Peter Schäfer – författare

The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World examines Judaism in Palestine throughout the Hellenistic period, from Alexander the Great's conquest in 334BC to its capture by the Arabs in AD 636. Under the Greek, Roman and finally Christian supremacy which Hellenism brought, Judaism developed far beyond its biblical origins into a form which was to influence European history from the Middle Ages to the present day. The book focuses particularly on the social, economic and religious concerns of this period, and the political status of the Jews as both active agents and passive victims of history.The author provides a straightforward chronological survey of this important period through analysis and interpretation of the existing sources. With its accessible style and explanation of technical terms, the book provides a useful introduction to students and anybody with an interest in post-biblical Judaism.

The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World examines Judaism in Palestine throughout the Hellenistic period, from Alexander the Great's conquest in 334BC to its capture by the Arabs in AD 636. Under the Greek, Roman and finally Christian supremacy which Hellenism brought, Judaism developed far beyond its biblical origins into a form which was to influence European history from the Middle Ages to the present day. The book focuses particularly on the social, economic and religious concerns of this period, and the political status of the Jews as both active agents and passive victims of history.The author provides a straightforward chronological survey of this important period through analysis and interpretation of the existing sources. With its accessible style and explanation of technical terms, the book provides a useful introduction to students and anybody with an interest in post-biblical Judaism.

Taking a fresh look at what the Greeks and Romans thought about Jews and Judaism, Peter Schäfer locates the origin of anti-Semitism in the ancient world. Judeophobia firmly establishes Hellenistic Egypt as the generating source of anti-Semitism, with roots extending back into Egypt’s pre-Hellenistic history.A pattern of ingrained hostility toward an alien culture emerges when Schäfer surveys an illuminating spectrum of comments on Jews and their religion in Greek and Roman writings, focusing on the topics that most interested the pagan classical world: the exodus or, as it was widely interpreted, expulsion from Egypt; the nature of the Jewish god; food restrictions, in particular abstinence from pork; laws relating to the sabbath; the practice of circumcision; and Jewish proselytism. He then probes key incidents, two fierce outbursts of hostility in Egypt: the destruction of a Jewish temple in Elephantine in 410 B.C.E. and the riots in Alexandria in 38 C.E. Asking what fueled these attacks on Jewish communities, the author discovers deep-seated ethnic resentments. It was from Egypt that hatred of Jews, based on allegations of impiety, xenophobia, and misanthropy, was transported first to Syria-Palestine and then to Rome, where it acquired a new element: fear of this small but distinctive community. To the hatred and fear, ingredients of Christian theology were soon added—a mix all too familiar in Western history.

In this beautifully realized study, Peter Schafer investigates the origins of a female manifestation of God in Jewish mysticism. The search itself is a fascinating exploration of the idea of a feminine divinity. And Schafer's surprising but persuasive conclusions yield deeper understanding of the complex but frequently intimate relationship between Christianity and Judaism--and of the development of religious concepts more generally. Toward the end of the twelfth century, a small book titled the Bahir (Light) appeared in Provence. The first document of Judaism's emerging kabbalistic movement, it introduced a completely new view of God, one that included a divine potency that was essentially female. This female divinity was portrayed both as a mediator between Jews and God and as part of the Godhead itself. Examining Judaic history from the biblical Wisdom tradition to the Middle Ages, Schafer finds some precedents for the Kabbalah's feminine divinity. But he cannot account for her forceful appearance in twelfth-century southern France without reference to the immediate Christian environment, particularly the flourishing veneration of the Virgin Mary.Indeed, twelfth-century Jews and Christians were simultaneously rediscovering the feminine as an aspect of the Godhead after having abandoned it in favor of either an abstract, disembodied God or an exclusively male one. In proposing that the medieval cult of Mary--rather than eastern Gnosticism--is the appropriate framework for understanding the feminine elements in Jewish mysticism, Mirror of His Beauty represents a sea change in Kabbalah and Jewish-Christian cultural studies. It shifts our attention from the Byzantine East to the Latin Christian West. And in contrast to histories that treat the development of Judaism and Christianity in isolation, it leads us to a fuller understanding of Jews and Christians living in proximity, aware of each other.

