broken new ground with this study, which examines of the reception and canonization of the Zohar as well as its criticism and rejection from its inception to the present day. His underlying assumption is that the different values attributed to the Zohar are not inherent qualities of the zoharic texts, but rather represent the way it has been perceived by its readers in different cultural contexts. He therefore considers not only the attribution of different qualities to the Zohar through time but also the people who were engaged in attributing such qualities and the social and cultural functions associated with their creation, re-creation, and rejection. For each historical period from the beginning of Zohar scholarship to the present, Huss considers the social conditions that stimulated the veneration of the Zohar as well as the factors that contributed to its rejection, alongside the cultural functions and consequences of each approach. Because the multiple modes of the reception of the Zohar have had a decisive influence on the history of Jewish culture, this highly innovative and wide-ranging approach to Zohar scholarship will have important repercussions for many areas of Jewish studies.
Tradition, Interpretation, and Change
Author: Kenneth E. Berger
language: en
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
Release Date: 2019-03-15
Minhag (custom) played a far greater and far more important role in medieval Ashkenazic society than in any other Jewish community. In upholding the authority of a custom, halakhic authorities frequently asserted that "custom prevails over halakhah." Furthermore, Ashkenazic authorities asserted that Ashkenazic custom is more authentic than the customs of other Jewish communities, including those of Sepharad (Spain). Given the importance attributed to minhag and the influence of the siddur commentaries of the circle of Hassidei Ashkenaz, which emphasize the precise formulation of liturgical texts, one might assume that Ashkenazic Jewry was committed to preserving ancestral custom and opposed to liturgical change. However, the reality is that the liturgy of Ashkenaz was never static. From a very early time, new liturgies and liturgical practices were incorporated into the service, the inclusion of various prayers was challenged, and variant readings of prayers became standard. Tradition, Interpretation, and Change focuses on developments in the Ashkenazic rite, the liturgical rite of most of central and eastern European Jewry, from the eleventh century through the seventeenth. Kenneth Berger argues that how a prayer or practice was understood, or the rationale for its recitation or performance, often had a profound effect on whether and when it was to be recited, as well as on the specific wording of the prayer. In some cases, the formulation of new interpretations served a conservative function, as when rabbinic authorities sought to find new, alternative explanations which would justify the continued performance of practices whose original rationale no longer applied. In other cases, new understandings of a liturgical practice led to changes in that practice, and even to the development of new liturgies expressive of those interpretations. In Tradition, Interpretation, and Change, Berger draws upon a wide body of primary sources, including classical rabbinic and geonic works, liturgical documents found in the Cairo genizah, medieval codes, responsa, and siddur commentaries, minhag books, medieval siddur manuscripts, and early printed siddurim, as well as a wealth of secondary sources, to provide the reader with an in-depth account of the history and history of interpretation of many familiar and not-so-familiar prayers and liturgical practices. While emphasizing the role that the interpretation ascribed to various prayers and practices had in shaping the liturgy of medieval and early modern Ashkenaz, Berger illustrates the degree to which Sephardic and kabbalistic influences, concern for the fate of the dead, the fear of demons, and the desire for healing and divine protection from a variety of dangers shaped both liturgical practice and the way in which those practices were understood.
Cultic and Further Orders: Semiotics of a Kabbalistic Culture
This book starts from the assumption that semiotics of culture and social-anthropological studies can offer useful tools to understand large segments and lasting aspects of the kabbalistic tradition. It attempts to study from this perspective the Sephardi Kabbalah, by examining 16th-century emblematic commentaries that collect, rearrange and carry on the earlier kabbalistic interpretation of the rabbinic ritual system. In this unusual light, much kabbalistic culture appears as an ongoing semiotic intensification of deep structures governing the discourse and practice of the Jews – so that, for instance, institutional cultic orders are integrated by other forms of order in imagination, thought, writing and experience.