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Offers a theoretical account of the relationship between power, emotion, and identity through an analysis of ancient Jewish texts.
List of contents
Part I. Jewish Emotional Resistance to Gentile Power-Over in the Greco-Roman Diaspora: 1. Emotional resistance to physical power-over: the performative power of the public spectacle in 4 Maccabees; 2. Emotional resistance to domination: feeling rules as proxies for power in Joseph and Aseneth; 3. Resistance to emotional stereotypes: emotional stereotypes and power dynamics in 3 Maccabees; Part II. Jewish Emotional Discourse in Response to Divine Power-Over: Emotions in the Context of Tragedy and Trauma: 4. Overcoming divine power-over: righteous anger in 1 Maccabees; 5. Coping with divine power-over: grief in 4 Ezra; Part III. The Dead Sea Sect as Emotional Community: The Power and Powerlessness of Feeling Like a Sectarian; 6. Feeling rules in the construction of communal identity: sectarian feelings in the Hodayot; 7. The power of fear: strategic manipulation of fear in the construction of a sectarian emotional community; 8. Sectarian ritual and the cultivation of an emotional habitus.
About the author
Ari Mermelstein is the author of Creation, Covenant, and the Beginnings of Judaism: Reconceiving Historical Time in the Second Temple Period (2014) and co-editor of The Divine Courtroom in Comparative Perspective (2014). He is a member of the steering committee of the Society of Biblical Literature's 'Bible and Emotion' group.