The Origins of Jewish Mysticism offers the first in-depth look at the history of Jewish mysticism from the book of Ezekiel to the Merkavah mysticism of late antiquity. The Merkavah movement is widely recognized as the first full-fledged expression of Jewish mysticism, one that had important ramifications for classical rabbinic Judaism and the emergence of the Kabbalah in twelfth-century Europe. Yet until now, the origins and development of still earlier forms of Jewish mysticism have been largely overlooked. In this book, Peter Schafer sheds new light on Ezekiel's tantalizing vision, the apocalyptic literature of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, the rabbinical writings of the Talmudic period, and the esotericism of the Merkavah mystics. Schafer questions whether we can accurately speak of Jewish mysticism as a uniform, coherent phenomenon with origins in Judaism's mythical past.Rather than imposing preconceived notions about "mysticism" on a great variety of writings that arose from different cultural, religious, and historical settings, he reveals what these writings seek to tell us about the age-old human desire to get close to and communicate with God.

Scattered throughout the Talmud, the founding document of rabbinic Judaism in late antiquity, can be found quite a few references to Jesus--and they're not flattering. In this lucid, richly detailed, and accessible book, Peter Schafer examines how the rabbis of the Talmud read, understood, and used the New Testament Jesus narrative to assert, ultimately, Judaism's superiority over Christianity. The Talmudic stories make fun of Jesus' birth from a virgin, fervently contest his claim to be the Messiah and Son of God, and maintain that he was rightfully executed as a blasphemer and idolater. They subvert the Christian idea of Jesus' resurrection and insist he got the punishment he deserved in hell--and that a similar fate awaits his followers. Schafer contends that these stories betray a remarkable familiarity with the Gospels--especially Matthew and John--and represent a deliberate and sophisticated anti-Christian polemic that parodies the New Testament narratives.He carefully distinguishes between Babylonian and Palestinian sources, arguing that the rabbis' proud and self-confident countermessage to that of the evangelists was possible only in the unique historical setting of Persian Babylonia, in a Jewish community that lived in relative freedom. The same could not be said of Roman and Byzantine Palestine, where the Christians aggressively consolidated their political power and the Jews therefore suffered. A departure from past scholarship, which has played down the stories as unreliable distortions of the historical Jesus, Jesus in the Talmud posits a much more deliberate agenda behind these narratives.

In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schafer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.

In late antiquity, as Christianity emerged from Judaism, it was not only the new religion that was being influenced by the old. The rise and revolutionary challenge of Christianity also had a profound influence on rabbinic Judaism, which was itself just emerging and, like Christianity, trying to shape its own identity. In The Jewish Jesus, Peter Schafer reveals the crucial ways in which various Jewish heresies, including Christianity, affected the development of rabbinic Judaism. He even shows that some of the ideas that the rabbis appropriated from Christianity were actually reappropriated Jewish ideas. The result is a demonstration of the deep mutual influence between the sister religions, one that calls into question hard and fast distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, and even Judaism and Christianity, during the first centuries CE.

A book that challenges our most basic assumptions about Judeo-Christian monotheismContrary to popular belief, Judaism was not always strictly monotheistic. Two Gods in Heaven reveals the long and little-known history of a second, junior god in Judaism, showing how this idea was embraced by rabbis and Jewish mystics in the early centuries of the common era and casting Judaism's relationship with Christianity in an entirely different light.Drawing on an in-depth analysis of ancient sources that have received little attention until now, Peter Schäfer demonstrates how the Jews of the pre-Christian Second Temple period had various names for a second heavenly power—such as Son of Man, Son of the Most High, and Firstborn before All Creation. He traces the development of the concept from the Son of Man vision in the biblical book of Daniel to the Qumran literature, the Ethiopic book of Enoch, and the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria. After the destruction of the Second Temple, the picture changes drastically. While the early Christians of the New Testament took up the idea and developed it further, their Jewish contemporaries were divided. Most rejected the second god, but some—particularly the Jews of Babylonia and the writers of early Jewish mysticism—revived the ancient Jewish notion of two gods in heaven.Describing how early Christianity and certain strands of rabbinic Judaism competed for ownership of a second god to the creator, this boldly argued and elegantly written book radically transforms our understanding of Judeo-Christian monotheism.

From a prize-winning historian, the first comprehensive narrative history of Ashkenazi Jews: their culture, their religion, their daily lives, and their many migrationsCovering two millennia of history, from late antiquity to the twentieth century, this landmark volume by an eminent historian traces the long trajectory of Ashkenazi Jews, that branch of the Jewish people who migrated from the Levant into central and then eastern Europe. Because religion, in the form of rabbinic Judaism, played so central a role in the lives of almost all Jews before modernity, author Peter Schäfer examines the ways in which the institutions and practices of the rabbis were transplanted, and transformed, during these periods of migration. Schäfer describes the establishment and flourishing of centers of rabbinic learning and innovation in the new European homelands—places including Cologne, Frankfurt, Worms, and Troyes, the French home of the legendary medieval Talmudic sage Rashi. He discusses the long and often fraught period of intellectual, cultural, economic, and political exchange with the Christian majority, and chronicles such Jewish movements as kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), messianism (Sabbateanism) and (in the modern period) Jewish socialism (“Bundism”) and Zionism.The scope of Ashkenazi is vast, beginning with a portrait of Jews in the late Roman Empire and then mapping the first central European Jewish settlements in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the expulsions of the late fifteenth century, the subsequent migration to Russia, Lithuania, and Poland, followed by remigration westward in the nineteenth century after the start of Russian pogroms. Finally, Schäfer considers the impact of the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel—which was spearheaded by Zionist leaders of largely Ashkenazi origins.

