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Through conflicts of opinions inside the Bratislava Jewish religious community, the author monitors changed relations toward Judaism after the Holocaust.
The current form of the community was due to Regulation 231-1945 concerning “the arrangement of the conditions of the Jewish faith members in Slovakia”. This resulted in religious, economic, and organizational centralization.
After the 1968 occupation, those who stayed behind in Bratislava concluded that due to the emigration of the young and middle generations, the community lost its future and under the newly established conditions it was losing its past too. The Velvet revolution helped to overcome passivity existing until then. An informal gathering called Jewish forum helped to build and revive the Jewish identity. The status of the present-day Judaism can be illustrated by the fact that 36.6 percent of funerals in the course of 2001–2013 were done by cremation prohibited in Orthodox Judaism. It has been a manifestation of solidarity with the “burials” of those killed in concentration camps; but it is also a kind of revolt against God who did not prevent the Shoa.
Today both individuals and families create their own model based on the traditions that they choose for themselves. Practicing such customs does not follow from Judaism, but it is an expression of one’s affiliation with the community and its traditions.
The author shows that the application of Jewish ethical precepts derived from the Halakhah (Bible, Talmud, Rabbinic writings and related sources) to 21st century concerns is not easy. Notwithstanding this difficulty, the basic precepts and overall ethical approach - the meta-ethics - are highly instructive for resolving modern-day business problems. Judaism has much to offer by way of insights and experience concerning the conduct of ethical business activity. The author points out that it is a profound insight in the Jewish tradition that Wealth (broadly defined as economic productivity) and Righteousness (broadly defined as ethical behaviour, justice, integrity) go hand in hand. This is what we, moderns, would all do well to ponder and to implement.
Emancipation and social engagement facilitated the Central European Jewry’s identification with the modern notion of national identity. During the Great War this often came into conflict with Jewish universalism. Those of Jewish denomination supporting the various national identity notions identified with the war aims and propaganda of the given nation while they tried to find the antetype of the new circumstances in the Jewish past and Judaism.
The word “Jew” is used as a more or less self-evident identity category, even though the content it conveys has been just as much transformed by secularisation, modernisation, assimilation and acculturation as any other identity category. In the world before secularisation and the modern idea of the nation - up to the nineteenth century in Hungary - a Jew was somebody whose religion was Jewish. The internal cracks caused the Judaism-based concept of Jewishness in Hungary to fall apart within a couple of decades. The fragmentation of Jewry was no less down to the challenge of national and secular identities, but these challenges only took effect because of the confirmations they promised in different situations. Departing from traditional Jewish ways was “rewarded” by social and intellectual success. Zionism - whose founder, Theodor Herzl, was brought up in the culture of Budapest and Vienna - conceived Jewish identity as a national identity and attempted to bring Jews, who were following divergent routes, together through self-identification with the nation. The Holocaust did not change the historical nature of the disintegrated Jewish identity. The anti-Semitic, disenfranchising Hungarian national consciousness said: it does not matter what you are - if I say you are a Jew, you are a Jew. Communism said: it doesn't matter what you are, if you are not a Communist, you cannot be anything else.
This article examines interfaith marriage in different cultures focusing on Islamic law. The modern approach to this social phenomenon is also studied. In order to provide the reader with the legal background, juristic approaches to interfaith marriage are highlighted. Some court cases as well as the universal declaration of human rights and the Cairo declaration of Islamic human rights are examined for this purpose. The article aims at giving a broader perspective on interfaith marriage.
T In the early 1840s several forgeries of Hebrew epigraphic material have been produced; these forgeries are associated with the name of Avraham Firkowicz/Firkovich, a Russian Jewish book collector and an amateur archaeologist. His discoveries were supposed to provide a revolutionising effect on the nascent Wissenschaft des Judenthums (Jewish Studies). On the margin of a re-edition of the Mejelis Document by the Finnish scholar Tapani Harviainen, this article makes justice to Firkowicz, analysing the cultural context in which the forgeries were made, such as the Haskalah movement, Orientalism, Christian missionary activity and Lost Tribes hunting.
