This course is an
introduction to the multifaceted civilization of Judaism as both a religion and
as a historical phenomenon. After a survey of the background and preconditions
of the emergence of the Hebrew Bible and of monotheistic culture within the
context of the ancient Middle East in antiquity, the course focuses on the
cultural mechanisms such as religious law and memory that kept the various
Jewish worlds somewhat linked, despite the Diaspora from the time of the
Babylonian Captivity onwards, and even more so following the destruction of the
Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Attention is given to religious,
cultural, and social developments that made Judaism survive from antiquity
through the middle ages to the present, and also to the different reactions to
its respective environments, in areas as diverse as Babylonia in the age of the
Talmud, the "Golden Age" of Islamic Spain, or Germany and the
Americas in the Modern era. The final part of the course covers the rise of a
Jewish center in Palestine in the twentieth century, the ensuing tensions
between this center and the persisting diasporas particularly after the
Holocaust, as well as the often violent relations between the state of Israel and
the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area, and the wider Muslim world.
- Teacher: Marcus Pyka