History of Religion Commons^™

The Expulsion Of The Jews From The State Of Milan: Same Event With Views From Different Archives, Flora Cassen

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

Documents presented here come from three different sources: the archives of Milan, the archives of Simancas, and Joseph Ha-Cohen’s chronicle Emek ha-Bakha. The document from Milan, dated from 1589, is a long defense of the Jews’ right to live in Milan sent to Madrid in response to a request by Philip II of Spain who was pondering whether or not to expel the Jews. The task of writing the report of Jewish life in Milan was given to the Spanish governor of Milan, but it was a collective work put together by the Senate of Milan, based on the opinions …

Founding Documents Of The Kahal Kadosh Talmud Tora, Amsterdam, Anne Oravetz Albert

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 1638 founding document of the Kahal Kadosh Talmud Tora of Amsterdam is well known as a “merger agreement” that brought three existing congregations together into one synagogue under one leadership council (Mahamad). It bears the signatures of 218 householding men of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish nation in Amsterdam, signifying their agreement to subject themselves to the authority of the new leadership. It is also well known that this document, along with the set of communal regulations drawn up later that year, granted nearly unfettered authority to the Mahamad. Looking at these two documents along with an …

Construction, Reconstruction And Deconstruction: Stories About Records From The Ottoman Heartlands, Shuki Ecker

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The texts were selected in light of the general question: what kind of records did Ottoman Jewish communities maintain as part of their regular communal activities. They were further chosen to reflect procedures, considerations and conflicts that accompanied record keeping and were not usually recorded in the actual records produced. In most cases the records kept by the communities before the 19th century are no longer available. While references to the existence of various records can be found in a variety of contemporary and later sources (some of which I will mention), the texts translated offer a short selection of …

Documents, Records And Early Modern Border Crossings, Debra Kaplan

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In order to cross borders in early modern Europe, travelers were expected to carry proper documentation that both identified them and permitted them entry into the region to which they intended to travel. In the Electoral Palatinate, the Jews were issued a special type of safe conduct that was tied to a flat rate tax levied on the Jews of Worms. In response, Jewish communities developed both inter- and intracommunal systems to sell, buy, and keep track of these documents. This presentation examines the safe conducts and the records and systems that developed to regulate their use.

Counting And Recording Sins, David Myers

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The documents below, from a 1635 handbook on how to confess sins, reflect the intensifying practice in early modern European Catholicism of remembering and counting offenses in preparation for attending the sacrament of penance and receiving absolution from an authorized priest. Among the originals is an example of how the “technology” was intended to work easily, almost effortlessly.

Linguistic And Formal Aspects Of Jewish Record Keeping In Italy—A Comparative Investigation, Bernard Cooperman

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

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 …

Taqqanot Qandiya And The Construction Of Crete’S Jewish History, Rena N. Lauer

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

During the first half of the sixteenth century, Elijah Capsali, community leader and rabbi of the Jewish community of Candia (the capital of Venetian Crete), collected the communal ordinances and other materials (including some lists and responsa) he deemed relevant. Capsali was a self-conscious historian who also wrote Hebrew histories of the Ottoman Empire and of Venice. Nevertheless, his Cretan collection has rarely been treated in the context of Capsali’s interest in history. Rather, it has been read as a collection of almost ad-hoc legal materials. I posit that Capsali edited these texts to construct an intentional record of his …

Strategic Record Keeping And Striving For Autonomy: Was There A Jewish Community Archive In Early Modern Frankfurt?, Verena Kasper-Marienberg

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The bombardment of Frankfurt am Main by Napoleonic forces in 1796 resulted in the almost total destruction of the so-called Judengasse, a narrow lane lined with wooden houses where the Frankfurt Jews lived. This ended nearly 350 years of oppressive living conditions that segregated more than 3,000 Jewish residents of Frankfurt and their guests from their Christian neighbors. For the most part, whatever might have existed in terms of archival records of the Jewish community was also a victim of the flames. It is mostly only through the survival of non-Jewish records of or about the Jewish community that we …

Unrecorded Justice: The (Non-)Archival Practices Of Medieval Jewish Courts, Rachel Furst