The different approaches to the problem of sin frequently attributed to it an ethical connotation which would have assigned its role and place even in the history of religions. These approaches supposed implicitly a closer or looser connection between religion and ethics. The present author's historico-philological investigation, after having compared some basic linguistic and historical data of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, came to the conclusion that the early forms of the sin perceptions had not yet belonged to the sphere of ethics, while those forms which developed in early modern times have not become part of ethics. Evil and sin were originally associated with religion, later on, however, the judgement of sins has been taken over by the secularised law.
Abstract
Locating the influence of modernity on gender in the ancient world of the Near East, this discussion of women’s spirituality traces the history of the idea that the monotheistic god of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity was originally both male and female. Paralleling the myths of the Hebrews and their pagan neighbors, which developed around fertility cults prominently featuring women, the author argues that patriarchal reforms ushered in during the 7th century B.C.E. forced worship of the female face of god underground. Thus split off from mainstream worship, the old fertility cults nonetheless continued to flourish in secret mystical communities. Here, god’s female aspect was worshiped symbolically as “Shekhinah”, the “bride of Yahweh” — now metaphorically identified with the exiled community of Israel. Focusing on the sexually charged and gendered mystical imagery resulting from the reformist prohibitions against goddess worship, the discussion pinpoints its sublimation in mystical contemplative practices from the Deuteronomic period to the present. Locating the influence of modernity on gender in the ancient world of the Near East, this discussion of women’s spirituality traces the history of the idea that the monotheistic god of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity was originally both male and female. Paralleling the myths of the Hebrews and their pagan neighbors, which developed around fertility cults prominently featuring women, the author argues that patriarchal reforms ushered in during the 7th century B.C.E. forced worship of the female face of god underground. Thus split off from mainstream worship, the old fertility cults nonetheless continued to flourish in secret mystical communities. Here, god’s female aspect was worshiped symbolically as “Shekhinah”, the “bride of Yahweh”—now metaphorically identified with the exiled community of Israel. Forcusing on the sexually charged and gendered mystical imagery resulting from the reformist prohibitions against goddess worship, the discussion pinpoints its sublimation in mystical contemplative practices from the Deuteronomic period to the present.
Anneo Cornuto: Compendio di Teologia Greca. (Testo greco a fronte.) Saggio introduttivo e integrativo, traduzione e apparati di Ilaria Ramelli. Milano 2003.; Commentum Cornuti in Persium. Recognoverunt et adnotatione critica instruxerunt W. V. Clausen et J. E. G. Zetzel. Monachii et Lipsiae in aedibus K. G. Saur, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana MMIV.; David Noy-Alexander Panayotov-Hanswulf Bloedhorn: Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis. vol. I. Eastern Europe. (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 101.) Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck 2004.; David Noy-Hanswulf Bloedhorn: Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis. vol. III. Syria und Cyprus. (TSAJ 102.) Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck 2004.; Walter Ameling: Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis. Bd. II. Kleinasien. (TSAJ 99.) Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck 2004. Edward Champlin: Nero. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) - London (England) 2003.; Pesthy Monika: A csábítás teológiája. A kísértés fogalmának története az ókorban. Kairosz Kiadó, Budapest 2005.; Szakrális képzőművészet a keresztény ókorban I-II. Összeállította, fordította, a jegyzeteket és a bevezető tanulmányt írta Bugár M. István. Catena, a Pécsi Tudományegyetem Patrisztika Központja, a Paulus Hungarus és a Kairosz Kiadó közös sorozata. Budapest 2004.
Abstract
One of the earliest measuring instruments used by human beings was the balance; evidence of this dates back more than 5.000 years. Initially, the weights of goods were measures rather of value than of mass. Besides yardsticks and graduated cups, scales are today the most widespread instruments, found in almost all laboratories, factories and households. Indeed, the balance accompanies us from birth to death. The balance very early achieved a metaphorical meaning and was used for the comparison of ethical values. It first appeared as an instrument in the death tribunal in Egyptian religion and later in Christianity. In the hands of the Grecian Gods, weighing was a deciding factor as concerns victory or death. In Judaism and for the Romans, scales become the symbol of justice. Several trade and handicraft guilds currently use the balance as an attribute, demonstrating in this way their sincerity and accuracy. The balance is of dubious significance in astrology, as one of the signs of the zodiac.
