----------------------- Message requiring your approval ---------------------- From: "Lieve Teugels" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [ha-Safran]: New Publications in Midrash at Gorgias Press
Gorgias Press is glad to present to following recently published titles in midrash:
Marc Bregman, The Tanhuma-Yelammedenu Literature: Studies in the Evolution of the Versions, 2003 [Hebrew]. [x + 299 pp.]. List Price $65.
This study of Tanhuma-Yelammedenu midrash includes a survey of previous research, a catalogue of textual witnesses, a synoptic analysis of four versions of midrashic material to one biblical lection and general conclusions about the multifaceted evolution of this important genre of midrashic literature.
This is a Hebrew-language book with an extensive introduction in English.
�Bregman�s book is undoubtedly the best research ever done about the most complicated issue in the study of rabbinic literature: the Tanhuma-type Midrashim. Based on a vast knowledge of the history of rabbinic literature, an admirable power of innovation and impressive capability of synthesis, this book lays the foundations for all future scholarship of a very important stratum in the literature of ancient Judaism.� (Prof. Avigdor Shinan)
�At last�an excellent exposition of the nature of the Tanhuma literature which takes into account all the textual and historical aspects of the problem� (Prof. Chaim Milikowsky)
In our �Gorgias Dissertations: Jewish Studies� Series
Joshua L. Moss, Midrash and Legend: Historical Anecdotes in the Tannaitic Midrashim, 2003. [ix + 678]. List Price $65.
This study collects every example of a historical anecdote in the tannaitic midrashim. These stories are of particular interest from an inter-religious and comparative literary point of view, because New Testament studies have often referred to certain narratives in the gospels as �midrashic�. There are indeed some dynamics shared in common between the two genres of gospel narrative and rabbinic anecdote. Both are didactic accounts; both represent transmitted material shaped to function in specific contexts. But the fundamental matrices governing each genre are strikingly different. In this study the author sets forth, in positive terms, an understanding of what functions historical anecdotes serve in the tannaitic midrashim, along with a catalog of the rhetorical conventions used to fulfill those functions. The data does not bear out the notion that each collection has a rigid ideological program, but it certainly bears out the notion that different documents exhibit different preferences of style, of authorities, of argumentation, and of sources. In the anecdotes of the tannaitic midrash collections we find a body of texts which, in highly formalized fashion, described behaviors and conversations of sages which provided legal information serving to fill in gaps discovered in Scripture by means of exegesis, or served to illustrate virtues revealed in Scripture. Their actions are paradigmatic, timeless, and normative, providing sources of law or elucidations of law.
See www.gorgiaspress.com for other Gorgias Dissertations.
In our �Jewish Studies Classics� Series.
Leopold Zunz , Die gottesdienstlichen Vortr�ge der Juden: historisch entwickelt ein Beitrag zur Alterthumskunde und biblischen Kritik, zur Literatur- und Religionsgeschichte, 2003. Reprint of the 1919 edition with a New Introduction by Prof. Rivka Kern-Ulmer. [xvi + 516 pp.] List price: $58.
Leopold Zunz (1794-1886) was the founding father of the �Wissenschaft des Judentums�, an intellectual movement that originated among Jewish academics in Germany in the early 1900�s. His pamphlet �Etwas ueber die rabbinische Literatur� (�Something about Rabbinic Literature�), published in 1818, marked the official start of this new, academic, approach to the traditional Jewish Literature. He co-founded the Verein fuer Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in 1819, and its journal, the Zeitschrift fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums. Besides a revolutionary new approach to the study of Jewish Literature and History, Zunz aimed at a reforms in Jewish Liturgy and strived for political and cultural recognition of Jews in German society. Die gottesdienstlichen Vortr�ge der Juden deals with biblical interpretation and homiletics from the Bible up to his own time. It is still a standard work on this subject.
�[Zunz's] researches served as the foundation and the example for the "Science of Judaism."� (Nachum Glatzer in Encyclopaedia Judaica)
�I know of no Jewish scholar in modern times who does not revere in him the master� (Louis Ginzberg, Introduction to the first volume of Ginze Schechter).
See www.gorgiaspress.com for other titles in the Jewish Studies Classics Series.
Lieve M. Teugels, Ph.D. Acquisition and Production Editor Gorgias Press [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel and fax: 908-8980691 Main Office: 46 Orris Ave. Piscataway, NJ 08854 Tel. 732-699-0343 Fax 732-699-0342 www.GorgiasPress.com
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