Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures - Hardcover

Berkowitz, Beth A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195179196 ISBN 13: 9780195179194

Verlag: OUP USA, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Berkowitz Beth A

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Críticas:

[A] carefully researched, and thoughtfully presented exploration of executions in rabbinic and Christian literature...[Berkowitz] presents a contextualised reading that reveals rabbis developing their own authority despite their status as colonial subjects. Her comfort using new theoretical frameworks to interpret rabbinic material should make this book of broad interest...Overall Berkowitz gives us a wonderful study. She demonstrates a fine talent at making difficult texts readable, she makes elegent use of modern interpretive strategies and she strikes a fine balance between complexity and clarity. She offers us a great gift. (Susan Marks, Journal of Jewish Studies)

Reseña del editor:

The death penalty in classical Judaism has been a highly politicized subject in modern scholarship. Those wishing to defend the Talmud from Enlightenment attacks on its legitimacy pointed to Talmudic criminal law as evidence for its elevated, progressive morals. But even more pressing was the need to prove the Jews' innocence of the charge of being Christ-killers. This charge hinged on the reconstruction of the ancient Jewish death penalty. The Gospels show a corrupt Jewish court as responsible for the death of Christ. Contemporary Jewish scholars have argued that the Mishnah's criminal law is in fact rigorously just and even abolitionist with respect to the death penalty. In this book Beth Berkowitz tells the story of modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and continues the story by offering a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies, cultural criticism, and talmudic source criticism. Against the scholarly consensus, Berkowitz argues that the rabbinic laws of the death penalty were used by the early Rabbis in their efforts to establish themselves in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. The purpose of the laws, she contends, was to create a complex ritual of execution that was controlled by the Rabbis, thus bolstering their claims to authority in the context of Roman imperial domination.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: OUP USA
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0195179196
• ISBN 13: 9780195179194
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352