Socialism and Feminism in the 19th century.

Jane Lead was a seventeenth-century prophetess, a mystic and visionary who became the religious leader of the Philadelphian Society in London at the end of the seventeenth century. She wrote at least 15 books and treatises, including a spiritual diary entitled A Fountain of Gardens which spans sixteen years and is nearly 2,500 pages long. Nearly all her works were translated into German and Dutch and published during her lifetime.

As stated in C.R. LI, p. 168, the Jerusalem palimpsest of Euripides had been collated by Tischendorf, Papadopoulos Kerameus and Horna Mr. D. L. Page's edition of the Medea takes account of the present collation, which in its turn owes much to the acumen of Mr. Page and to his kindness in allowing me to include some of his results obtained from independent photographs. Each of the above-named scholars has found reason to correct and add to his predecessor's work, (...) and this is natural, since not only is man not infallible but more and more is also required of a collator as time goes on. (shrink)

The scholarly labels commonly applied to one of the most critical junctures in the history of medieval Georgian culture - a period that saw a distinct shift in cultural orientation towards Constantinople - warrant reconsideration. A transfer of liturgical tradition from that of Jerusalem to Constantinople’s and a surge in religious knowledge stimulated by the translation and literary efforts of Georgian Athonite monks are widely regarded as indications of the change. At first glance, the overall picture leaves no space (...) for interpretation, though comparative analysis of stylistic and iconographic features peculiar to works of religious art, along with surviving records regarding the patronage and ceremonies, liturgical texts, and other aspects relating to the historical context, suggest the need for further insights. The overwhelmingly Hellenophile style of Georgian religious art of the time should be questioned, judging from numerous works witnessing the variety of tastes among the Georgian elite and choices made by specific individuals. The eleventh-century liturgical innovations do not seem to have been followed by a total transformation. Jerusalem’s traditions and veneration of the Cross as markers of Georgian Christianity appear to have acquired significance as national elements in a new Constantinopolitan context. (shrink)

As a political thinker nurtured in early 20th-century German, Hannah Arendt is most often identified with the Greek philosophical tradition. This article argues that the crisis in reality that threw her into politics also, though unacknowledgedly, threw her into ‘Jewish modes of thinking’ as an alternative source where she found the Greek tradition lacking. This claim is controversial, given Arendt’s vehement criticisms of any recourse to the absolute, or metaphysical truths in the realm of politics. Nevertheless, and consistent with a (...) number of early 20th-century Jewish thinkers who explicitly identified the Hebrew God not as the metaphysical but as the condition of possibility for authentic freedom under conditions of finitude, one finds in Arendt a move towards an understanding of the seat of human freedom that sits far more comfortably in the Jerusalem than in the Athens tradition. Specifically, in her emphasis on natality and genuine futurity, one senses a strong resonance with the notion of pure creation in the Hebrew Bible, as one does, notably, in her insistence that forgiveness and promises form the two pillars for human sociality. Throughout the history of Jewish thought, one consistently finds precisely this Arendtian struggle to represent a model of law that holds the tension between binding fidelity to promises, memory and the past, and an openness to futurity, to the infinity of interpretation that gives meaning to those promises. Closely resembling the midrashic tradition, Arendt’s political community of speech is one in which meaning is open ended and plural, allowing for the binding together that sustains a polity, while also opening up to the radically new of each new birth. (shrink)

Examining the depiction of Jerusalem in German-Jewish literature between 1848 and 1948, this essay explores the occupation of real places by the imagination. The work with the old myths as well as the invention of new ones about Jerusalem expressed the negotiation of cultural identity and the German-Jewish situation in an era that saw the far-reaching modernization of Judaism. In the tension between the force of descent and the horizon of self-invention, some authors created the space for the,,invention (...) of a tradition" in modernity. (shrink)

