1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910882889103321

Autore

Nissan Ephraim

Titolo

Besmirching the Denominational Enemy Within and Outside : Counter-history or Its Parody / / by Ephraim Nissan, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2024

ISBN

3-031-46069-3

Edizione

[1st ed. 2024.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (401 pages)

Altri autori (Persone)

Petrovsky-ShternYohanan

Disciplina

201.5

Soggetti

Europe - History

World history

Religion - History

Judaism and culture

Judaism - History

European History

World History, Global and Transnational History

History of Religion

Jewish Cultural Studies

Jewish History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Part I Antiquity to the Middle Ages: An Iranic Locale, Outside Views -- 1. Mazdak, Mazdakism, and the Mazdakite Parenthesis in Sasanian History -- 2. “Ḥiwi” (Ḥəyyawi) of Balkh -- 3. Poor Pharaoh, Wicked Moses: The “Letter of Haman” — A Rabbinic Parody of Anti-Jewish Counter-History -- Part II Modern Contexts: Otherworldly Counter-Biography of the Other and the “Enemy Within” -- 4. Haim Vital, Founders of Other Faiths, and the Censors Nicholas I -- 5. Moses Mendelssohn, Hartwig Wessely, and Fear of the Haskalah.

Sommario/riassunto

Counter-hagiography and counter-biography besmirch foundational figures held dear by different religious, political, or social groups. Such phenomena figure prominently in the history of religion and conflicts. For example, what we know of the Mazdakite revolution in pre-Islamic Iran/Iraq comes from revilers. The anti-Judaic polemicist from ninth-



century Afghanistan and Iraq, Hiwi (“Snake”), was actually called Ḥəyyāwī (still a name among Iraqi Jews). The reputation of the great Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) thinker Moses Mendelssohn was damaged among the Orthodox by how Haskalah extremists portrayed him in their image. In 1869, a Genoan politician, Cesare Cabella, fulminated against Esther and Mordecai. In the Letter of Haman in rabbinic homiletics, Jews parodized hostile representations of their sacred history. Gerson Rosenzweig parroted in his 1892 talmudic-style Tractate America, anti-immigrant rhetoric from New York newspapers. Roman-age rabbis responded to claims about the protagonist of the Book of Joshua, “Joshua the Robber” as per a North African inscription early Byzantine Procopius of Caesarea alleged to have seen.