A History of Judaism
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- £12.99
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- £12.99
Publisher Description
A panoramic history of Judaism from its origins to the present
Judaism is by some distance the oldest of the three Abrahamic religions. Despite the extraordinarily diverse forms it has taken, the Jewish people have believed themselves bound to God by the same covenant for more than three thousand years. This book explains how Judaism came to be and how it has developed from one age to the next, as well as the ways in which its varieties have related to each other.
A History of Judaism ranges from Judaism's inception amidst polytheistic societies in the second and fi rst millennia, through the Jerusalem Temple cult in the centuries preceding its destruction, to the rabbis, mystics and messiahs of medieval and early modern times and, finally, the many expressions of the modern and contemporary Jewish worlds. Throughout, Martin Goodman shows how Judaism has been made and remade over the millennia by individuals as well as communities, and shaped by the cultures and philosophies in which Jews have been immersed.
It becomes a truly global story, spanning not only the Middle East, Europe and North Africa, but also China, India and America, andone that untangles the threads of doctrinal and philosophical debate running through Judaism's history. Goodman demonstrates that its numerous strains have often adopted incompatible practices and ideas - about the authority of ancestral traditions, the meaning of scripture, the nature of God, the afterlife and the End of Days - but that disagreement has almost always been tolerated without schism.
There have been many histories of the Jewish people but remarkably few attempts to describe the history and evolution of Judaism itself. This panoramic book, the fi rst of its kind in almost seventy years, does glorious justice to the inexhaustible variety of one the world's great religions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goodman (Rome and Jerusalem), professor of Jewish studies at Oxford, integrates up-to-date scholarship into an accessible narrative look at more than 2,000 years of Judaism. His approach combining the linear histories that earlier generations of scholars used with contemporary open-minded thinking about considering "the claims of all traditions" avoids the common pitfalls of assuming that there was always a clearly-defined mainstream of Judaism. Beginning with the second century B.C.E., Goodman traces many varieties of the religion as it shifted over the centuries into its current incarnations; as he notes, "the central liturgical concern of 2,000 years ago the performance of sacrificial worship in the Jerusalem Temple has little to do with most forms of Judaism today." He ends with a nuanced look at contemporary topics, particularly the adjustments major denominations have struggled to make in order to accommodate LGBTQ members and the increase in messianic strains among Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Despite the volume's ambitious scope, Goodman leaves no significant topic unaddressed. This is the rare scholarly volume that offers new insights and details for the lay and academic reader alike.