A series of seven epigrams from the Anthologia Marciana (MS Marc. gr. 524) sheds light on the life of John IX Merkouropoulos, patriarch of Jerusalem in exile (1157-before 1166). The evidence that comes to light reveals traces of a monastic network connecting Jerusalem with Constantinople. According to the epigrams, John became a monk at Mar Saba - something further evinced by the double vita of St John of Damascus and Kosmas of Maiouma that he composed [BHG 395]. After (...) staying at the Koutsovendis monastery, he travelled to Constantinople, where Manuel I appointed him on the patriarchal see and also made him abbot of the monastery of St Diomedes/New Zion in Constantinople. Shortly before or after John’s departure from life, his disciple, the monk Clement, attempted to manifest that his spiritual father was a holy man. Thus, Clement had John’s portrait placed next to that of St James, the brother of God. John’s complex relationship with the Syropalestinian monastic tradition make his life and the survival of his memory an exceprional case study for understanduing the phenomenon of Holy Men in twelfth-century Constantinople. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt aims to secure a more adequate understanding of the new crime of genocide so that it can be prosecuted in a manner that better serves justice. She criticizes the Nuremberg Trials and, to a lesser extent, the Jerusalem trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for miscasting this unprecedented crime in terms of familiar concepts and thereby obscuring it. Arendt claims that this atrocity, instead, demanded (...) original thinking that emanated from a closer grappling with these new experiences. I argue that her criticism reflects Heideggerian phenomenology. This approach questions absolute concepts from a position more consciously planted in the world, which Heidegger considers the source of original thinking. However, Arendt extends this approach to the domain of ethics and law and confronts genocide instead of aligning with those who perpetrated it. (shrink)

Throughout his life, Leo Strauss (1899–1973) employed the expression “Jerusalem and Athens” to refer metaphorically to the two opposing poles of his thinking: biblical faith and ancient philosophy. While Strauss continuously stressed that “Jerusalem” and “Athens” pose a radical alternative, which demands a binary choice, he himself did not present his decision to the public. The following essay examines for the first time four different lectures that Strauss gave in New York City (1946 and 1967), Annapolis (1946), and (...) Chicago (1950) under the title “Jerusalem and Athens.” Using not only the new first edition of the 1950 lecture published in this volume – Strauss’s most extensive public treatment of the issue – but also dozens of recently discovered archival sources, I try to illuminate the historical settings in which Strauss spoke about the tension between “Jerusalem” and “Athens.” This biographical approach highlights rhetorical strategies adopted by Strauss in his lectures and intends to show different reasons he had to abstain from opting publicly for either “Jerusalem” or “Athens.” In the concluding part, I discuss Strauss’s previously unknown but well-advanced (if eventually abandoned) plans to publish a monograph entitled Jerusalem and Athens with the University of Michigan Press in 1956/1957. (shrink)

Leontius of Jerusalem is considered the most accomplished of the neo-Chalcedonian theologians of the sixth century. He shows himself, in his Testimonies of the Saints, to be an ecumenical theologian attempting to convince Syrian anti-Chalcedonians that their objections to Chalcedon are baseless, since all agree, beneath their antithetical formulae, on a christology of hypostatic union. They are urged to abandon their self-important yet discredited mentor, Severus, and to see that Chalcedon had no secret agenda. Gray's edition of this important (...) early Christian treatise provides an introduction, the Greek text, and notes, together with a new translation into readable, modern English. (shrink)

ABSTRACT William Blake's poem Jerusalem, like all Perennial utopias, achieves a dialectical synthesis of the ideal and the actual through the narrative focalization of a religious experience at the level of character, one that is at once transhistorical and universal. By reading the poem through the lens of the Perennial paradigm, we discover that the temporal aspects of Jerusalem are intimately tied to the religious dimensions of Blake's utopian vision. In addition to giving us a new way to (...) understand the well-documented distinctiveness of Blake's religious message, the Perennial paradigm shows Blake's soteriology in Jerusalem to be utopian rather than salvationist. Because of the ultimately subjective nature of apprehension of the Divine Vision, Blake's utopian thought is not “clearly a forward-directed anticipatory and visionary concept,” as Magnus Ankarsjö has recently argued. Blake does not rally the reader towards some “ensuing peaceful millennium” but rather to find enlightenment in the eternal moment. In light of Blake's suspicion of ratiocination, combined with his deliberate use of narrative focalization of Albion's religious vision, reading Jerusalem as a Rational utopia grounded in Judeo-Christian of notions of Apocalypse is to miss Blake's core religious message. (shrink)

With Eichmann in Jerusalem, we have, I would admit, a most unlikely case study for use in a business ethics classroom. The story of Eichmann is already some sixty years old, and his activities in his career as a Nazi were far beyond the pale of even the most egregious cases found in the typical business ethics case books. No doubt, there is some truth to the fact that introducing Eichmann’s story into an applied ethics class would inevitably depict (...) an unseemly analogy between the practices of latter day corporations and the bureaucracy of the Nazi era. My argument here, though, is that the story of Adolf Eichmann, as depicted in Hannah Arendt’s well-known Eichmann in Jerusalem, offers a philosophically cogent account of judgment and ethical decision-making that future business managers and employees would do well to heed. Indeed, Eichmann in Jerusalem, originally a series of press accounts for New Yorker magazine, deserves consideration alongside the Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and other classic ethics texts in a business ethics syllabus. This is not to say that Arendt’s work is uncontroversial; there are serious questions to be raised about both her depiction of Eichmann and her conclusions about “the banality of evil.” Nevertheless, her account of ethics, which, with its account of ethical duties and its case study of Eichmann’s character, shows both its Aristotelian and Kantian influences, is a warning to readers who would conflate morality with state laws and their duties with the needs of superiors. In short, I argue that, despite her well-known critique of modern large scale economies and her general avoidance of discussions of post-industrial corporations, Arendt may be a business ethicist of the first order. (shrink)

