Jewish Thought Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

2025

La quotidienneté à l'épreuve de la déportation Ce colloque intervient dans le prolongement d'une série d'autres colloques sur l'épreuve de la Déportation. L'idée est de se demander ce qu'il en est en particulier de telle ou telle thématique si nous l'étudions à partir du contexte concentrationnaire. Cette fois-ci, nous souhaitons sonder la quotidienneté pour nous demander ce que vit le déporté au jour le jour, comment il le vit et ce qu'il fait de ce qu'il vit. Comment nous représenter cette épreuve ? Comment en transmettre le sens ? Quelles questions nous poser ? Le déporté rencontra à chaque instant la négation de son humanité, c'est-à-dire de sa sensibilité, de son intégrité, de sa dignité… Il fallut donc imaginer toutes sortes de stratagèmes psychiques pour pouvoir compenser ce traitement et survivre : la religion, la prière pour ceux qui étaient croyants, l'art, pour les artistes, l'écriture… Mais on réalise rapidement que le temps du déporté n'est pas le même que le temps que l'on vit dans un confort optimal en contexte de paix même relative. Qu'en est-il donc de cette temporalité de la déportation et de la situation extrême ? La dernière partie du colloque nous permettra d'ouvrir l'horizon sur d'autres situations génocidaires et concentrationnaires : celles du Rwanda, du Cambodge, de la Roumanie. Quels points communs ? Qu'est-ce qui est impérativement singulier à chaque situation ? Comment ces situations nous appellent-elles à penser et prévenir les barbaries futures ?

2025

This draft was prompted by Jewish discussion on the significance of the date Sivan 23 in the Book of Esther, when the decree allowing Jews to defend themselves in Persia was issued. This paper looks at the theological themes of the Purim story in Jewish and Christian thought and in the Quran in the context of the present war between Iran and Israel.

2025

Revised draft of my paper on the meaning of the Book of Esther in relationship to the Iran-Israel War of June, 2025.

2025

English version of an article published in Italian in Sacrum et Polis, June, 2025.

2025, Sacrum et Polis

Può una persona moderna e illuminata prendere sul serio gli insegnamenti filosofico-religiosi di un pensatore medievale come Maimonide (1135-1204)? La risposta dipenderà da ciò che si intende per illuminismo. Qui vogliamo offrire alcuni suggerimenti riguardo il carattere dell'illuminismo medievale, come rappresentato da Maimonide, e il suo rapporto con l'illuminismo nel senso in cui viene inteso oggi. Quello che oggi si chiama comunemente illuminismo fu un movimento dei secoli XVII e XVIII che emerse tramite una deliberata rottura con la filosofia e la religione medievali, con ciò che Thomas Hobbes condannò come "il regno delle tenebre". Grazie al successo di questo movimento, gli occidentali moderni godono di una libertà e di una sicurezza, in particolare riguardo la religione, che è senza precedenti. Dagli orrori della lotta religiosa ("l'infame" di Voltaire) si è passati alla toleranza e alla pace. I filosofi e gli scienziati, come voleva Spinoza, possono pensare ciò che vogliono e dire ciò che pensano senza temere la persecuzione. Come voleva Locke, ognuno è libero di adorare Dio e di cercare la salute della propria anima a modo suo, secondo le proprie opinioni.

2025, PHIL 336 - Pelton - final paper - Martin Buber's I and Thou

Final paper for an undergraduate class on existentialism. PHIL 336: Twentieth-Century Continental Thought: Existentialism. Spring 2012. Professor Martin J. De Nys. Course info:... more

2025, Martin Buber's I and Thou

Final paper for an undergraduate class on existentialism. PHIL 336: Twentieth-Century Continental Thought: Existentialism. Spring 2012. Professor Martin J. De Nys. Course info:... more

2025, Dibur

This paper examines several medieval kabbalistic texts unified by their foundational engagement with the doctrine of cosmic cycles-a doctrine that views creation as a series of seven worlds formed and destroyed in succession, culminating in the eschaton. In the late thirteenth-century expression of this doctrine, situated between Spain and Byzantium, kabbalists depict the natural characteristics of each world or cosmic cycle. A particular focus on the animals within these cycles reveals an ontology of being that disrupts traditional definitions of animals and humans, redefines and blurs animal-human relations, and ultimately envisions a reality in which animals assume the role of kabbalistic masters. By analyzing this kabbalistic portrayal of animals, the study proposes the possibility of remapping the key trends in medieval kabbalah and highlights the relevance of these ideas to contemporary discussions in posthumanism, animal-human studies, and the environmental humanities. a (marginal) kabbalistic reading of animals: revisiting the doctrine of cosmic cycles