This book represents the first wide-scale presentation and interpretation of pre-kabbalistic, Jewish mysticism. This is the Hekhalot or Merkavah mysticism. The emphasis is on the conceptions of God, the angels, and man that the texts provide and that are the framework of the Judaic world view in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.This interpretation is based on the major works of this early Jewish mysticism: Hekhalot Rabbati ("The Greater Palaces"), Hekhalot Zutarti ("The Lesser Palaces"), Ma'aseh Merkavah ("The Working of the Chariot"), Merkavah Rabbah ("The Great Chariot)" and the Third (Hebrew) Book of Enoch. Many quotations from this largely unknown body of esoteric literature are included.The experience of the mystical heroes of this literature moves between the two poles of the heavenly journey-between the ascent of the mystic through the seven palaces to the Throne of Glory and the adjuration, the attempt to invoke God and his angels in order to force them to fulfill man's will. Both are permeated by magic, and the world view of this first stage of Jewish mysticism is thus deeply magical. The circles which formed it were concerned with nothing less than a radical transformation of the world of normative Judaism that for centuries was determined by the Rabbis.

In diesem zweiten Aufsatzband werden die Untersuchungen zum Talmud Yerushalmi hinsichtlich seines historischen Kontexts fortgesetzt. Dabei wird das rabbinische Judentum nicht als isolierte Gruppe gesehen, sondern in die kulturellen Strömungen der römischen Kaiserzeit eingeordnet. Die Beiträge namhafter Forscher wie auch jüngerer Wissenschaftler geben einen aktuellen Einblick in die internationale Diskussion über das rabbinische Judentum im kulturellen Raum der Spätantike.

Dieser Band, ein weiterer Markstein in der Erforschung des Talmud Yerushalmi, der wichtigsten Quelle des spätantiken Judentums, ist das bisher letzte Ergebnis eines Forschungsprojektes, das 1994 vom Institut für Judaistik an der Freien Universität in Berlin begonnen und November 2001 mit einer Tagung an der Princeton University beendet wurde. Er befaßt sich mit einem breiten Themenspektrum, wie zum Beispiel mit Geschlechterstudien, mit Aspekten des täglichen Lebens, römischen Festen, Magie etc. und wirft dabei auch ein Licht auf die methodologischen Probleme, die sich bei interkulturellen Studien ergeben. Diese Sammlung könnte daher für ähnliche Projekte in der Judaistik als Vorbild dienen, in denen verschiedene kulturelle Zusammenhänge diskutiert werden.

Joseph Dans Studien zur Kabbala sowie zur jüdischen Mystik, zum modernen Messianismus und zum Chassidismus vermitteln einen umfassenden Überblick über die komplexe Geschichte jüdischer Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte. Joseph Dan zu Ehren haben Freunde und Kollegen eine Festschrift mit Beiträgen zum Thema der Schöpfung und Neuschöpfung im jüdischen Denken zusammengestellt.Beiträge von: Philip Alexander, Dan Ben-Amos, Peter Schäfer, Margarete Schlüter, Bernard McGinn, Klaus Herrmann, Herbert Davidson, Annelies Kuyt, Haym Soloveitchik, Eli Yassif, Gerold Necker, Marc Saperstein, Giuseppe Veltri, Aviezer Ravitzky, Avinoam Rosenak, Kimmy Caplan, Saverio Campanini, Eric Jacobson, Yair Zakovitch, Rachel Elior, David Weiss Halivni, Avigdor Shinan, Avraham Grossman, Giulio Busi, Moshe Hallamish, Chava Turniansky, Jacob Elbaum, Hagit Matras, Joseph Hacker, Raya Haran, Arnold J. Band, Hamutal Bar Yosef, Miri Kubovy, Naama ben Shahar.