John Caiazza's essay raises important controversial issues regarding the contemporary debates between science and religion. His arguments are largely presented in a dichotomous and rather adversarial mode with which I strongly disagree. Unable to present a detailed counterargument in this brief reflection, I ask, What is being spoken about, and who is speaking? What is meant by science and religion here? Neither term can be taken as a unified, essentialist category; both comprise many historical layers, possess numerous internal complexities, and (...) invite a diversity of interpretations. I refer to the science of China, India, and the ancient Near East, all of which have fed into modern science, so that the sciences cannot be restricted to those of the modern West. Nor can religion be limited to the religious beliefs and practices of Western Christianity. I discuss the position/location/context of the author‐ Caiazza's as well as my own‐ after introducing Hans‐Georg Gadamer's idea of the “fusion of horizons,” which provides a rich vein for enhancing the debate between science and religion. To expand the respective horizons of their dialogue it will be important to move away from an adversarial, exclusionary spirit to a more collaborative and communicative framework that allows for the development of new ideals, new questions, new ways of knowing, and an ethical and socially responsible stance more centered on human needs and concerns. We may have to build an altogether new Athens and Jerusalem for this. (shrink)

The first volume in the new critical edition of Lev Shestov's work in English, which I have been asked to coordinate. The volume includes my preface and annotations.

There are multiple manners of defining Jewish philosophy. The controversies woven around this topic seem to leave the issue perpetually open instead of determining a unique and final perspective. However, this outcome is indubitably an indication of the fact that Jewish philosophy proposes a privileged manner of understanding Judaism through the encounter between philosophy and religion as a founding polar- ity of a creative tradition. One of the ways of asserting this polarity has gained the symbolic dimension of superimposing two (...) cultural paradigms. This has been expressed through the metaphor of two cities, namely Jerusalem and Athens, and through the metaphor of two lands, Greece and Israel. Out of these symbolic designations I will bring into discussion the standpoints of Leo Strauss and Abraham Joshua Heschel and will try to offer a new perspective over this issue. (shrink)

As a political thinker nurtured in early 20th-century German, Hannah Arendt is most often identified with the Greek philosophical tradition. This article argues that the crisis in reality that threw her into politics also, though unacknowledgedly, threw her into ‘Jewish modes of thinking’ as an alternative source where she found the Greek tradition lacking. This claim is controversial, given Arendt’s vehement criticisms of any recourse to the absolute, or metaphysical truths in the realm of politics. Nevertheless, and consistent with a (...) number of early 20th-century Jewish thinkers (Rosenzweig, Levinas, Buber, Shestov) who explicitly identified the Hebrew God not as the metaphysical but as the condition of possibility for authentic freedom under conditions of finitude, one finds in Arendt a move towards an understanding of the seat of human freedom that sits far more comfortably in the Jerusalem than in the Athens tradition. Specifically, in her emphasis on natality and genuine futurity, one senses a strong resonance with the notion of pure creation in the Hebrew Bible, as one does, notably, in her insistence that forgiveness and promises (covenants) form the two pillars for human sociality. Throughout the history of Jewish thought, one consistently finds precisely this Arendtian struggle to represent a model of law that holds the tension between binding fidelity to promises, memory and the past, and an openness to futurity, to the infinity of interpretation that gives meaning to those promises. Closely resembling the midrashic tradition, Arendt’s political community of speech is one in which meaning is open ended and plural, allowing for the binding together that sustains a polity, while also opening up to the radically new of each new birth. (shrink)

This volume is the second instalment in the new critical edition of Lev Shestov's complete works which has been entrusted to the Director of the Lev Shestov Society, Dr Ramona Fotiade, by the French publisher, Le Bruit du Temps.

This paper discusses the representation of Jewish religion and culture in the architecture of the YMCA Building in Jerusalem, a prominent edifice built by the New York architect Arthur Loomis Harmon for the American YMCA. Within it, Jewish place and space were reconstructed as part of an architecture planned to promote Jewish, Christian and Moslem co-existence through an American secular cultural curriculum and a Christian vision of peace.

