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Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
Cambridge Companions are a series of authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods.
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Every judge who judges with complete fairness even for a single hour, the Writ gives him credit as though he had become a partner to the Holy One, blessed be He, in the creation.(BT Shabbat 10a)
In acting and judging with fairness—in applying the law in an impartial and equitable way—a judge models himself on divine creation. In this chapter, I interpret this rabbinic dictum along Maimonidean lines, drawing in part on some of Maimonides’ own views on creation and Mosaic prophecy. In the second part of the Guide Maimonides draws close connections between the two topics, and I help myself to that in presenting my own discussion of the aforementioned rabbinic dictum. The chapter proceeds in three sections, over the course of which I am concerned with teasing out the juridical analogy in a variety of ways: morphologically/structurally, psychologically, and finally teleologically.
This chapter considers the ways in which filmmakers have established the ‘tragic universe’ in screen adaptations of Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, through attention to the environment. Filmmakers repeatedly foreground the interplay between human body, physical surroundings and filmic space in ways that foreground the tragic environment as subjectively experienced and produced, and in turn see that environment producing and influencing its human subjects. The chapter moves between three kinds of tragic environment. The open spaces of films by Akira Kurosawa, Roman Polanski, Justin Kurzel, and Grigori Kozintsev frame human conflict within the natural world, a world that often suffers ecological catastrophe alongside its inhabitants, but which also endures. Another strand of films, including work by Michael Almereyda, Penny Woolcock, Don Boyd and Vishal Bhardwaj, establishes urban environments that privilege an interpretive focus on community, claustrophobia, consumption, and class. Finally, other filmmakers from Laurence Olivier to Kit Monkman, as well as directors of stage-to-screen adaptations, utilise cinematic technique to foreground inner psychological space, with environments constructed subjectively around their protagonists.
I argue that a traditional Jewish conception of God should be that of a perfectly good being. This follows from the demand for our maximal love of God. A perfectly good being must have a perfectly good character and need have power and knowledge only to the degree needed to express its perfectly good character. It need not be omnipotent or omniscient. It would be eternal and creator and sustainer of the world. It is an open question whether God must be a metaphysically necessary being.
R. Kook is best-known today for his paradoxical embrace of secular Zionism as a covert harbinger and embodiment of the traditional messianic dream. Despite its considerable influence on the trajectory of modern Israeli politics, the practical conclusions that have (rightly or wrongly) been distilled from this understanding of the nature of contemporary Jewish nationalism are increasingly challenged by a more complicated political reality.Other more radical implications of this blurring of theological boundaries, however, which have their roots in modern offshoots of classical Kabbala and parallel tropes of German idealism, bear notions that are surprisingly relevant to more fluid and humanist notions of religious belief in a post-Kantian age. These bear the potential for revising our understanding of the concept of God and of the grounding of religious dogma at large.
In this paper, I present a range of contemporary Jewish theological approaches to revelation with the aim of highlighting an array of opinions for beginning a discussion of a Jewish theology of revelation. I use models in theology because a “models approach” helps one place the thinkers into conceptual rubrics loosely based on the models of the Catholic theologian Avery Dulles. We discuss seven different models of Jewish Revelation. (1) the historic event model (2) the dialectic model (3) the mystical model (4) the Verbal model (5) the human potential model (6) the negative theology model and the (7) Hermenutical model
Approximately 300 Shakespeare films were made in the film industry’s silent era. They range from the filmed record of a theatre production to the film conceived as an autonomous work of cinema; the brief allusion to the full-blown drama; the narratively precise retelling of a play to a skittish borrowing from it; the historically placed production to the radical update. They emerged from production companies in Britain, the US, Italy, France, Germany and Denmark. Collectively, they are revealing both about the changing priorities of the film industry and of the broader history of Shakespeare on screen. This chapter considers the impulses that inspired them, what they achieved, how they were exhibited and received and the nature of their legacy. Moments selected for illustrative focus include the Herbert Beerbohm Tree King John (1899), The Tempest (1908), films of the Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916), Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet (1920), Emil Jannings’ Othello (1922), John Gielgud in the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene (1924) and the use of live lecturers. The chapter ends with the creative engagements silent Shakespeare films have recently prompted, including in the Kit Monkman Macbeth (2018).
The central theological questions raised for Jewish belief by the Holocaust concern the existence and nature of God. In this paper, I focus on four figures who addressed these theological questions in a serious way: Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, and Hans Jonas. I show that Jonas’s argument for a limited and changing God is the most radical of these theological responses and that the radical character of his response can best be appreciated by contrasting his approach with the other three theological accounts, especially in terms of how the problem of theodicy functions in those accounts.
This chapter considers the treatment of ethnic and cultural identity in adaptations of two plays in which they are an integral element, The Merchant of Venice and Othello.Complex characterization is in danger of being short-circuited by unconscious bias, pulling audiences back to racial stereotypes, dehumanizing Shylock and Othello despite the efforts of well-intentioned filmmakers. In The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitism and its consequences in recent and current politics unavoidably complicate a play whose romantic elements are already made uneasy by issues of patriarchal control and materialism. In Othello the challenges of representing ‘the Moor’ himself are not simply resolved by casting an actor of colour in the role. Productions also have to deal with the manner in which agency is wrested from the titular hero by a villain who can seem to have taken charge of way the audience perceives the action.
Biblical theology is the systematic theological interpretation of the Bible, and Jewish biblical theology is the systematic theological interpretation of the Jewish Bible (Tanak). The Jewish Bible appears in its uniquely distinctive form as the Tanak, which enables the Jewish Bible to function as the essential and foundational work of Jewish thought and practice. In order to provide an overview of Jewish biblical theology, this essay treats several fundamental concerns, viz., the unique form of the Jewish Bible in contrast to the distinctive forms of the Christian Bible; the dialogical character of the Jewish Bible in relation to itself and to the larger context of Jewish thought; the eternal covenant between G-d and the Jewish people; the construction of the Jewish people and its institutions, such as the land of Israel, the holy Temple, and the monarchy; and the problem of evil, particularly the exile and potential destruction of the Jewish people, that calls the eternal covenant between G-d and Israel into question.
Concentrating on adaptations of As You Like It, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, this chapter argues that Shakespeare’s comedies on screen constitute a significant and cross-fertilizing body of work. Scriptwriters have pursued imaginative routes through the syntax of the comedies, and there has been considerable experiment in terms of updating Shakespeare’s language. Comedy is the genre where constructions of gender/sexuality are often expressed with filmmakers recognizing in Shakespeare’s comedies opportunities to explore agency, voice and embodiment. The comedies on screen anticipate many of the themes energizing recent criticism, and in this there is a pronounced self-consciousness. Harking back to earlier experiments, the most recent Shakespearean comedies showcase their own artifice along with strategies of revision dependent on a dense intertextuality.