Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in 17th-Century England

Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in 17th-Century England
Author: Achsah Guibbory
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2010-09-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199557160

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This book is a cultural history of seventeenth-century England. It explores the many, often contradictory ways people thought about themselves in relation to Jews, Judaism, and Jewish history. Grounded in archival research, the book analyzes the works of major writers including Foxe, Herbert, Bunyan, Milton, and Dryden.

Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850

Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850
Author: Andrew Crome
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 3319771949

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This book explores why English Christians, from the early modern period onwards, believed that their nation had a special mission to restore the Jews to Palestine. It examines English support for Jewish restoration from the Whitehall Conference in 1655 through to public debates on the Jerusalem Bishopric in 1841. Rather than claiming to replace Israel as God’s “elect nation”, England was “chosen” to have a special, but inferior, relationship with the Jews. Believing that God “blessed those who bless” the Jewish people, this national role allowed England to atone for ill-treatment of Jews, read the confusing pathways of providence, and guarantee the nation’s survival until Christ’s return. This book analyses this mode of national identity construction and its implications for understanding Christian views of Jews, the self, and “the other”. It offers a new understanding of national election, and of the relationship between apocalyptic prophecy and political action.

The Invention of the Land of Israel

The Invention of the Land of Israel
Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1844679462

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What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess

The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess
Author: Adrienne Williams Boyarin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2020-11-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812252594

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In the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, Trinity Term 1277, Adrienne Williams Boyarin finds the case of one Sampson son of Samuel, a Jew of Northampton, arrested for impersonating a Franciscan friar and preaching false Christianity. He was sentenced to walk for three days through the centers of London, Canterbury, Oxford, Lincoln, and Northampton carrying the entrails and flayed skin of a calf and exposing his naked, circumcised body to onlookers. Sampson's crime and sentence, Williams Boyarin argues, suggest that he made a convincing friar—when clothed. Indeed, many English texts of this era struggle with the similarities of Jews and Christians, but especially of Jewish and Christian women. Unlike men, Jewish women did not typically wear specific identifying clothing, nor were they represented as physiognomically distinct. Williams Boyarin observes that both before and after the periods in which art historians note a consistent visual repertoire of villainy and difference around Jewish men, English authors highlight and exploit Jewish women's indistinguishability from Christians. Exploring what she calls a "polemics of sameness," she elucidates an essential part of the rhetoric employed by medieval anti-Jewish materials, which could assimilate the Jew into the Christian and, as a consequence, render the Jewess a dangerous but unseeable enemy or a sign of the always-convertible self. The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess considers realities and fantasies of indistinguishability. It focuses on how medieval Christians could identify with Jews and even think of themselves as Jewish—positively or negatively, historically or figurally. Williams Boyarin identifies and explores polemics of sameness through a broad range of theological, historical, and literary works from medieval England before turning more specifically to stereotypes of Jewish women and the ways in which rhetorical strategies that blur the line between "saming" and "othering" reveal gendered habits of representation.

Menasseh Ben Israel's Mission to Oliver Cromwell

Menasseh Ben Israel's Mission to Oliver Cromwell
Author: Manasseh ben Israel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108053807

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First published in 1901, this work comprises a series of mid-seventeenth-century pamphlets urging Cromwell to readmit the Jews into England.

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature
Author: Rachel Trubowitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2012-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199604738

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Rachel Trubowitz connects changing 17th century English views of maternal nurture to the rise of the modern nation, especially between 1603 and 1675.

The Salvation of Israel

The Salvation of Israel
Author: Jeremy Cohen
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501764764

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The Salvation of Israel investigates Christianity's eschatological Jew: the role and characteristics of the Jews at the end of days in the Christian imagination. It explores the depth of Christian ambivalence regarding these Jews, from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, through late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the Puritans of the seventeenth century. Jeremy Cohen contends that few aspects of a religion shed as much light on the character and the self-understanding of its adherents as its expectations for the end of time. Moreover, eschatological beliefs express and mold an outlook toward nonbelievers, situating them in an overall scheme of human history and conditioning interaction with them as that history unfolds. Cohen's close readings of biblical commentary, theological texts, and Christian iconography reveal the dual role of the Jews of the last days. For rejecting belief and salvation in Jesus Christ, they have been linked to the false messiah—the Antichrist, the agent of Satan and the exemplary embodiment of evil. Yet from its inception, Christianity has also hinged its hopes for the second coming on the enlightenment and repentance of the Jews; for then, as Paul prophesized, "all Israel will be saved." In its vast historical scope, from the ancient Mediterranean world of early Christianity to seventeenth-century England and New England, The Salvation of Israel offers a nuanced and insightful assessment of Christian attitudes toward Jews, rife with inconsistency and complexity, thus contributing significantly to our understanding of Jewish-Christian relations.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion
Author: Hannibal Hamlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107172594

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A wide-ranging yet accessible investigation into the importance of religion in Shakespeare's works, from a team of eminent international scholars.

The Invention of the Jewish People

The Invention of the Jewish People
Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2020-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1788736613

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A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be read and reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland? Shlomo Sand argues that most Jews actually descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered far across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The formation of a Jewish people and then a Jewish nation out of these disparate groups could only take place under the sway of a new historiography, developing in response to the rise of nationalism throughout Europe. Beneath the biblical back fill of the nineteenth-century historians, and the twentieth-century intellectuals who replaced rabbis as the architects of Jewish identity, The Invention of the Jewish People uncovers a new narrative of Israel’s formation, and proposes a bold analysis of nationalism that accounts for the old myths. After a long stay on Israel’s bestseller list, and winning the coveted Aujourd’hui Award in France, The Invention of the Jewish People is finally available in English. The central importance of the conflict in the Middle East ensures that Sand’s arguments will reverberate well beyond the historians and politicians that he takes to task. Without an adequate understanding of Israel’s past, capable of superseding today’s opposing views, diplomatic solutions are likely to remain elusive. In this iconoclastic work of history, Shlomo Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel’s future.