Browsing by Subject "Judaism"
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Item Open Access American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System(2016) Krone, Adrienne Michelle“American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System” is an investigation of the religious complexity present in religious food reform movements. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at four field sites. These field sites are a Jewish organic vegetable farm where the farmers begin their days with meditation, a Christian raw vegan diet center run by Messianic Jews, a Christian family that raises their cattle on pastures and sends them to a halal processing plant for slaughter, and a Jewish farm where Christian and Buddhist farm staff helped to implement shmita, the biblical agricultural sabbatical year.
The religious people of America do not exist in neatly bound silos, so in my research I move with the religious people to the spaces that are less clearly defined as “Christian” or “Jewish.” I study religious food reformers within the framework of what I have termed “free-range religion” because they organize in groups outside the traditional religious organizational structures. My argument regarding free-range religion has three parts. I show that (1) perceived injustices within the American industrial food system have motivated some religious people to take action; (2) that when they do, they direct their efforts against the American food industry, and tend to do so outside traditional religious institutions; and finally, (3) in creating alternatives to the American food industry, religious people engage in inter-religious and extra-religious activism.
Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, literature review, and methodology overview. Chapter 2 focuses on the food-centered Judaism at the Adamah Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT. In Chapter 3, I discuss the Hallelujah Diet as prescriptive literature and as it is put into practice at the Hallelujah Diet Retreat Center in Lake Lure, NC. Chapter 4 follows cows as they move from the grassy hills of Baldwin Family Farms in Yanceyville, NC to the meat counter at Whole Foods Markets. In Chapter 5, I consider the shmita year, the biblical agricultural sabbatical practice that was reimagined and implemented at Pearlstone Center in Baltimore, MD during 2014-2015. Chapter 6 will conclude this dissertation with a discussion of where religious food reform has been, where it is now, and a glimpse of what the future holds.
Item Open Access Genealogy, Circumcision, and Conversion in Early Judaism and Christianity(2010) Thiessen, MatthewIn his important work, The Beginnings of Jewishness, Shaye J. D. Cohen has argued that what it meant to be a Jew underwent considerable revision during the second century B.C.E. While previously a Jew was defined in terms of ethnicity (by which Cohen means biological descent), in the wake of Judaism's sustained encounter with Hellenism, the term Jew came to be defined as an ethno-religion--that is, one could choose to become a Jew. Nonetheless, the recent work of scholars, such as Christine E. Hayes, has demonstrated that there continued to exist in early Judaism a strain of thinking that, in theory at least, excluded the possibility that Gentiles could become Jews. This genealogical exclusion, found in works such as Jubilees, was highly indebted to the "holy seed" theology evidenced in Ezra-Nehemiah, a theology which defined Jewishness in genealogical terms.
This dissertation will attempt to contribute to a greater understanding of differing conceptions of circumcision in early Judaism, one that more accurately describes the nature of Jewish thought with regard to Jewishness, circumcision, and conversion. In terms of methodology, my dissertation will combine historical criticism with a literary approach to the texts under consideration. The dissertation will focus on texts from the Hebrew Bible as well as Jewish texts from the Second Temple period as these writings provide windows into the various forms of Judaism from which the early Christian movement arose.
Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, I will argue that there is no evidence that circumcision was considered to be a rite of conversion to Israelite religion. In fact, circumcision, particularly the infant circumcision instantiated within Israelite and early Jewish society excludes from the covenant those not properly descended from Abraham. In the Second Temple period, many Jews did begin to conceive of Jewishness in terms which enabled Gentiles to become Jews. Nonetheless, some Jews found this definition of Jewishness problematic, and defended the borders of Jewishness by reasserting a strictly genealogical conception of Jewish identity. Consequently, some Gentiles who underwent conversion to Judaism in this period faced criticism because of their suspect genealogy. Our sources record such exclusion with regard to the Herodians, Idumeans who had converted to Judaism.
Additionally, a more thorough examination of how circumcision and conversion were perceived by Jews in the Second Temple period will be instrumental in better understanding early Christianity. It is the argument of this dissertation that further attention to a definition of Jewishness that was based on genealogical descent has broader implications for understanding the variegated nature of early Christian mission to the Gentiles in the first century C.E.
Item Open Access Marriage and Divorce in the Herodian Family: A Case Study of Diversity in Late Second Temple Judaism(2009) Moen, Ingrid JohanneNoting the disparities between the stipulations of rabbinic law and the behavior of the Herodian royal family, scholars have traditionally described the family's commitment to Judaism as lackluster. In particular, many examples from the Herodians' marriage and divorce practices have been engaged to support this view. In contrast, I argue that the royal Jews' behavior in general and their marital practices in particular were largely in accord with one of the formulations of Jewish law in circulation in the first centuries B.C.E. and C.E. Indeed, the extant Second Temple writings indicate that Judaism in Roman Palestine was highly diverse. The rabbis, whose views became normative from late antiquity and on, may well have formed only one of the many competing schools of interpretation in Herodian times. Consequently, the family's failure to comply with rabbinic views does not preclude their identification as pious Jews committed to fulfilling the Law. In fact, one can make an argument for the Herodians' piety based on close readings of biblical texts, Josephus' descriptions of the royal family, and even certain readings of rabbinic texts. Other Jewish texts that pre- and postdate Herodian rule, as well as those from the late Second Temple era itself, further support this view. Indeed, situating the Herodians within their proper setting in Roman Palestine suggests that they were committed Jews who formed one subgroup of the many pious Jewish parties that comprised the diverse world of late Second Temple Judaism.
