The Posthumous Works Of Mr Thomas Chubb Containing 1 Remarks On The Scriptures 2 Observations On The Reverend Mr Warburtons Divine Legation Of Moses 3 The Authors Farewel To His Readers Comprehending A Variety Of Tracts On The Most Important Subjects Of Religion With An Appendix Including A Postscript To His Four Last Dissertations More Particularly Relative To That On The History Of Melchizedek To The Whole Is Prefixed Some Account Of The Author Written By Himself Vol 1 2

Author : Yaacov Deutsch
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199756538
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Download or read book Judaism in Christian Eyes written by Yaacov Deutsch and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Christian ethnographic writing about the Jews in early modern Europe, offering a systematic historical analysis of this literary genre and arguing its importance for better understanding both the period in general and Jewish-Christian relations in particular. The book focuses on nearly 80 texts from Western Europe (mostly Germany) that describe the customs and ceremonies of the contemporary Jews, containing both descriptions and illustrations of their subjects. Deutsch is one of the first scholars to study these unique writings in extensive detail. He examines books in which Christian authors describe Jewish life and provides new interpretations of Christian perceptions of Jews, Christian Hebraism, and the attention paid by the Hebraist to contemporary Jews and Judaism. Since many of the authors were converts, studying their books offers new insights into conversion during the period. Their work presents new perspectives the study of religion, developments in the field of anthropology and ethnography, and internal Christian debates that arose from the portrayal of Jewish life. Despite the lack of attention by modern scholars, some of these books were extremely popular in their time and represent one of the important ways by which Jews were perceived during the period. The key claim of the study is that, although almost all of the descriptions of Jewish customs are accurate, the authors chose to concentrate mainly on details that show the Jewish ceremonies as anti-Christian, superstitious, and ridiculous; these details also reveal the deviation of Judaism from the Biblical law. Deutsch suggests that these ethnographic descriptions are better defined as polemical ethnographies and argues that the texts, despite their polemical tendency, represent a shift from writing about Judaism as a religion to writing about Jews, and from a mode of writing based on stereotypes to one based on direct contact and observation.