2025, Modern Theology

Drawing on the writings of the twentieth-century rabbi-philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-93), and in particular his observations on the nature and value of the aesthetic, this article sketches one element of a larger project that will explore an aesthetic approach to God and religion. The claim here is that bringing Soloveitchik into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, and in particular Nietzsche's claims in The Birth of Tragedy regarding how the world and existence can only be justified as "aesthetic phenomena," can act as a springboard for constructing a picture whereby: (1) the experience of the halakhic life can play a life-affirming role for its more sophisticated practitioners, parallel to that played by aesthetic phenomena in Nietzsche's thought; (2) it is the aesthetic element of halakhic practice that explains how it can do this; and (3) these aesthetic elements of halakhic practice enable its practitioners, in varying ways, to experience halakhah as mediating a relationship with a God who cannot be comprehended propositionally.

2025, Routledge Companion to Jewish Philosophy

Sefirot is the Hebrew term that refers to an essential doctrine underlying virtually the entire corpus of Jewish mystical literature known as kabbalah, constituting a bold schematization of a God that is enigmatically both known and unknown. It provides the basic nomenclature for assembling a complex portrait of an eternal creator God’s internal organismic interplay
between its diverse components and its external relationship with the creation. Its ubiquitously metaphoric sumptuousness demands of the philosopher an acculturated poetic sensibility to decipher its referents
before even beginning to mine its philosophical implications. Prior
to any examination of the intersection between this mystical ‘theory’ and philosophy however, it is paramount to raise questions about the very viability of any such interface. Though recent scholarship has demonstrated its diversely rich facets beyond the noetic , this
discussion’s focus will be restricted to the more theosophical cognitive conceptions of sefirot rather than its performative ones through theurgy, magic, rituals and ecstasy. Can the parochial discipline body of kabbalistic knowledge express itself as, contribute to, complement or supplement philosophy? Must the two remain at worst antagonists, or at best
two solitudes in their respective, mutually exclusive, antithetical quests for the nature, meaning and value of existence?

2025

During my stay in London as a research fellow at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in the years 1995-7, I was looking at some material from Maimonides' medical and halakhic writings dealing with the topic of sexual intercourse (as I was editing bk. 6 on sexual diseases of Ibn al-Jazzār's medical compendium Zād al-musāfir). I was perplexed to find that most of these medical writings had not been edited at all in the original Arabic, as was the case with his Treatise on Asthma; Medical Aphorisms; Commentary on Hippocrates' Aphorisms; Treatise on Poisons; and Extracts from Galen. Even more disturbing was the fact that the existing editions of the medieval Hebrew translations of Maimonides' medical works prepared by Süssman Muntner are unreliable. They are not the result of an evaluation of all the available MSS, lack a critical apparatus referring to deviant readings and suffer from many editorial mistakes, omissions and additions. I also found that of the minor treatises those which have been edited in the past by Hermann Kroner (1870-1930) (both Arabic text and Hebrew translations) have to be revised. Being a Rabbi in Bopfingen-Oberdorf in the south of Germany he only had access to a very limited number of Mss. For instance, his edition of the Arabic text of Maimonides, De coitu, isbased on one Ms only, namely Granada, Biblioteca del Sacro Monte which is partly hard to read due to water damage. For my edition, I could consult four more MSS, plus Genizah fragments. It became clear to me that the publishing of critical editions with translations of the Arabic originals of these works is an urgent desideratum. Only on the basis of these critical editions scholarly research into Maimonides' medical works can and should be carried out. These originals not only provide better readings than the sometimes corrupt Hebrew translations, but sometimes have different versions and additions as, for instance, the K. al-Fuṣūl (Medical Aphorisms).

2025

This paper examines the lives and legacies of the three last rabbis of the Warsaw Ghetto — Rabbi Menachem Zemba, Rabbi Shemshon Stockhammer, and Rabbi David Shapiro — who chose to remain among their people during the Holocaust rather than... more

2025, Africa

The Italo-Ottoman war of 1911-1912 sparked bitter reactions in the contemporary press across the Ottoman Empire, as well as indignation and mobilisation against Italy. Amongst the Ottoman press, the Hebrew language newspapers of Jerusalem... more

2025

El poder renovador de la palabra es puesto de relieve en el texto a partir del caso paradigmatico de Paul Celan y su experiencia durante la barbarie nazi. En efecto, se sostiene que ante los abusos del poder y el triunfo de los... more

2025, .

