Psalms In/On Jerusalem

Ilana Pardes, Ophir Münz-Manor, Ilana Pardes, Ophir Münz-Manor

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783110336917
• eBook ISBN: 9783110459296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism

This volume explores the ways in which Jerusalem is represented in Psalms – from its position in the context of liturgical and pilgrim songs to its role as metaphor. Jerusalem in the Book of Psalms is the site of scenes of redemption, joy, and celebration of the proximity to God and the house of the Lord. But it is also the quintessential locus of loss, marked by cries over the devastating destruction of the Temple. These two antithetical poles of Jerusalem are expressed in both personal terms as well as within a collective framework. The bulk of the articles are devoted to questions of reception, to the ways in which the geographies of the Book of Psalms have travelled across their native bounds and entered other historical settings, acquiring new forms and meanings.

Notes on Contributors

Leora F. Batnitzky is Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton, 2000), Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge, 2006), and How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, 2011). Her current book project, tentatively titled “Conversion Before the Law: How Religion and Law Shape Each Other in the Modern World,” focuses on a number of contemporary legal cases concerning religious conversion in the U.S., Great Britain, Israel, and India. She is co-editor, with Ilana Pardes, of The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics and Hermeneutics (de Gruyter, 2014) as well as co-editor, with Yonatan Brafman, of an anthology Jewish Legal Theories, for the Brandeis Library of Modern Jewish Thought. She is co-editing Institutionalizing Rights and Religion, with Hanoch Dagan, to be published by Cambridge University Press and is also co-editor, with Ra’anan Boustan, of the journal Jewish Studies Quarterly.

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has written on subjects ranging from representations of the Holocaust in postwar American, Israeli and European culture to the configurations of exile and homecoming in contemporary Jewish literature. In 2007 she became a Guggenheim Fellow for her current project on “Jerusalem and the Poetics of Return.”

Ronald Hendel is the Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard and is the author of many articles and books on the Bible, including The Book of Genesis: A Biography (2013), Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (2016) and How Old is the Hebrew Bible? (2018, co-authored with Jan Joosten). He is the general editor of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature.

Vivian Liska, Professor of German literature and Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. In addition, since 2013, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Faculty of the Humanities at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has published extensively on literary theory, German modernism, and German-Jewish authors and thinkers. She is the (co-) editor of numerous books, among them the two-volume ICLA publication Modernism (2007), which was awarded the Prize of the Modernist Studies Association in 2008 and, most recently, Kafka and the Universal (2016). She is the editor of the book series “Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts” (De Gruyter, Berlin). In 2012, she was awarded the Cross of Honor for Sciences and the Arts from the Republic of Austria. Her books include Giorgio Agamben’s Empty Messianism (2008); When Kafka Says We. Uncommon Communities in German-Jewish Literature (2008); Fremde Gemeinschaft. Deutsch-jüdische Literatur der Moderne (2011) and, most recently, German-Jewish Thought and its Afterlife. A Tenuous Legacy (2017).

Ruth Kara- Ivanov Kaniel, Lecturer at Haifa University, a Research Fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Her book

“Holiness and Transgression: Mothers of the Messiah in the Jewish Myth” was published by Academic Studies Press, 2017. [Hebrew version Hakibbutz Hameuhad Press 2014]. Her new book “Human Ropes – Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis” is in print by Series in Criticism Culture and Interpretation – Bar Ilan University and Carmel (2018). Ruth’s current research deals with intersections between mysticism, gender, and psychoanalysis.

Ophir Münz-Manor, an associate professor of Rabbinic Culture in the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies at the Open University, is a specialist in Jewish liturgy and liturgical poetry from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. His studies focus on the intersections with contemporary Christian texts as well as questions of ritual, performance and gender in late antique Near Eastern cultures.

Ilana Pardes is the Katharine Cornell Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Director of the Center for Literary Studies at HU. She is the author of Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Harvard University Press, 1992), The Biography of Ancient Israel: National Narratives in the Bible (University of California Press, 2000), Melville’s Bibles (University of California, 2008); Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (The Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies, University of Washington Press, 2013), The Song of Songs: A Biography (Lives of great Religious Books, Princeton University Press, 2019). She is co-editor, with Ruth Ginsburg, of New Perspective on Moses and Monotheism (Niemeyer, 2006); and co-editor, with Leora Batnitzky, of The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics (De Gruyter, 2015).

Yael Sela is a faculty member and Head of the Program in Music at the Open University of Israel (since 2014). Having completed her graduate studies at the University of Oxford (2010), she has held several postdoctoral research fellowships at Universities in Berlin, Philadelphia, and Jerusalem. Her research interests are in the cultural and intellectual history of music at intersections with Jewish thought and Jewish intellectual history, politics, aesthetics, and literature in early modern Germany and England. Her current research is concerned with the role of aesthetic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Myth and Mimesis in the Psalm of Jonah
• His Highness: God’s Voice and the Autoimmune in Two Royal Psalms
• “Take Pity on Zion, Rebuild the Walls of Jerusalem”: A Late Antique Hebrew Elegy on the Destruction of Jerusalem
• Oral Tales and Written Truth in the Early Reception History of LXX Psalm 118(119)
• David and Jerusalem: From Psalms to the Zohar
• The Voice of the Psalmist: On the Performative Role of Psalms in Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem
• Rosenzweig’s Reading of Psalm 115: The Gruesome “We”
• Paul Celan, the Last Psalmist
• “By the Waters of Babylon”: The Amnesia of Memory
• Appendix: Selected Psalms on Jerusalem (translated by Robert Alter)
• Notes on Contributors