Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Jewish Identity and Politics between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba: Groups, Normativity, and Rituals . Edited by Benedikt Eckhardt. (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 155). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Pp. ix, 282. Cloth with dust jacket. €105.00 / US$ 144.00. ISBN 978-90-04-21046-2.

Jewish Identity and Politics between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba: Groups, Normativity, and... This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Münster in 2009. The conference took as its starting point the assumption that what we call “Judaism” was a “political-ethnographic category” (2), and thus that Jewish identity was necessarily related to and influenced by political developments between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba. The keywords in the book’s subtitle—“Groups, Normativity, and Rituals”—were added to frame the discussion. After the editor’s introduction, there follow eleven essays arranged in chronological order of subject matter. In the opening essay, David Goodblatt observes that early Jewish self-designations correspond, for the most part, to a linguistic pattern. Jews who wrote in Hebrew preferred the name “Israel,” while Jews who wrote in Greek tended to employ “Judean,” the term universally applied to Jews by outsiders. The main exception is the Hasmoneans, who used “Judean” in texts composed in Hebrew. According to Goodblatt, “inertia” explains this anomaly. Hasmonean territory had been known as “Judah” for centuries of Persian and Greek rule, and the name stuck. As the region’s lingua franca , Aramaic usage had more influence over Hasmonean diction than the normative biblical label “Israel.” In the end, however, the meaning of both http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal for the Study of Judaism Brill

Jewish Identity and Politics between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba: Groups, Normativity, and Rituals . Edited by Benedikt Eckhardt. (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 155). Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Pp. ix, 282. Cloth with dust jacket. €105.00 / US$ 144.00. ISBN 978-90-04-21046-2.

Miller, David M.
Journal for the Study of Judaism , Volume 44 (3): 397 – Jan 1, 2013
Download PDF
2 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/jewish-identity-and-politics-between-the-maccabees-and-bar-kokhba-MEp1P91nql

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Subject
Review of Books
ISSN
0047-2212
eISSN
1570-0631
DOI
10.1163/15700631-12340008
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This volume contains the proceedings of a conference held at the University of Münster in 2009. The conference took as its starting point the assumption that what we call “Judaism” was a “political-ethnographic category” (2), and thus that Jewish identity was necessarily related to and influenced by political developments between the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba. The keywords in the book’s subtitle—“Groups, Normativity, and Rituals”—were added to frame the discussion. After the editor’s introduction, there follow eleven essays arranged in chronological order of subject matter. In the opening essay, David Goodblatt observes that early Jewish self-designations correspond, for the most part, to a linguistic pattern. Jews who wrote in Hebrew preferred the name “Israel,” while Jews who wrote in Greek tended to employ “Judean,” the term universally applied to Jews by outsiders. The main exception is the Hasmoneans, who used “Judean” in texts composed in Hebrew. According to Goodblatt, “inertia” explains this anomaly. Hasmonean territory had been known as “Judah” for centuries of Persian and Greek rule, and the name stuck. As the region’s lingua franca , Aramaic usage had more influence over Hasmonean diction than the normative biblical label “Israel.” In the end, however, the meaning of both

Journal

Journal for the Study of Judaism – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2013

There are no references for this article.