Jews in an Illusion of Paradise

Dust and Ashes Volume One—Comedians and Catastrophes

Norman Simms (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

410 Seiten

2017 | Unabridged edition
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Verlag)
9781443817301 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars. They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture, entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend, this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women, comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical and grotesque screen between them.

Norman Simms, during his academic career, has taught in New Zealand for more than forty years, as well as in Canada, France and Israel. He was one of the founding editors of the journal Mentalities/Mentalités. His latest books include a series of three studies on Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus.

Erscheinungsdatum	23.08.2017
Verlagsort	Newcastle upon Tyne
Sprache	englisch
Maße	148 x 212 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Judentum
ISBN-13	9781443817301 / 9781443817301
Zustand	Neuware