Commentaries on Eichmann in Jerusalem are of two kinds. The first confronts the historical relevance of Arendt's `report' and attempts to ascertain whether her ironical presentation of Eichmann's trial matches reality, namely, the incommensurable suffering of the Jewish people. The second focuses on the meaning of her expression `the banality of evil', and places Arendt in a long tradition of moral and political philosophy concerned with the problem of evil and, accordingly, of judging evil. The argument of this paper (...) is that both paths of research miss Arendt's intention, and that her `report' has to be read in light of Walter Benjamin's conceptions of history and storytelling. On the one hand, Eichmann in Jerusalem was not intended to reflect reality objectively because, as Arendt claimed, the objectivity of scientific historiography may serve only to condone the genocide. Throughout her entire work, Arendt aimed at avoiding the neutrality of historicism, the `tradition of sine ira et studio', which, according to her, represents a renunciation of responsibility. On the other hand, Arendt emphasized that she did not attempt to write about the nature of evil but to faithfully describe a phenomenon. Therefore the questions to be answered are: What did Arendt mean by a `report'? What does it mean to describe Eichmann's trial non-objectively but faithfully? In this paper, I show that her report should be understood in the light of a new methodological experiment inherited from Benjamin, which can be broken down into two steps: 1. To reveal the truth of history in stories rather than seek historical `objectivity' through theories; and 2. To look at events from forgotten standpoints, which are assumed to represent the experienced `inside' of history. (shrink)

This article discusses the historical opposition in the Western world between Athens as the centre of democratic political thinking, reason and philosophical knowledge and Jerusalem as the centre of religion, faith and revelation. It examines the historical trajectory of the debate from early Christianity to this day with special emphasis on the work of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin; it addresses the relation between faith and reason as two existential and political principles reinforcing each other and explores the symbiotic (...) relationship existing today after both symbolic landscapes have been replaced by new patterns of social organization. It suggests that we must recast the duality Athens/ Jerusalem, not as terms of antagonism, but as two complementary dimensions of existence and orders of experience. It proposes that the event of human natality belongs to the religious order while that of human conscience belongs to the political order. It concludes that modern complex trans-national societies must absorb the experience of both traditions and articulate a new conceptual framework about the relationship between faith and reason. (shrink)

William Blake and film noir apparently had the same problem with the urban landscape. While Blake attempts to create a mental world within language that would give a new face of religion to offer comfort to the inhabitants of London, film noir in Los Angeles finds noise and nihilism in the absence of faith. Both struggle with Immanuel Kant, who claimed that reason actively makes the world worthwhile. Hickey and Boggs, a relatively obscure neo-noir movie from 1972, represents the meaninglessness (...) and noise of language, bereft of the religion of Blake and the reason of Kant. (shrink)

In the context of the launch of a new theater company whose mission is to bring entertaining theological content to audiences in and around Jerusalem, Roy Doliner’s Divine Right was chosen as the company’s first production. This play about the Disputation of Barcelona balances historical accuracy and creative dramatic content in a satisfying and intellectually honest portrayal of the events of the Disputation for educated lay audiences. Many theological and dramaturgical issues arise, especially in producing a play with a (...) high level of Christian content and theology for mainly Orthodox or at least traditionally educated Jewish audiences. English speaking audience members in Jerusalem tend to be well-informed, both on the historical level and on the level of Jewish law and mores. This makes them exacting viewers, critical of inaccuracies of history or interpretation, wary of challenging positions but mostly willing to learn, and delighted by thorough research and characterization. This paper examines the technical, dramaturgical, and theological issues that arose during this production for the playwright, director, actors, and audiences. (shrink)

Prophecies concerning an incredible End of Days for the city of Jerusalem usually make use of stories that deal with beginnings in order to build from their bits and pieces a new one, a new an better beginning. This is not the case in our prophecy, that found in Zechariah 8:4-6, which does not rearrange the order of the creation but instead promises the city days of routine and peace, days in which the weaker elements of society, the elderly (...) and the very young, will enjoy complete security and will have no need for the protection of the powerful. The prophecy yet makes subtle allusion to recent hardships, to the destruction of Jerusalem as that event is shown to us in the book of Lamentations. Unlike the fantastical prophecies, it is precisely the promise of quiet routine that threatens to awaken doubt in the dark and difficult days in which Zechariah lives, and so God announces with insistence that the promise will indeed be fulfilled. (shrink)