'At the Age of 12': The Boy Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:41-52), The Emperor Augustus, and the Social Setting of the Third Gospel

The story of the boy Jesus at the age of 12 in the temple (Luke2:41–52) is often read and understood in relation to itsinherently Jewish narrative setting. The probable recipientsof Luke–Acts were, however, almost certainly Gentilesliving in the cities of Asia Minor in the late first centuryCE, removed by at least a generation from the Jewish originsof Christianity. The social setting of the recipients is, then,shaped not by the rituals and symbols of late Second TempleJudaism, but those of imperial Rome and, in particular, thelegacy and cult of the first of the imperial princeps, thatof Augustus. Writing in this milieu, Luke seeks to present Jesusas a significant figure in history in accordance with the conventionsof contemporary Greco-Roman biography, and to transmit throughhis infancy narrative those traditions about Jesus which assistin presenting him as the ultimate superior and successor tothe deified Augustus. The episode in the temple is includedby Luke in his infancy narrative because it is consistent with,and contributes to, this broader purpose.     

MUSIC OF THE “FOLKS‐NESHOME”

In their task of creating a style of “Jewish” national art music based on ethnographic research, many of the composers affiliated with the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music wrote arrangements of traditional ethnic songs and dances for small chamber ensembles. These works, generally no longer than the duration of a traditional folk melody, and written with the aim of evoking Jewish village folk culture, occupy a genre that I call the “rural miniature”. This genre was popular in Eastern and Central Europe during this period, and was most commonly composed and performed by musicians who conducted ethnographic fieldwork themselves or studied the findings of other ethnographers of music. The rural miniature was a critical art music genre in the development of state and diaspora musical nationalism. Works in the genre assumed a standard role in the chamber music and solo repertoire during the first four decades of the twentieth century. As the genre’s early proponents moved away from their homes and settled throughout the diaspora, however, the continued survival of rural Jewish life appeared increasingly imperilled by urbanization, emigration, and anti‐Semitism. A discussion of Joseph Achron’s “Hebrew Melody” will demonstrate that, with this cultural migration, the ethnographic component of the rural miniature came gradually to be superseded by the aesthetic elements of propaganda and nostalgia, as the genre was appropriated for fictional idealizations of traditional life in the Eastern European shtetl ¹ 1. David Assaf defines the shtetl as “a physical enclave represented by hundreds of small and midsized towns in Eastern Europe whose Jewish character was in clear evidence”. Assaf, Journey to a Nineteenth‐Century Shtetl, 20. View all notes and expressions of a Zionist longing for the biblical Jewish homeland.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Books Reviewed in this Article: Tradition and Interpretation. Edited by G.W. Anderson. New Light on Genesis. By William Todd. New Light on Exodus. By William Todd. Isaiah and the Deliverance of Jerusalem. A Study of the Interpretation of Prophecy in the Old Testament. By R.E. Clements. Amos's Oracles against the Nations: a Study of Amos 1.3–2.5. By John Barton. Gospel Perspectives: Studies of History and Tradition in the Four Gospels, Vol. I. Edited by R.T. France and David Wenham. Righteousness in Matthew and his World of Thought. By Benno Przybylski. Das Johannesevangelium: ein Kommentar. By Ernst Haenchen. The Gospel According to St John, Volume 2. By Rudolf Schnackenburg. La Vérité dans Saint Jean. By Ignace de la Potterie. El Evangelio de Juan. By Juan Mateos and Juan Barreto. The Rebel Jew: A Study of Paul. By Henry Marsh. Paul and Peter: Meeting in Jerusalem. By Kenneth Cragg. Pauline Studies: Essays Presented to F.F. Bruce. Edited by D.A. Hagner and M.J. Harris. A Commentary on the Epistle of James. By Sophie Laws. Jesus in the Tide of Time: an Historical Study. By John Ferguson. The Ground and Grammar of Theology. By Thomas F. Torrance. The Use of Sacrificial Ideas in Greek Christian Writers from the New Testament to John Chrysostom. By Frances M. Young. The Emergent Church: the Future of Christianity in a Postbourgeois World. By Johann Baptist Metz. The Open Church: Invitation to a Messianic Lifestyle. By Jürgen Moltmann. We Believe in One God: The Experience of God in Christianity and Islam. Edited by A. Schimmel and A. Falaturi. Taking Leave of God. By Don Cupitt. Salvation and Damnation. By William J. Dalton. Lotario dei Segni: De Miseria Condicionis Humanae. Edited by Robert E. Lewis. St. Thomas More, the Tower Works: Devotional Writings. Edited by G.E. Haupt. Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John. By A.D. Nuttall. Milton's Theatrical Epic: The Invention and Design of‘Paradise Lost’. By John G. Demaray. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. V: Liberalism in Oxford, January 1835–December 1836. Edited by Thomas Gornall S.J. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Prose. Edited by Gerald Roberts. Free Will: A Defence against Neurophysiological Determinism. By John Thorp. Schopenhauer. By D.W. Hamlyn. Science in the Middle Ages. Edited by David C. Lindberg. Rome: Profile of a City. By Richard Krautheimer. Popes, Lawyers and Infidels. By James Muldoon. Robert Winchelsey and the Crown: 1294–1313. By J.H. Denton. Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre Party in Württemberg Before 1914. By David Blackbourn. Christian Attitudes to Homosexuality. By Peter Coleman. Minister? Pastor? Grass-roots Leadership in the Churches. By Lucas Grollenberg and Others. The Death of a Christian: the Rite of Funerals. By Richard Rutherford. The Catholic Church and the Struggle for Zimbabwe. By Ian Linden. The Demands of Simple Justice. By Enda McDonagh. Free Enterprise and Jewish Law: Aspects of Jewish Business Ethics. By Aaron Levine.     