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

In the summer of 1298, a wave of anti-Jewish violence incited by a German nobleman named Rindfleisch swept through Franconia and the neighboring vicinities. In Würzburg, local burghers joined gangs of murderous knights to massacre nearly 900 Jews. Among the victims was Simeon ben Jacob (R. Shim’on ben R. Ya’akov), a resident of Worms who had come to Würzburg to pay and collect business debts. Following the riots, three witnesses reported that they had seen Simeon’s dead body; and on the basis of these testimonies, the Jewish court in Worms declared Simeon’s wife a widow and granted her permission to …

Volume 14: Cultures Of Record Keeping: Creation, Preservation, And Use In The Early Modern Period, Magda Teter

Early Modern Workshop: Resources in Jewish History

The 2017 Early Modern Workshop's theme was "Cultures of Record Keeping: Creation, Preservation, and Use in the Early Modern Period." The workshop focused on the creation, preservation, organization, collection, translation, and use of records, evidence, and information. It also examined continuities and change between chronological periods --including medieval and modern, and different cultures and settings--Jewish and non-Jewish. Among themes addressed were: official record keeping, personal records, collection and organization of information.

Even more than in our previous topic--history of emotions/emotions in history--there is such an abundance of work on records, and record keeping in non-Jewish historiography, but exceedingly little on …

The Catholic Church And The Formation Of Human Rights Doctrine In El Salvador, Edward Mikus Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The Catholic Church’s focus on human rights in the years following the Second Vatican Council led to increased political activity amongst the clergy in socially stratified El Salvador. This development, in turn, led to a breakdown in relations between the Church and the Salvadoran State

August 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Kiddush Levana; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Community Notices

Contested Moral Issues In Contemporary African Catholicism: Theological Proposals For A Hermeneutics Of Multiplicity And Inclusion, Stan Chu Ilo

Journal of Global Catholicism

Drawing upon the broad work of Vatican II and Pope Francis’ Evangelicum Gaudium the article proposes how a hermeneutic of multiplicity and inclusion could help hold in balance the tension between tradition and innovation, universal principles and specific contextual application for Catholicism in Africa. Among the issues addressed are cultural relativism, natural law theory, and polygamy.

July 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Maine-ly Jewish Storytelling Festival; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcments; Inconvient Artifacts; Federation Report; Community Notices

Providential Capitalism: Heavenly Intervention And The Atlantic’S Divine Economist, Ian F.P. Green

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Providential capitalism names the marriage of providential Christian values and market-oriented capitalist ideology in the post-revolutionary Atlantic through the mid nineteenth century. This is a process by which individuals permitted themselves to be used by a so-called “divine economist” at work in the Atlantic market economy. Backed by a slave market, capital transactions were rendered as often violent ecstatic individual and cultural experiences. Those experiences also formed the bases for national, racial, and classed identification and negotiation among the constellated communities of the Atlantic. With this in mind, writers like Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw presented market success …

Liturgical Processions In The Black Death, Eric A. Gobel

The Hilltop Review

The popularity of the flagellant movement in the German speaking lands during the Black Death is due to a number of factors. Flagellation may seem like a nonsensical reaction to despair from a modern perspective, but for medieval people, the itinerant processional penitent pilgrims represented more than a bloody, painful spectacle. Rather, it was a rational and emotion reaction to their troubles. The success of the flagellants lays, not in the grotesquerie of their performances, but instead in their ability to provide people with familiar, engaging ways to perform and observe penance while also departing from ecclesiastical norms that had …

June 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Shabbat Together; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Community Notices

Depending On Sex? Tongue, Sieve, And Ladle Shaped Pendants From Late Iron Age Gotland, Meghan P. Mattsson Mcginnis

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Artifacts of female dress such as brooches and pendants have long been objects of interest to scholars of late Iron Age /early medieval Scandinavia. They figure in dating and tracing stylistic developments, and their presence is often (controversially) used to help assign gender to burials. There are three types of pendants which constitute a type of feminine adornment unique to Viking Age Gotland: the so-called tongue, sieve, and ladle pendants. The purpose of this paper is to examine these pendant types and the possible symbolic and magical functions behind their forms and manner of use, and how these functions intersected …

Immanent Frames: Meiji New Buddhism And The 'Religious Secular', James Mark Shields