According to the term Catholic polemicists, historians such as Opitat Milév and Saint Augustin, who called the anti-Romanian movement and the Catholic Church of Carthage loyal to it, called the Donatismus, a Christian religious movement that appeared in Morocco in the third century AD and flourished between the fourth and fifth centuries AD, which was named after one of its great founders (Donatus), a Christian cleric born in Tivest (presentday Algeria), who refused to submit to the will of the emperor, and the resistance of the Catholic bishops of Carthage who They contented themselves with being under the banner of the emperor and the Roman authority, Those conditions in which Donatus saw a severe indignation from the principles of Christ and a shattering of the strength of the faithful believers in Christianity, an outright retreat from true Christianity, a religious apostasy and a betrayal of the victims of oppression (martyrs). Donatism emerged in the form of an independent religious current opposing the Church of Carthage, a reason that was sufficient for the beginning of the conflict between Donatism and its allies from The lower popular classes, together with the Church of Carthage and the Romanian authority, were evident in the many revolutions throughout Morocco, represented by the revolutions of the Circum Cellas, who tasted the woes of the Romanian authority and the Catholic Christians in Morocco, and the revolts of the Fermus brothers and after Gildon (Ghildon), However, the Romanian authority did not remain static, but rather used all its capabilities to quell these revolutions and eliminate this Donatian bee that was able to strike the stability of the Romans and Catholics in .

2025, The Quest. A Quarterly Review

The search for God is a quest within the human mind, as all knowledge of God lies within its measures. The Way to God is Love, a direction or mode of the mind, and the state of pure intelligence in deep contemplation is a state of... more

2025, The State of American Jewry New: Insights and Scholarship

Orthodox Jews represent 10 percent of the American Jewish population which, since the postwar period, has numbered around five and a half million in total.1 The Orthodox proportion has been more or less constant since Jewish agencies started conducting population studies in the 1970s, defying the earlier prognosticators who had prophesied that this group was a "case study of institutional decay. "2 The sociologist Peter Berger was one of the pessimists about the long-term sustainability of the Orthodox-and all other tradition-bound faiths-and its capacity to persist in modern society. Berger, initially anyway, doubted whether this group could continue to pull its adherents along a path of all-or-nothing strict observance of Shabbat, ritual purity for married women, and kosher dietary laws, to list the most well-known strictures of halakhah (Jewish law). He was skeptical that Orthodoxy would hold its adherents against the push of technology, secularism, and other social forces.3 In a word, Orthodox Judaism was perceived as too countercultural to survive. These prognostications were not altogether wrong. An uncountable number left the Orthodox fold, part of a "winnowing" process in which, so suggests the chaff-and-grain analogy, the most committed Orthodox remained while others departed to more liberal religious movements or altogether secular lives.4 But the Orthodox Jewish community managed to persevere due to its high birthrate, low intermarriage rate, and the increase in ba' alei teshuva, so-called returnees to traditional Jewish life.5 Owing to this, thirty-five years after he first opined on the subject, Peter Berger admitted that the "aggressiveness" of those Orthodox Jews who "chose" to remain had fortified their "vulnerable" faith community.6 The Pew Research Center's "Jewish Americans in 2020" report suggests that Orthodox Judaism in the United States is not just

2025

2025, Torah Musings

We are witnessing a major transformation of information and technology with the growth of artificial intelligence (AI). This paper explores different halachic theories of AI and specific questions related to AI and halachah.

2025

There is ample evidence for a flourishing Jewish documentary consciousness in 16th-century Italy. This is clear at many different levels-from the notarial to the constitutional, from the judicial to the legislative, from the personal and mercantile to the criminal and diplomatic. Maintaining documentary archives clearly became common, indeed normative, in a wide range of communities, apparently partly in response to pressure from the outside, partly because of an increasing level of institutionalization in the growing communities themselves. What were the models and norms for Jewish documentary and archival practice? How did existing traditions of terminological, conceptual, and linguistic practices among Jews interact with those imported from the outside? Can we see a difference between Jewish documents that might have to be presented to the outside authorities and those for purely internal use? Can we trace the emergence of a Jewish bureaucratic personnel? In my presentation I will compare documents preserved from two ethnically and geographically quite different communities-that in Rome and that in Pisa/Livorno-to try and answer some of these questions.