An Atlantic Jewish republic of letters?

Atlantic port Jews began publishing English-language periodicals, pamphlets, and books during the 1840s as a means to advance an enlightened, observant form of Judaism, identified in large part with Sephardic rather than Ashkenazic religious culture and history. Three of their Jewish periodicals, the Voice of Jacob, edited by Jacob Franklin, Morris Raphall and David Aron de Sola and published in London, the Occident and American Jewish Advocate, edited by Isaac Leeser and published in Philadelphia, and the First Fruits of the West, edited by Moses N. Nathan and Lewis Ashenheim, and published in Kingston, Jamaica, provide historical evidence of the persistence of Atlantic port Jewish networks of commerce, communication, kinship and community well into the Victorian era. Publishing in a non-Jewish vernacular, and printing almost entirely in a non-Hebrew alphabet, this new “Atlantic Jewish republic of letters” did not however represent a secularizing trend. Rhetorically, ancient Jewish wisdom was invoked as the foundation, not the antithesis, of progress. The primary forces against which these editors, authors, and translators were reacting were religious, not secular in nature, namely Christian proselytizing and Jewish religious reform. Their self-conscious, programmatic activities led to the establishment of new kinds of enlightened religious educational institutions. Taken together, these phenomena constituted an Atlantic haskalah. I offer here my deep thanks and appreciation to Jonathan Karp, David Ruderman, Lois Dubin, and Kenneth Stow for their close readings and criticisms of earlier versions of this paper.     

Vox clamantis in deserto: Rhetoric, Reproach, and the Forging of Ascetic Authority in Jerome's Letters from the Syrian Desert

In eight letters (Epp. 6–9, 11–13, 16) that Jeromesent from his monastic retreat in the Syrian desert betweenc.375 and c.377, he sharply criticized friends who were notas faithful in writing to him as he had been to them. John Kelly,in his influential biography of Jerome (1975), famously readthese letters as the petty outbursts of a neurotic curmudgeonwho was bitter and resentful about being snubbed; other scholarssince have followed suit with this face-value interpretation.The present article challenges this widely accepted psychologizingreading as being uncritical and unappreciative of the lettersas literary artefacts. It is demonstrated first that they arestylish specimens of the epistolary genre of reproach. It isthen argued that these letters, inasmuch as they portray Jeromeas being shunned by human society, were important componentsof a book of collected personal correspondence that Jerome releasedin Rome in the early 380s to promote himself as the consummatehermit and hero of desert asceticism.     

