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"This career-spanning anthology from prominent Jewish historian David Biale brings over a dozen of his key essays together for the first time. These pieces, written between 1974 and 2016, are all representative of a method Biale calls "counter-history": "the discovery of vital forces precisely in what others considered marginal, disreputable and irrational." The themes that have preoccupied Biale throughout the course of his distinguished career - in particular power, sexuality, blood, and secular Jewish thought - span the periods of the Bible, late antiquity, and the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Exemplary essays in this volume argue for the dialectical relationship between modernity and its precursors in the older tradition, working together to "brush history against the grain" in order to provide a sweeping look at the history of the Jewish people. This volume of work by one of the boldest and most intellectually omnivorous Jewish thinkers of our time will be essential reading for scholars and students of Jewish studies"--
List of contents
Introduction: Between Canon and Counterhistory
1. The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible
2. Korah in the Midrash: The Hairless Heretic as Hero
3. Counterhistory and Jewish Polemics against Christianity: The Sefer Toldot Yeshu and the Sefer Zerubavel
4. "The Torah Speaks the Language of Human Beings": Abraham Ibn Ezra's Radical Interpretation of the Bible
5. Between Melancholy and a Broken Heart: A Note on Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav's Depression
6. The Kabbalah in Nachman Krochmal's Philosophy of History
7. Masochism and Philosemitism: The Strange Case of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
8. Historical Heresies and Modern Jewish Identity
9. Shabbtai Zvi and the Seductions of Jewish Orientalism
10. Leo Strauss: The Philosopher as Weimar Jew
11. Arendt in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt on the Eichmann Trial
12. Gershom Scholem's "Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on the Kabbalah": Text and Commentary
13. The Threat of Messianism: An Interview with Gershom Scholem (August 14, 1980)
14. Mysticism and Politics in Modern Israel: The Messianic Ideology of Abraham Isaac Ha-Cohen Kook
15. The End of Enlightenment?
Epilogue: By the Waters of San Francisco: A Partial Autobiography
About the author
David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis.