Item Open Access Rewritten Gentiles: Conversion to Israel's 'Living God' and Jewish Identity in Antiquity(2014) HicksKeeton, JillThis dissertation examines the ideological developments and strategies of boundary formation which accompanied the sociological novelty of gentiles’ becoming Jews in the Second Temple period. I argue that the phenomenon of gentile conversion influenced ancient Jews to re–conceive their God as they devised new ways to articulate the now–permeable boundary between Jew and ‘other,’ between insiders and outsiders. Shaye Cohen has shown that this boundary became porous as the word ‘Jew’ took on religious and political meanings in addition to its ethnic connotations. A gentile could therefore become a Jew. I focus on an ancient Jewish author who thought that gentiles not only could become Jews, but that they should: that of Joseph and Aseneth. Significant modifications of biblical traditions about God, Israel, and ‘the other’ were necessary in order to justify, on ideological grounds, the possibility of gentile access to Jewish identity and the Jewish community.
One such rewritten tradition is the relationship of both Jew and gentile to the ‘living God,’ a common epithet in Israel’s scriptures. Numerous Jewish authors from the Second Temple period, among whom I include the apostle Paul, deployed this biblical epithet in various ways in order to construct or contest boundaries between gentiles and the God of Israel. Whereas previous scholars have approached this divine title exclusively as a theological category, I read it also as a literary device with discursive power which helps these authors regulate gentile access to Israel’s God and, in most cases, to Jewish identity. Joseph and Aseneth develops an innovative theology of Israel’s ‘living God’ which renders this narrative exceptionally optimistic about the possibilities of gentile conversion and incorporation into Israel. Aseneth’s tale uses this epithet in conjunction with other instances of ‘life’ language not only to express confidence in gentiles’ capability to convert, but also to construct a theological articulation of God in relationship to repentant gentiles which allows for and anticipates such conversion. A comparison of the narrative’s ‘living God" terminology to that of the book of Jubilees and the apostle Paul sets into relief the radical definition of Jewishness which Joseph and Aseneth constructs — a definition in which religious practice eclipses ancestry and under which boundaries between Jew and ‘other’ are permeable.
Item Open Access The Gospel of John and the Future of Israel(2017) Blumhofer, ChrisThe canonical gospels are each concerned to present the significance of Jesus vis-à-vis the Jewish tradition. Yet the Gospel of John exhibits a particularly strained relationship with Judaism, especially through its frequent description of Jesus’s opponents as “the Jews,” its presentation of numerous hostile exchanges between Jesus and characters described as “Jews,” and its application of significant Jewish imagery (e.g., “the temple of his body,” “I am the true vine”) to the person of Jesus rather than to traditional Jewish institutions or figures. This dissertation argues that the Gospel of John presents Jesus as the one through whom the Jewish tradition realizes its eschatological hopes in continuity with the stories and symbols of its past. As the Fourth Gospel presents its theological vision for the significance of Jesus, it also criticizes the theological vision of a rival group—that is, “the Jews.” In the Fourth Gospel, “the Jews” represents an alternative—and for John, a rival—theological vision for how the Jewish tradition might live into its future in continuity with its past. Therefore, John’s affirmations of many aspects of the Jewish tradition are bound up with its negation of how another segment of the tradition would construe those same features of the tradition.
Methodologically, this study attends to how the narrative of John characterizes Jesus as the fulfillment of particular Jewish hopes and expectations, and also as the narrative of John states (or implies) the shortcomings of Jesus’s opponents insofar as they fail to bring the Jewish tradition into more thorough continuity with its storied past and prophesied future. Attention to John’s narrative does not override the importance of its historical location, however. Questions that were directly relevant to Second Temple and late first-century Judaism about how the tradition might live faithfully are pertinent to the structure of the Fourth Gospel and its presentation of Jesus and “the Jews.” John narrates the fulfillment present in Jesus and the failure represented by “the Jews” by drawing on discourses that were accessible within late first-century Judaism. Historical context is thus essential for understanding the logic of John and the terms in which the Gospel tells its story. This study concludes that the Fourth Gospel is a late first-century narrative that takes up the question of how the Jewish tradition might move into its future in continuity with its past. Through the vehicle of the Gospel narrative, John argues for Jesus as the one who enables the people of God to experience the future toward which the Jewish tradition had long been oriented.