S. Daniel Breslauer - Böcker

A collection of essays focusing on myth in Judaism from biblical to modern times, this book offers a sense of the great diversity of the Jewish religion.The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth offers a panorama of diverse definitions of myth, understandings of Judaism, and competing evaluations of the "mythic" element in religion.The contributors focus on the problem of defining myth as a category in religious studies, examine modern religion and the role of myth in a "secularized" world, and look at specific cases of Jewish myth from biblical through modern times.

This book, first published in 1990, summarizes and evaluates the contribution of Martin Buber as a theorist of myth. Buber provides explicit guidelines for understanding and evaluating myths. He describes reality as twofold: people live either in a world of things, to which they relate as a subject controlling its objects, or in a world of self-conscious others, with whom one relates as fellow subjects. Human beings require both types of reality, but also a means of moving from one to the other. Buber understands myths as one such means by which people pass from I-It reality to I-You meeting. In studying myths, he focuses on the myths in the traditions he knows best, but offers his advice and interpretation of mythology and scholarship about mythology generally.