The other invisible hand: Jews and anarchists in London before the First World War

In the decades before the First World War, London worried about anarchist outrages, and particularly, about Jews said to instigate them. Jewish anarchists were rumoured to have been responsible for the ‘ripper’ murders in Whitechapel (1888), an attempt to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich Park (1894) and the Houndsditch murders (1910)/Sidney Street affair (1911). Jews were a visible population in the East End, and editors, MPs, and police authorities offered Jewishness to explain the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of anarchist violence. Jews were also thought to have the capacity to become invisible, ‘outsiders’ who could pass for ‘insiders’. In the radical press, and fictionalised accounts in novels such as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, the image of the Jewish anarchist became that of agent provocateur paid by police to infiltrate and undermine the movement. Jews were said to operate behind-the-scenes, manipulating the economy and political structure. The invisible hand of the market and the invisible hand of anarchism were attached to a Jewish body. About the author: Paul Knepper (Ph.D. Arizona State) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, and Research Fellow, Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester. Recent publications include ```Jewish Trafficking” and London Jews in the Age of Migration’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2008); ‘British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire’ British Journal of Criminology (2007); ‘Michael Polanyi and Jewish Identity’ Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2005); ‘Polanyi, “Jewish Problems”, and Zionism’ Tradition and Discovery (2005).     

Mary between Bible and Qur'an: Soundings into the Transmission and Reception History of the Protoevangelium of James on the Basis of Selected Literary Sources in Coptic and Copto-Arabic and of Art-Historical Evidence Pertaining to Egypt

Taking up the question of the permeability of boundaries between early Eastern Christian and Islamic communities and their literatures, this article studies the Coptic and Copto-Arabic trajectory of the transmission and reception history of the Protoevangelium of James, a text which offers remarkable parallels to presentations of Mary and Jesus in the Qur'an. Being a second-century Christian apocryphal work, the Protoevangelium tells of Mary's infancy and youth and ends shortly after the birth of Christ. The article proceeds from Émile de Strycker's claim of the Protoevangelium's Egyptian provenance through an examination of Egyptian Christian traditions concerning it, covering Coptic and Copto-Arabic literature up to and including the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Ongoing research on Christian women in Copto-Arabic sources points to traces of the usage of the Protoevangelium of James in the early stages of redaction of the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Coptic and Copto-Arabic art also provides a number of pictorial representations of passages in the Protoevangelium. Finally, the transmission history of the Coptic and Arabic versions of the Protoevangelium rounds out the picture of the reception history of this text in Christian Egypt into later medieval times. The article contributes towards a systematic study of the spread of the Protoevangelium of James tradition in the late antique and Byzantine Christian East and also towards a better understanding of the oral, written, and visual milieu in which the Qur'an and early Islamic exegetical traditions encountered apocryphal motifs derived from the Protoevangelium of James.     

Oh {delta}{iota}{alpha with oxia}! How is Romans 4:25 to be Understood?

How are we to understand the difficult expression ‘raisedfor our justification’ (Romans 4:25b)? The clue lies intaking seriously the two + accusatives in Romans 4:23. Therethey express a parallel between the promise of righteousness‘for him (Abraham)’ and the same kind of promise,still valid ‘for us’. This same emphasis shouldbe taken into 4:25, ‘for us ... for us.’ Such areading is not only backed up by the Isaiah 53 echo and thecontents of Romans 5, it also serves to explain the meaningof Romans 4:25b. Abraham was given an opportunity for ‘righteousness-producingfaith’ through a tension between ‘under-realizedreality’ and God's faithfulness (vv.18–22). Throughthe resurrection of Jesus Christ, the same opportunity is nowafforded to ‘us’.     