2025, מגש הזיכרון ממחנה ג'אדו

[מגש הזיכרון ממחנה ג'אדו [מצגת

כנס יד יצחק בן צבי, קיץ 2025 , ירושלים

הביטויים החזותיים של יהדות צפון אפריקה במלחמת העולם השנייה

2025, MAKING HISTORY STUDIES IN RABBINIC HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE IN HONOR OF RICHARD L. KALMIN Edited by Carol Bakhos and Alyssa M. Gray

2025

Leviticus 23 contains two textual anomalies that suggest that Jewish religious authorities in Babylon during the First Exile made slight alterations to the biblical text that established Israel’s sacred calendar. These changes were made reluctantly and only because the religious authorities believed exigent circumstances required them. They needed to protect a biblically-mandated observance from disappearing, and they needed to recast another to avoid it taking on pagan trappings.

2025

תַּלְמִידֵי חֲכָמִים מַרְבִּים שָׁלוֹם בָּעוֹלָם? היתה יכולה להיות כאן תנועת שלום יהודית גדולה על עמדתם המסורתית של גדולי התורה בעד שלום ונגד מלחמה ושפיכות דמים נוכח המצב בישראל כיום והוויכוח על גיוס תלמידי ישיבה. משבר גיוס תלמידי הישיבה... more

2025

For an Israeli Civic Identity
Yigal Bin-Nun Judaism is in constant transformation. And yet, in the face of contemporary upheavals, it runs the risk of a gradual collapse. Ironically, it was precisely the founding of the Jewish State that brought halakha into the most serious crisis in its history. This turning point coincided with humanity's entry into the Age of Enlightenment and its distancing from religion. In retrospect, one can say that halakha has failed in its attempt to govern the lives of Jews in their own state. It lacked the courage necessary to adapt to the realities of a sovereign people. Its rabbinical authorities were unable to revise commandments that had become anachronistic, contrary to modern ethics and incompatible with social progress. Instead, they chose to retreat inward, building walls and erecting new barriers in an attempt to contain the ideological earthquake shaking their foundations. In place of the great intellectual figures who once shaped Judaism, a disoriented rabbinate has emerged-one that veers toward mysticism, excessive messianism, and the exploitation of the most vulnerable. A Crisis of Judaism in a Jewish State The political activism aimed at imposing religion on secular society reflects a latent crisis of faith within the religious community itself. Their leaders are no longer driven by a desire for renewal, but by a visceral fear of change. The effects of this became apparent rather quickly: halakha is now undergoing an unprecedented intellectual decline. Its fragility is evident in the mediocrity of its elites—many of its defenders have become mere religious bureaucrats, sometimes corrupt, and utterly detached from any ethical or spiritual reflection. They have abandoned engagement with the fundamental questions of faith, preferring instead to attack secular Jews through practices of religious harassment. Lacking the courage to reform itself, halakha has ended up alienating a large segment of the Jewish people.

2025

This short essay is part of a symposium issue titled "People of the Book: Judaism's Influence on American Legal Scholarship." The essay is in part a bit of a spiritual memoir. More important, it tries to tie together various aspects of pluralism and existential encounter that have animated much of my scholarly work. The topics touched on include the question of religion-based exemptions in American constitutional law, the complicated relationship of natural law and positive, law, the debate on same-sex marriage, the problem I call "constitutional glare," and the jurisprudence of Jewish law.

2025, Journal of Textual Reasoning 16.1: 35-58. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/jtr/vol16/iss1/3

The two volumes of "Dirshuni" - contemporary women's midrashim - purport to be part of the rabbinic tradition of midrash. This paper compares salient aspects ("Form, Language, Contents, and Purpose") of selected passages in Dirshuni to... more

2025, Materia Giudaica. Rivista dell’associazione italiana per lo studio del giudaismo

In her personal, sometimes nostalgic, essay Ruth, the American Jewish author Cynthia Ozick depicts the biblical matriarch Ruth as a «second Abraham», for being capable of speaking the language of visionaries and prophets, and, therefore, knowing by herself God’s existence and oneness. Unlike her sister-in-law, Orpah, Ruth voluntarily leaves her uncomfortable past behind to embrace a not yet realized future. Taking a cue from Maimonides’ prophetic anthropology and from Leo Baeck’s idea of Judaism, Ozick transforms the Moabite heroine into a modern alter ego. Ruth’s spiritual journey from idolatry to ethical monotheism becomes an intrinsic part of Ozick’s family story, foreshadowing her spiritual and progressive passage from a childish, mythological religiosity to an intellectual approach to God.