Faculty Journal Articles

The secularization thesis, rooted in the idea that “modernity” brings with it the destruction—or, at least, the ruthless privatization—of religion, is clearly grounded in specific, often oversimplified, interpretations of Western historical developments since the eighteenth century. In this article, I use the case of the New Buddhist Fellowship (Shin Bukkyō Dōshikai 新仏教同志会) of the Meiji period (1868–1911) to query the category of the secular in the context of Japanese modernity. I argue that the New Buddhists, drawing on elements of classical and East Asian Buddhism as well as modern Western thought, promoted a resolutely social and this-worldly Buddhism that …

May 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Café Shalom; From the Rabbi; Presidents Message; Book Group; Announcements; Bissel of Maine; Community Notices

No Foreign Despots On Southern Soil: The American Party In Alabama And South Carolina, 1850-1857, Robert N. Farrell

Master's Theses

During the 1850s in the South, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, rallied southerners culturally and politically around nativism, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic ideology. This thesis studies nativism in the Deep South and challenges existing scholarship by Tyler Anbinder and William Darrell Overdyke. Anbinder claims that southern Know Nothings held little in common with their northern counterparts and exhibited only regional characteristics. Overdyke maintains that the American Party in the Deep South participated in the national organization, but he argues that nativism appeared only as an incidental component.

An analysis of private papers, speeches, and newspapers …

Silver Breathed Upon The Stage: The American Revolution As Drama And Mythology, Nathan Stone

Masters Theses

At the time of the American Revolution, several different intellectual influences were present within the American colonies: the classical tradition, taken from ancient Greece and Rome; Christianity, taken from the Bible and the Reformed, Calvinist tradition; and, Whig theory. The question that must be asked is: Were these different intellectual traditions brought together at the time of the American Revolution and, if so, by what means? By analyzing how the different traditions were present in the colonies as well as how the past was utilized through the eighteenth century understanding of time and history—particularly through the use of pseudonyms and …

April 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Community Passover Seder; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; Announcements; Message to the Community; Community Notices

"Mistris Hutchinsons Double Weekly-Lecture": Puritan Assemblies And The Antinomian Controversy Of 1636-38, Courtney H. Forster

Senior Honors Theses

The Antinomian Controversy of 1636-38 was a complex religious conflict concerning politics and disruption of Puritan society. It began when the Massachusetts Bay colony split into religious factions within the Church at Boston. At the height of the controversy it seemed a majority of the congregation favored a grace-only means of salvation. Most in authoritative positions believed religious works were important to the societal foundation of a holy Puritan community. With the feared breakdown of society looming over them, they would prosecute and convict Anne Hutchinson for violating the cohesion of the colony. Hutchinson was a prominent woman in the …

An Oral History Of Italian American Identity & Perception During The First Half Of The 20th Century, Joshua A. Hoxmeier

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

This paper will detail the experiences, perceptions, and memories of working and middle class Italian American men during the first half of the twentieth century and examine the differences between how the two World Wars and their aftermaths shaped the ethnic identity of these men. By looking at Italian American World War II veterans, I conclude the notion that Italian American inclusion was achieved through the First World War and the nationalism of the 1920s, especially the restriction of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, is not fully representative of both the realities and perceptions of a sizable number of …

March 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Purim Down with Haman; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Announcements; Book Group; Paul Goodman Changed my Life; Community Notices

February 2017, Temple Shalom Synagogue Center

Newsletter Archive

Contents: Musical and Mystical Tu B'Shavat; From the Rabbi; President's Message; Book Group; A 3-D View of Jewish History; Announcements; A Bissel of Maine; Community Notices

Space, Land, Territory, And The Study Of The Bible, Stephen C. Russell

Publications and Research

In this brief volume, written for professional biblical scholars and graduate students being trained in biblical studies, Stephen C. Russell introduces the reader to the interdisciplinary study of space and its related concepts, including land, territory, border, frontier, nature, scale, spatial flows, and rhythm. He offers a synopsis of eight approaches to the study of space that have been influential in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades—sacred, legal, political, economic, ecological, visual, social, and urban approaches. He pays special attention to Henri Lefebvre’s treatment of social space as a social product. The volume also briefly notes some of …

Guest Editor's Introduction, Sherlynn Allen-Harris

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

Acknowledgments And Disclaimer, Regennia N. Williams

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.