'At that Time the Group Around Maximian was Enjoying Imperial Power': an Interpolation in Gregory of Nyssa's Homily in Praise of Theodore

The sentence ‘For at that time the group around Maximianwas enjoying imperial power’, the only chronological indicatorin Gregory of Nyssa's In Theodorum, may be identified on literarygrounds as a scribal interpolation. When this is recognized,the Passio Theodori (BHG 1761) becomes the oldest evidence forthe dating of Theodore's martyrdom.     

SHORT NOTICES

La Prière du Seigneur. By Heinz Schürmann . The Mother of God. Her physical Maternity: A Reappraisal. By Cletus Wessels . La Mystique et les Mystiques. By A. Ravier , S.J. and Others. Sous la direction de A. Ravier , S.J. Préface de Henri de Lubac , S.J. Summa Theologiae: St Thomas Aquinas ; Latin text and English translation, introductions, notes Thomistic Epistemology. Vol. 2. By Georges van Riet . Translated by Donald . Mc Carthy , ph.d., and George E. Hertrich , m.a. Religious Psychology. By Vincent V. Herr , S.J. St Augustine and Being: A Metaphysical Essay. By James F. Anderson . The Coming of the Franciscans. By Thomas of Eccleston. Translated by Leo Sherley -Price . The Roman Catacombs and their Martyrs. By L. Hertling and E. Kirschbaum . The Council of Chalcedon and the Armenian Church. By Karekin Sarkissian . Histoire du Concile de Trente, Vol. 1. By Hubert Jedin . Jewish Prayer and Worship: an Introduction for Christians. By William W. Simpson . Carnet de Notes. By Jacques Maintain . The German Church Conflict. By Karl Barth . Gilbert Foliot and his Letters. By Adrian Morey and C. N. L. Brooke .     

Post-Baptismal Chrismation in Second-Century Syria: A Reconsideration of the Evidence

Alastair Logan has argued for the existence of a post-baptismalanointing with ointment in parts of the ‘great church’of second-century Syria and Asia Minor. He has proposed thatthis rite fell into desuetude but found new life in the fourthcentury. Logan's arguments depend especially on Ignatius’Letter to the Ephesians 17.1, the blessing at the end of theCoptic Didache 10.7, and the version of this prayer in ApostolicConstitutions 7.27. However, Logan's evidence lacks convincingcompleteness for three reasons. First, Ignatius’ Letterto the Ephesians says too little about the anointing practisedin communities he judged orthodox to serve as a witness fora post-baptismal ointment rite in these churches. Second, Logan'sargument that the prayer at the end of the Coptic Didache 10.7refers to ointment and is an original part of this documentfails to answer sufficiently too many questions and counter-argumentsfound in the literature. Third, his argument for supposing thatApostolic Constitutions 7.27 proposes a ritual innovation consideredessential by the redactor depends on the misreading of somepassages and on the assertion of divergent interpretations ofthe baptismal ointment in this work which comparison with otherAntiochene sources shows to be unjustified.     

Blond, tall, with honey-colored eyes: Jewish ownership of slaves in the Ottoman Empire

Hundreds of Hebrew written sources, dozens of official decrees, judicial records (sijillat), and reports of European travelers indicate that slaveholding – particularly of females of slavic origin – in Jewish households in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire was widespread from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This halachically and legally problematic habit was an unparalleled phenomenon in any other Jewish community in the early modern period. The presence of slaves in Jewish households effected family life in many ways. I dealt with two of them: The first is cohabitation of Jewish men with female slaves, usually non-Jewish, who in effect served as their concubines and bore them legitimate children; the second is marriage with manumitted slaves who converted to Judaism and became an integral part of the community. These phenomena attest once again to the great extent to which Jewish society and its norms and codes were influenced by Muslim urban society, and the gap between rabbinic rhetoric ideals and the dynamic daily existence of Jews from all social strata. Research for this article was carried out during my postdoctoral fellowship as a Mandel Scholar at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center, the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The article is based on a lecture delivered at a conference in honor of Prof. Amnon Cohen in June 2005 at the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem; and in Ankara, Turkey, in October 2005. I thank Prof. Kenneth Stow for his kind and friendly guidance.     