2025

Erich Neumann was one of the most important disciples of C.G. Jung. He fled Germany in 1934, settled in Tel Aviv and began a deep philosophical and psychological investigation of Judaism that continued throughout the war years. The result was two unpublished volumes, The Roots of Jewish Consciousness: Volume One: Revelation and Apocalypse, on biblical Judaism, and Volume Two: Hasidism1, finally published in 2019. Reuven Kruger has given us some excellent introductions to Erich Neumann's 'Jewish Corpus'. Here I will discuss Neumann on aa central theme in Hasidism: elevating 'holy sparks' and 'alien thoughts'.

2025, Studies in History and Jurisprudence

This paper offers a critical response to an essay which argues that Noahides are prohibited from innovating religious practices, creating ceremonies, or adopting additional commandments. While affirming the Torah’s insistence on halakhic precision and the prohibition against unauthorized religious innovation within the covenant of Israel, this paper distinguishes between covenantal boundaries for Jews and those for Noahides. Drawing on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, the Talmudic discussions in Sanhedrin 59a, Avodah Zarah 64b, and Menachot 109b, and the philosophical writings of Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh, the paper argues that non-Jews are not only permitted—but expected—to develop their own covenants through religious expressions, provided these do not attempt to replace or disinherit the covenant of Israel. By introducing the concept of religious federalism, it proposes that diversity among mainstream religions can coexist within Torah universalism, as long as ethical monotheism and covenantal integrity are maintained.

2025

Ecological responsibility in Hans Jonas's The Principles of Responsibility (1979).

2025, American Jewish History

2025, La Corónica

Abstract: Cedric Dover, an Indian-born botanist and acolyte of W.E.B. DuBois,
was a proponent of a program of “positive eugenics” that would have used his knowledge of Mendelian genetics to homogenize the population of the British Empire and, thereby, reduce or eliminate the possibility for racism amongst its subjects. In the course of his study, Dover learned of the work of three medieval, Arabic-language writers whom he came to consider primordial theorists of race. Among the three was Judah Halevi, the twelfth-century poet and philosopher whose work across genres manifests racial animus as it was understood during that period. Dover sought to understand Halevi’s conception of race and to situate it, at least in part, as a product of Halevi’s sense of himself as a member of a religious minority group in a time of great social and political change.

2025, ISRG Journal of Arts,Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper aims to present Hans Jonas' reflections on the ethical challenges posed by the advent of modern technology, as well as the traditional ethical discourse of Timor-Leste, lulik, which acknowledges the sacredness of nature. It seeks to demonstrate how both perspectives can contribute to a reconciliation between humanity and the environment. Jonas' philosophical project proposes a Theory of Responsibility that responds to the threats generated by technological action, whose expanded power now holds the potential both to preserve and to destroy life. In contrast, lulik teaches reverence and care for nature through sacred ritual practices. Modern technology, marked by moral ambiguity-representing technical advancement but ethical decline-poses serious threats to future generations and the biosphere. This necessitates a rethinking of human action, one that integrates responsibility and respect, thereby contributing to an ethical paradigm rooted in care and responsibility.

2025, ISRG Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

2025

La ricerca documentale sulla presenza ebraica nel Sud Italia da Cesare Colafemmina al CeRDEM .

2025, Francis Keli Munyao

In a world increasingly defined by individualism, consumerism, and moral uncertainty, I find my identity not in titles or trends but in Kithio. Rooted in the cultural philosophy of the Akamba people, Kithio is not simply tradition; it is a way of being, a way of relating, and a way of leading. To call myself Kithio is to commit to a life of truth, justice, humility, and interconnectedness. In embracing Kithio, I also affirm Ubuntu the Southern African philosophy that says, "I am because we are." Together, Kithio and Ubuntu form the foundation of an African humanism that guides both my personal life and my public vocation.

2025

These thoughts are unfiltered by normative beliefs, but they are a blend of my inheritance, further study, and cultural immersion.
If you would like to adapt aspects of my philosophy to your own, feel free to do so. These are techniques I’ve not only inherited but developed to shield my spiritual and true self from criticism, shame, or structural exclusion (in education or otherwise).

2025

This white paper presents the findings of a comprehensive investigation into public conspiratorial claims levied primarily by decentralized online entities such as 4chan and Anonymous, alleging coordinated global domination by the Jewish people. These accusations often cite financial power, influence over media, or control over technology and social systems as their foundation. The intent of this review is to test these claims through the lens of karmic law, spiritual doctrine, and empirical historical analysis.

2025

Über ein uraltes Gerücht, seine Herkunft und Bedeutung