Peter Schäfer legt den ersten zusammenfassenden Versuch einer Geschichte der frühen jüdischen Mystik von Ezechiel bis zur Merkavah-Mystik vor. Er bietet damit eine genaue und einfühlsame Lektüre der einschlägigen Texte im Blick auf die Frage, was diese Texte uns über die uralte menschliche Sehnsucht vermitteln wollen, Gott nahe zu kommen. Das Werk bildet die Synthese eines Autors, der sich ein Leben lang mit diesem Thema beschäftigt hat. Es ist in einer gut verständlichen Sprache verfasst und daher sowohl für Spezialisten als auch für ein breiteres Publikum geeignet.

Peter Schäfer befasst sich mit den Rückwirkungen des sich herauskristallisierenden Christentums auf das zeitgenössische rabbinische Judentum, d.h. den Einflüssen, die das zu sich selbst findende Christentum auf das Judentum ausübte.Nach der viel diskutierten Erzählung vom verschwundenen Messiasbaby im Jerusalemer Talmud werden Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Rabbinen und diversen Häretikern bezüglich der Frage des einen Gottes oder einer möglichen Vielzahl von Göttern untersucht. Vor allem die im Christentum allmählich konkrete Gestalt annehmende Idee einer göttlichen Zweiheit (Vater und Sohn) bzw. Dreiheit (Vater, Sohn und Heiliger Geist) hat im rabbinischen Judentum deutlichere Spuren hinterlassen als bisher meist angenommen. Daneben spielen Vorstellungen eine wichtige Rolle, die sich aus dem Menschensohn des Danielbuches im Judentum und im Christentum entwickelten; im babylonischen Talmud und in der frühen jüdischen Mystik tritt uns dann die Gestalt eines höchsten Engels mit Namen Metatron entgegen, der sogar den Beinamen "Kleiner Gott" erhält. Abschliessend wird ein klassischer rabbinischer Midrasch vorgestellt, der ganz unbefangen den Gedanken des stellvertretenden Sühneleidens des Messias (wieder) in das Judentum einführt.Die Grenzen zwischen "Rechtgläubigkeit" und "Häresie" erweisen sich auch im Judentum als fließend, und mehr als einmal drängt sich die häretische Überlegung auf, ob man nicht nur von der "Geburt des Christentums aus dem Geist des Judentums" sprechen sollte, sondern umgekehrt auch von der "Geburt des Judentums aus dem Geist des Christentums".

Toledot Yeshu ("Die Lebensgeschichte Jesu") ist eine polemische jüdische Gegenerzählung gegen das Neue Testament. Der Text schreibt Jesus eine uneheliche Geburt, den Raub des Unaussprechlichen Namens Gottes, häretische Aktivitäten und schließlich einen unehrenhaften Tod zu. In Vorbereitung einer wissenschaftlichen Edition und Übersetzung der Erzählung organisierten Peter Schäfer, Michael Meerson und Yaacov Deutsch eine internationale Konferenz in Princeton, die den gegenwärtigen Stand der Erforschung des polemischen Traktats diskutierte. Nachdem er lange Gegenstand heftiger und bitterer Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen und Juden war, ist jetzt die Zeit reif für eine nüchterne und sachliche historische Einordnung.

Die Erforschung der frühen jüdischen Mystik (Merkavah-Mystik) hat in den letzten 30 Jahren gewaltige Fortschritte gemacht. Das alte Modell einer linearen Entwicklung, ausgehend von einem einmaligen und möglichst frühen Ursprung, wird zunehmend durch neue Einsichten in die spezifischen - und sich wandelnden - kulturellen Kontexte in Frage gestellt, in denen diese Mystik entstand und ihren literarischen Niederschlag fand. Das byzantinische Palästina und das sassanidische Babylonien kristallisieren sich als die beiden entscheidenden Brennpunkte der Merkavah-Mystik heraus. Im vorliegenden Band untersuchen internationale Wissenschaftler aus verschiedenen Disziplinen und demnach auch unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die literarische Entstehung, kulturelle Bedeutung, religiöse Funktion und Überlieferung der Hekhalot Literatur.

Genesis Rabbah, der früheste rabbinische Genesiskommentar, wurde im römischen Palästina um das 5. Jahrhundert n. Chr. verfasst. In diesem Sammelband untersucht ein internationales Team von Wissenschaftlern die literarische Entstehung und textliche Überlieferung des Werks in der Spätantike sowie den historischen, kulturellen, religiösen und politischen Kontext, aus dem es entstand. Die Sammlung möchte die Diskussion über den klassischen rabbinischen Textkorpus, den Midrash, die Religionen der Spätantike, Interaktionen zwischen Juden, Christen und anderen in der griechisch-römischen Welt und die Rezeption von Genesis Rabbah in Mittelalter und Moderne voranbringen.