Daniel R. Schwartz - Böcker

A new translation and commentary on I Maccabees that offers a fresh interpretation of the author’s values and purpose  First Maccabees, composed in the second century BCE, chronicles four decades of clashes between Hellenistic Syria and Judea, from Antiochus Epiphanes’s ascent to the throne in 175 BCE to the Hasmoneans’ establishment of an independent Judean state, ruled by Simon and his sons.  In this volume, Daniel R. Schwartz provides a new translation of the Greek text and analyzes its historical significance. In dialogue with contemporary scholarship, the introduction surveys the work’s themes, sources, and transmission, while the commentary addresses textual details and issues of historical reconstruction, often devoting special attention to the lost Hebrew original and its associations. Schwartz demonstrates that 1 Maccabees, despite its Hebraic biblical style and its survival within the Christian canon, deviates from biblical and Judaic works by marginalizing God, evincing scorn for martyrs, and ascribing to human power and valor crucial historical roles. This all fits its mandate: justification of the Hasmonean dynasty, especially the Simonides.

In writing in English about the classical era, is it more appropriate to refer to “Jews” or to “Judeans”? What difference does it make? Today, many scholars consider “Judeans” the more authentic term, and “Jews” and “Judaism” merely anachronisms.In Judeans and Jews, Daniel R. Schwartz argues that we need both terms in order to reflect the dichotomy between the tendencies of those, whether in Judea or in the Disapora, whose identity was based on the state and the land (Judeans), and those whose identity was based on a religion and culture (Jews).Presenting the Second Temple era as an age of transition between a territorial past and an exilic and religious future, Judeans and Jews not only sharpens our understanding of this important era but also sheds important light on the revolution in Jewish identity caused by the creation of the modern state of Israel.

2 Maccabees is a Jewish work composed during the 2nd century BCE and preserved by the Church. Written in Hellenistic Greek and told from a Jewish-Hellenistic perspective, 2 Maccabees narrates and interprets the ups and downs of events that took place in Jerusalem prior to and during the Maccabean revolt: institutionalized Hellenization and the foundation of Jerusalem as a polis; the persecution of Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes, accompanied by famous martyrdoms; and the rebellion against Seleucid rule by Judas Maccabaeus. 2 Maccabees is an important source both for the events it describes and for the values and interests of the Judaism of the Hellenistic diaspora that it reflects - which are often quite different from those represented by its competitor, 1 Maccabees.

The life of Philipp Jaffé (1819–1870), from his youth in Posen; his studies with Leopold von Ranke and career – as a close friend of Theodor Mommsen – at the pinnacle of historical scholarship in Berlin, first at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and then, after his feud with Georg Heinrich Pertz, with his unprecedented 1862 appointment, while still a Jew, to a Berlin professorship; and on to his baptism in 1868 and suicide in 1870, was a life of transition between East and West and between Judaism and Christianity – and a life of devotion to scholarship, of loneliness, of success and of frustration. Forgotten today, except by medievalists who depend on his numerous editions of Latin texts, Jaffé was a central figure in the heydays of German scholarship. His career illustrates the working conditions of such scholars, their friendships and feuds, and also the limits that hemmed Jews in and the ways they could be overcome. This volume documents Jaffé’s life, accomplishments, and struggles, and also offers insight into his soul via more than two hundred of his letters (in German) – about half to his parents in Posen and half to colleagues around Europe, especially Pertz and Mommsen.

Apart from an opening survey of modern study of ancient Jewish history, which emphasizes the foundational role of German-Jewish scholars, the studies united in this volume apply philological methods to the writings of four of them: Heinrich Graetz, Isaak Heinemann, Elias Bickerman(n), and Abraham Schalit. In each case, it is argued that some seemingly trivial anomaly or infelicity, in a publication about such ancient characters as Antiochus Epiphanes, Herod, and Josephus, points to the way in which the historian constructed, and revised, his understanding of the Jews’ situation under Greeks or Romans in light of his perception of the Jews’ situation under the Second or Third Reich. The collection also includes a study that focuses on a Jewish medievalist, Philipp Jaffé, and unravels the indirect but inexorable process that led from a scholarly feud about the editing of medieval Latin texts, in the 1860s, to the “Berlin Antisemitism Dispute” (Berliner Antisemitismusstreit) of 1879–1881, which is commonly viewed as the opening act of modern German antisemitism.

Die Autoren der vorliegenden Studien würdigen Menahem Stern, einen der größten Gelehrten der antiken jüdischen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ihr Thema ergibt sich aus der Erkenntnis, dass das jüdische Leben und die jüdische Gesellschaft während der tausendjährigen Zeitspanne von Alexanders Eroberung im vierten Jh. v. Chr. bis zur arabischen Eroberung im siebten Jh. n. Chr. unzählige plötzliche wie auch schrittweise Veränderungen erfahren haben. Das hatte zur Folge, dass sich in der Antike zahlreiche Facetten jüdischen Lebens sowie viele Aspekte jüdischer Identität drastisch gewandelt haben. Die Aufsätze dieses Bandes umfassen politische, soziale, kulturelle und religiöse Sachverhalte in literarischen und archäologischen Quellen.