Picture History Of Jewish Civilization Pdf Free Download

[Channing Chambers]

Our community has benefitted from a Reconstructionist understanding of Judaism as a civilization. As the rabbi, I have sought to deepen our awareness of the vast richness of Jewish civilization that extends beyond Eastern Europe. We began to learn from the global Jewish community and to incorporate an array of Jewish lore, rituals, music and prayer forms into our worship services, and our family and adult education. We sought to understand the contexts and history of these parts of our collective heritage, thus educating ourselves and connecting to and honoring our wide Jewish sense of family. This global approach disrupts an overemphasis of the normative Jewish narrative and makes visible a commitment to recognizing the truth of the diversity of who is a Jew. On a practical level, it has created entry points for Jews of different ethnicities to feel welcomed and represented. For example, a bar mitzvah of Indian and Jewish heritage requested that we incorporate the piyyut Ahot Ketanah, which emerged from the Indian Jewish community at his bar mitzvah. He had experienced it as part of our High Holiday ritual and remembered that we thus honored his heritage, and he felt affirmed.


"Basic" and "introductory" Jewish Studiescourses may also be unacceptable because they have to be much more elementarythan parallel courses in other parts of the university. My colleagues and Idaily pay the price of the Jewish community's failure to educate itsyoung. Many, if not most, students taking Spanish or French at collegealready have studied those languages for a number of years. When we hearcalls for two years of required foreign-language study in college, the intentis two years beyond high school level. Almost all students taking Hebrew incollege have to start from alef bet (whether or not they attended Hebrewschool as children). More generally, every course in American history at agood university can assume that the students already know the basic outlines:who the colonists were, when the Revolution took place, what the Civil Warwas all about, and so forth. The students are not only fluent in English.They will also have considerable familiarity with the American culturallegacy, both through the classics that they were assigned in high school andthrough the mass media which they encountered in their daily lives. TheJewish Studies teacher can assume none of this. Quite to the contrary, he (orshe) must assume that his students know next to nothing about the Jewishpast, that they have only the vaguest idea of what Torah is, that, for them,Talmud is terra totally incognita, and that, indeed, they are functional, andmore likely total, illiterates in the language and culture of contemporaryJewish civilization.(4) And when we recall that Jewish Studies are inherentlymore complex and difficult than many other popular majors, we realize thatthere is much reason to feel that the present state of affairs is not yetsatisfactory.



picture history of jewish civilization pdf free download

Download https://t.co/TAdldzTP8a






12. See the insightful remarks of Bernard Lewis, "ThePro-Islamic Jews," reprinted in Islam in History, pp. 123-137 and idem,History Remembered, Recovered, Invented (Princeton NJ: Princeton UniversityPress, 1975), part III. In a field with which I am particularly familiar, thehistory of Italian Jewry, nothing illustrates the tendentiousness of thistype of scholarship better than Moritz Gudermann's idealized picture ofthe relations between Italian Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors in his DieGeschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der abenlandischen Juden(1880-88). Gudermann cited such positive relations as a model forcontemporary treatment of the Jews in vienna where he was Chief Rabbi. (It isnot coincidental that Gudermann was instrumental in keeping the first ZionistCongress out of Vienna; the rabbi felt that Herzl's nationalist goalsundermined the Jewish struggle for acceptance into general society.) Hisviews were echoed by Cecil Roth and by virtually every other historian whodealt with the period. See most recently Robert Bonfil's importantanalysis of "The Historian's Perception of the Jews in the ItalianRenaissance. Towards a Reappraisal," Revue des Etudes Juives 143 (1984):59-82.


Ways of the World: A Brief Global History, Volume I focuses on the big picture of history with its brief-by-design narrative which exposes you to more content. By highlighting compelling historical trends, themes, and developments in world history, you'll learn how to review evidence in the same way current historians do.

35fe9a5643