A converso confraternity in Majorca: La Novella Confraria de Sant Miquel

After their forced conversion during the anti-Jewish violence of August 1391, Majorcan conversos could no longer avail themselves of the social structures that provided for their welfare as members of the aljama. Rather than joining existing confraternities, which were the main purveyors of social welfare in Christian society, in 1404, conversos formally established a confraternity of their own. Its statutes, translated here in an Appendix, reveal both Jewish and Christian precedents in provision for the poor, the sick and for burial. These applied not only to members, but to all Majoran conversos. While the suspicions or hostility of Old Christians may have deterred conversos from seeking membership in their institutions, the converso confraternity was essentially a formalization of a community that was already bound together by pre-baptismal networks and relationships and which was addressed as a corporate entity by the Crown and creditors of the former aljama. The very establishment of Sant Miquel, as the converso confraternity was called, coupled with an absence of ritual injunctions among its statutes, supports the hypothesis that the first generations of conversos continued in the same relationships and customs as when they were Jewish. The confraternity offered a space in which these conversos could retain vestiges of their Jewish identity while situating themselves in the ambit of Christian culture, thus setting a new social referent for future generations.     

Hues of adjustment: Landsmanshaftn in inter-war New York and Tel-Aviv

Jewish immigrants in New York City and Tel-Aviv founded landsmanshaftn – local associations of those arrived from the same country, region, city or village. Comparing these civil organizations' goals, structures, and activities during the interwar period illuminates noteworthy aspects of emerging modern Jewish cultures. Landsmanshaftn advanced various forms of immigrant acculturation in New York and Tel-Aviv. They reflected and enhanced economic, social, political, religious and linguistic circumstances, as well as they unveiled differing urban attitudes, multi-layered national and ethnic identities, and divergent sentiments and ideologies regarding the East-European shtetl. Although Landsmanshaftn reveal distinct modes of adjustment in New York and Tel-Aviv, they also disclose similarities, responding in both cities to the immigrants' need for communal experience. Anat Helman: I would like to thank Eli Lederhendler for his interesting remarks and helpful suggestions.     

REVIEWS

Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics. By F.P. Ramsey Mathematics, Matter and Method. By Hilary Putnam. The Mental as Physical. By Edgar Wilson. Philosophy As It Is. Edited and Introduced by Ted Honderich and Myles Burnyeat. On the History of Philosophy. By F.C. Copleston. The Existence of God. By Richard Swinburne. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. By Charles H. Kahn. Heraclitus Seminar 1966/7. By Martin Heidegger and Eugene Fink Natural Rights Theories. By Richard Ruck. Women in Western Political Thought. By Susan Moller Okin. Practical Ethics. By Peter Singer. The Just King: Monarchical Judicial Authority in Ancient Israel. By K.W. Whitelam. The Art of God Incarnate. By Aidan Nichols. An Introduction to the Reformed Tradition: A Way of Being the Christian Community. By John H. Leith. Third-Eye Theology: Theology in Formation in Asia. By C.S. Song. A Short History of Buddhism. By Edward Conze. The Journey to the West. Translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu. Studies in Islamic Mysticism. By R.A. Nicholson. Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union. By A.A. Bennigsen and E.S. Wimbush. Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages. By Thomas F. Glick. Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade. By W.C. Jordan. Jewish Society in Fez 1450–1700. By Jane S. Gerber. Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratzla^y. By Arthur Green. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. By Frances A. Yates. Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century. Edited by William J. Callahan and David Higgs. Poverty and Prostitution: A Study of Victorian Prostitution in York. By Frances Finnegan. Families in Former Times. By J.-L. Flandrin. The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and the Fall of Parnell, 1888–1891. By Emmet Larkin. Action Française and Revolutionary Syndicalism. By Paul Mazgaj. The New Inquisition? Schillebeeckx and Küng. By Peter Hebblethwaite. Blake and the New Age. By Kathleen Raine. Creative Man. By Erich Neumann. Montague Rhodes James. By R.W. Pfaff.     

