[PDF] The Tahkemoni eBook

Author : Judah Alharizi
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 733 pages
File Size : 10,36 MB
Release : 2003-08-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1909821179

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The crowning jewel of medieval Hebrew rhymed prose in vigorous translation vividly illuminates a lost Iberian world. With full scholarly annotation and literary analysis.

Author : Michael Rand
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 31,87 MB
Release : 2018-07-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004373772

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Michael Rand’s The Evolution of al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni offers an in-depth, textually-grounded analysis of the development of al-Harizi’s classic maqama collection, together with some previously unknown texts that may very well have originally belonged to the Taḥkemoni.

Author : Ross Brann
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 46,94 MB
Release : 2010-01-10
Category : History
ISBN : 069114673X

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Power in the Portrayal unveils a fresh and vital perspective on power relations in eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim Spain as reflected in historical and literary texts of the period. Employing the methods of the new historical literary study in looking at a range of texts, Ross Brann reveals the paradoxical relations between the Andalusi Muslim and Jewish elites in an era when long periods of tolerance and respect were punctuated by outbreaks of tension and hostility. The examined Arabic texts reveal a fragmented perception of the Jew in eleventh-century al-Andalus. They depict seemingly contradictory figures at whose poles are an intelligent, skilled, and noble Jew deserving of homage and a vile, stupid, and fiendish enemy of God and Islam. For their part, the Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic texts display a deep-seated reluctance to portray Muslims in any light at all. Brann cogently demonstrates that these representations of Jews and Muslims--each of which is concerned with issues of sovereignty and the exercise of power--reflect the shifting, fluctuating, and ambivalent relations between elite members of two of the ethno-religious communities of al-Andalus. Brann's accessible prose is enriched by his splendid translations; the original texts are also included. This book is the first to study the construction of social meaning in Andalusi Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew literary texts and historical chronicles. The novel approach illuminates nuances of respect, disinterest, contempt, and hatred reflected in the relationship between Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain.

Author : Jonathan P. Decter
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 20,76 MB
Release : 2007-08-08
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 0253116953

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This stimulating and graceful book explores Iberian Jewish attitudes toward cultural transition during the 12th and 13th centuries, when growing intolerance toward Jews in Islamic al-Andalus and the southward expansion of the Christian Reconquista led to the relocation of Jews from Islamic to Christian domains. By engaging literary topics such as imagery, structure, voice, landscape, and geography, Jonathan P. Decter traces attitudes toward transition that range from tenacious longing for the Islamic past to comfort in the Christian environment. Through comparison with Arabic and European vernacular literatures, Decter elucidates a medieval Hebrew poetics of estrangement and nostalgia, poetic responses to catastrophe, and the refraction of social issues in fictional narratives. Published with the generous support of the Koret Foundation.

Author : Michael Rand
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 44,96 MB
Release : 2021-10-18
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004462139

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This work contains a Hebrew and an English section. The former is an edition of the Maḥberot Eitan ha-Ezraḥi, a maqama collection composed after the pattern of al-Ḥarizi’s Taḥkemoni. The edition opens with an introduction, translated at the beginning of the English section. The rest of the English section is devoted to an analysis of that branch of the Hebrew maqama tradition that is rooted in the Maqāmāt of al-Ḥarīrī, starting from a review of the evidence for the presence of the Maqāmāt in the world of Hebrew letters, through the Taḥkemoni, and concluding with the Maḥbarot of Immanuel ha-Romi.

Author : Eitan P. Fishbane
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 28,29 MB
Release : 2018-11-22
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0190885475

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In the study of Judaism, the Zohar has captivated the minds of interpreters for over seven centuries, and continues to entrance readers in contemporary times. Yet despite these centuries of study, very little attention has been devoted to the literary dimensions of the text, or to formal appreciation of its status as one of the great works of religious literature. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a critical approach to the zoharic story, seeking to explore the interplay between fictional discourse and mystical exegesis. Eitan Fishbane argues that the narrative must be understood first and foremost as a work of the fictional imagination, a representation of a world and reality invented by the thirteenth-century authors of the text. He claims that the text functions as a kind of dramatic literature, one in which the power of revealing mystical secrets is demonstrated and performed for the reading audience. The Art of Mystical Narrative offers a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective on the Zohar and on the intersections of literary and religious studies.

Author : Michael A. Ryan
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 13,22 MB
Release : 2012-03-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0801463165

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Astrology in the Middle Ages was considered a branch of the magical arts, one informed by Jewish and Muslim scientific knowledge in Muslim Spain. As such it was deeply troubling to some Church authorities. Using the stars and planets to divine the future ran counter to the orthodox Christian notion that human beings have free will, and some clerical authorities argued that it almost certainly entailed the summoning of spiritual forces considered diabolical. We know that occult beliefs and practices became widespread in the later Middle Ages, but there is much about the phenomenon that we do not understand. For instance, how deeply did occult beliefs penetrate courtly culture and what exactly did those in positions of power hope to gain by interacting with the occult? In A Kingdom of Stargazers, Michael A. Ryan examines the interest in astrology in the Iberian kingdom of Aragon, where ideas about magic and the occult were deeply intertwined with notions of power, authority, and providence. Ryan focuses on the reigns of Pere III (1336–1387) and his sons Joan I (1387–1395) and Martí I (1395–1410). Pere and Joan spent lavish amounts of money on astrological writings, and astrologers held great sway within their courts. When Martí I took the throne, however, he was determined to purge Joan's courtiers and return to religious orthodoxy. As Ryan shows, the appeal of astrology to those in power was clear: predicting the future through divination was a valuable tool for addressing the extraordinary problems—political, religious, demographic—plaguing Europe in the fourteenth century. Meanwhile, the kings' contemporaries within the noble, ecclesiastical, and mercantile elite had their own reasons for wanting to know what the future held, but their engagement with the occult was directly related to the amount of power and authority the monarch exhibited and applied. A Kingdom of Stargazers joins a growing body of scholarship that explores the mixing of religious and magical ideas in the late Middle Ages.

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 575 pages
File Size : 29,49 MB
Release : 2009-01-10
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 1400827558

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Hebrew culture experienced a renewal in medieval Spain that produced what is arguably the most powerful body of Jewish poetry written since the Bible. Fusing elements of East and West, Arabic and Hebrew, and the particular and the universal, this verse embodies an extraordinary sensuality and intense faith that transcend the limits of language, place, and time. Peter Cole's translations reveal this remarkable poetic world to English readers in all of its richness, humor, grace, gravity, and wisdom. The Dream of the Poem traces the arc of the entire period, presenting some four hundred poems by fifty-four poets, and including a panoramic historical introduction, short biographies of each poet, and extensive notes. (The original Hebrew texts are available on the Princeton University Press Web site.) By far the most potent and comprehensive gathering of medieval Hebrew poems ever assembled in English, Cole's anthology builds on what poet and translator Richard Howard has described as "the finest labor of poetic translation that I have seen in many years" and "an entire revelation: a body of lyric and didactic verse so intense, so intelligent, and so vivid that it appears to identify a whole dimension of historical consciousness previously unavailable to us." The Dream of the Poem is, Howard says, "a crowning achievement."