HIS 245 Worlds of Judaism
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 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, 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 in the Modern era. The course concludes with the rise of a Jewish center in Palestine in the twentieth century, and the ensuing tensions between this center and the persisting diasporas.