Poetry and patronage: Azariah de’ Rossi’s elegies for Margaret of Savoy

The death of Margaret of Savoy in 1574 created a momentous stir in literary and political circles. This renowned patroness of arts and protector of minorities had extended her protection to the Jews and conversos living in the realm of her husband, Emannuel Philibert. Jews, too, lamented her demise. The purpose of this paper is to interpret the elegies written by the Jewish Italian scholar, Azariah de’ Rossi, setting them in their historical and literary context. De’ Rossi’s extant poems in Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin are printed here in their entirety for the first time. An analysis of their content demonstrates how de’ Rossi, the scholar, adopts the medium of the elegy in order to “exalt and exhort” Margaret’s widower, the ruler Emannuel Philibert of Piedmont, implicitly, therefore, pleading the Jewish cause.     

Farming the land on three continents: Bilu, Am Oylom, and Yefe-Nahar

Jewish agrarianization projects in Eastern Europe began in the late eighteenth century. This article compares three such movements that emerged in the Russian Empire: the colonization of the southern Ukraine that took place in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and, later, in the 1880s, the initiatives known as Am Oylom and Bilu. The founders of the colonies in the Ukraine combined the ideology of the Enlightenment with Russian imperial considerations, while the later movements were part of a radical Jewish avant-garde that aimed to create a “new” Jew, who would be a hardworking farmer and live in a cooperative community. Yet these visions could be realized only in a new land free of old, anti-Jewish political systems. Thus the place of social and economic rebirth would be “New Russia,” the United States, or Palestine, and regardless of location or time, the initiators of these enterprises all adopted a consistently productivist rhetoric. In addition, the settlement projects all unknowingly advanced the expanding colonialist interests of the governments of Russia, North America, and Palestine. A revised version of this paper was presented at the international conference “Beyond Eastern Europe: Jewish Cultures in Israel and the United States”, Rutgers University, March 2007.     

THE FOUR JAZZ SINGERS: MAPPING THE JEWISH ASSIMILATION NARRATIVE

The 1927 movie The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson—famously ad-libbing synch dialogue, infamously appearing in blackface—has spawned three remakes: a 1952 and a 1980 movie starring Danny Thomas and Neil Diamond, respectively; and a 1959 television drama starring Jerry Lewis.1 The 1927 Jazz Singer was directed by Alan Crosland, the 1952 version by Michael Curtiz, the 1959 version by Ralph Nelson, and the 1980 version by Richard Fleischer. View all notes While none of the remakes can possibly match the singular importance of the original, arguably the cinematic ur-text of the Jewish assimilation narrative (not to mention of the American sound film), taken together the four films function as a compelling “metaphor for Jewish modernization.”2 Hoberman, “Deracinatin' Rhythm,” 1, 3–31. My “ur-text” designation for the 1927 Jazz Singer is based on its unrivaled sociocultural impact rather than on its chronological priority. Several other popular works dealing with Jewish assimilation preceded the Jolson-starring film. British playwright Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (1908) “first articulated the ideology upon which America's grand assimilation narrative of assimilation was built” (Brook, Something Ain't Kosher Here, 22). Noted novels on the subject include Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Fanny Hurst's Humoresque (1919), and Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts (1920). The latter two of these were adapted for the screen in the early 1920s, as, in the late 1920s, was Ann Nichol's 1924 play Abie's Irish Rose. Samuel Raphaelson's short story Day of Atonement, (1925) and his stage play The Jazz Singer (1926) provided the source material for the 1927 film version. View all notes Beyond the ethnically specific insights the films provide, their variations on the theme of an aspiring Jewish pop singer's conflict with his sternly religious father have much to say, individually and collectively, about continuity and change in American culture and society during the four films' six-decade span. Through social-historical and textual analysis, this essay further examines how identity issues raised by the four Jazz Singers continue to resonate among a Jewish people beset, perhaps more than ever, by the double bind of difference.