Back To The Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Barry W. HoltzEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1986-01-02
ISBN: 0671605968
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of Back To The Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts
Book Review: Superb introduction to Jewish texts
Summary: 5 Stars
Back to the Sources is a collection of essays by eminent scholars in their field on the major texts of the Jewish religious tradition. The topics covered include, Bible, Talmud (includes Mishnah and medieval law codes), midrash, medieval biblical commentaries, medieval philosophy, kabbalah (sans pop stars), hasidic tales, and the siddur (the prayerbook). The essay on the Bible covers the literary aspects of modern scholarship. The Talmud and midrash essays help the reader understand the classical rabbinic mindset that give rise to those literatures - that is, every word and every letter means something, and therefore the parallelism (which to a modern literary theorist is an aspect of style) of the biblical text, becomes a phenomenon to be explained. The essay on medieval biblical commentaries is an excellent survey of all the major figures and amounts to an introduction to the Mikra'ot Gedolot (the biblical text printed with a collection of commentaries on the same page to facilitate study). The essay on medieval philosophy traces the development of Jewish philosophical works and presents the main figures. The essay on kabbalah is the weakest of the collection. It presents only a very superficial account of the major figures, the "official" (Gershom Scholem) story of its evolution, and a very limited introduction to the system of sfirot. It mentions not at all the four worlds, a major failing. The essay on Hasidic tales is excellent.
Each essay has a "Where to go from here?" section that points the reader towards translations of the primary sources and other books and articles. The sources cited date primarily to the 1980s and earlier, and that particular section is in need of an update. There are also some glaring omissions in the references. For example, in biblical poetry, James Kugel's The Idea of Biblical Poetry is the gold standard, and not referenced. Nor when discussing Biblical narrative is Julius Wellhausen's Prolegomena to the Study of Israel, which is the foundation text for the Documentary Hypothesis.
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