Awards

• Short-listed for AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity 2013
• Short-listed for Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards, Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity category 2013
• Shortlisted for AJS Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity 2013.
• Winner of Salo Baron Prize 2013
• Winner of Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize 2013
• Winner of Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize 2013.

Overview

This book studies the significance of sight in rabbinic cultures across Palestine and Mesopotamia (approximately from the first to seventh centuries). It tracks the extent and effect to which the rabbis living in the Greco-Roman and Persian worlds sought to appropriate, recast and discipline contemporaneous understandings of sight. Sight had a crucial role to play in the realms of divinity, sexuality and gender, idolatry and, ultimately, rabbinic subjectivity. The rabbis lived in a world in which the eyes were at once potent and vulnerable: eyes were thought to touch objects of vision, while also acting as an entryway into the viewer. Rabbis, Romans, Zoroastrians, Christians and others were all concerned with the protection and exploitation of vision. Employing many different sources, Professor Neis considers how the rabbis engaged varieties of late antique visualities, along with rabbinic narrative, exegetical and legal strategies, as part of an effort to cultivate and mark a 'rabbinic eye'.

Full Product Details

9781107032514

Table of Contents

Reviews

'... highly recommended to anyone interested in late antique Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman society and to scholars of rabbinic and patristic texts.' Catherine Hezser, Theologische Literaturzeitung ... highly recommended to anyone interested in late antique Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman society and to scholars of rabbinic and patristic texts. Catherine Hezser, Theologische Literaturzeitung

'… highly recommended to anyone interested in late antique Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman society and to scholars of rabbinic and patristic texts.' Catherine Hezser, Theologische Literaturzeitung

'... highly recommended to anyone interested in late antique Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman society and to scholars of rabbinic and patristic texts.' Catherine Hezser, Theologische Literaturzeitung

Author Information

Rachel Neis is an Assistant Professor in the History Department and in the Program for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Her interests include rabbinic literature and culture, the history of the senses, and comparative ancient and contemporary law and legal theory.

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