Mythology and Folklore
Biale, David. Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008.
Blood contains extraordinary symbolic power in both Judaism and Christianity–as the blood of sacrifice, of Jesus, of the Jewish martyrs, of menstruation, and more. Yet, though they share the same literary, cultural, and religious origins, on the question of blood the two religions have followed quite different trajectories. For instance, while Judaism rejects the eating or drinking of blood, Christianity mandates its symbolic consumption as a central sacrament. How did these two traditions, both originating in the Hebrew Bible’s cult of blood sacrifices, veer off in such different directions? With his characteristic wit and erudition, David Biale traces the continuing, changing, and often clashing roles of blood as both symbol and substance through the entire sweep of Jewish and Christian history from Biblical times to the present.
Chireau, Yvonne and Nathaniel Deutsch, eds. Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Black Zion explores the myriad ways in which African American religions have encountered Jewish traditions, beliefs, and spaces. The collection’s unifying argument is that religion is the missing piece of the cultural jigsaw puzzle, that much of the recent turmoil in black-Jewish relations would be better understood, if not alleviated, if the religious roots of those relations were illuminated. Toward that end, the contributors look a number of provocative topics, including the concept of the Chosen People, the typological identification of blacks with Jews, the actual identification of blacks as Jews, the sacredness of space and symbols, the importance of scriptural interpretation in creating theology and self understanding, the dialectic of exile and redemption in communal history, and the integration of ethnicity and religion in constructing group identity. Ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Hebrew Israelites and from Abraham Joshua Heschel to Martin Luther King, Jr., the book sheds light on a little examined but vitally important dimension of black-Jewish relations inAmerica: religion.
Knowles, Melody D., ed. Contesting Texts: Jews and Christians in Conversation about the Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.
Themes explored include: biblical authority, texts of violence, tradition, identity and the other, common hope.
Waardenburg, Jean Jacques, ed. Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Since its inception, Islam and its civilization have been in continuous relationships with other religions, cultures, and civilizations, including not only different forms of Christianity and Judaism inside and outside the Middle East, Zoroastrianism and Manicheism, Hinduism and even Buddhism, but also tribal religions in West and East Africa, in South Russia and in Central Asia, including Tibet. The essays collected here examine the many texts that have come down to us about these cultures and their religions, from Muslim theologians and jurists, travelers and historians, and men of letters and of culture.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Adam, Prometheus, and Faust–their stories were central to the formation of Western consciousness and continue to be timely cautionary tales in an age driven by information and technology. Here Theodore Ziolkowski explores how each myth represents a response on the part of ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, and sixteenth-century Christian culture to the problem of knowledge, particularly humankind’s powerful, perennial, and sometimes unethical desire for it. This book exposes for the first time the similarities underlying these myths as well as their origins in earlier trickster legends, and considers when and why they emerged in their respective societies. It then examines the variations through which the themes have been adapted by modern writers to express their own awareness of the sin of knowledge. Each myth is shown to capture the anxiety of a society when faced with new knowledge that challenges traditional values. Ziolkowski’s examples of recent appropriations of the myths are especially provocative. From Voltaire to the present, the Fall of Adam has provided an image for the emergence from childhood innocence into the consciousness of maturity. Prometheus, as the challenger of authority and the initiator of technological evil, yielded an ambivalent model for the socialist imagination of the German Democratic Republic. And finally, an America unsettled by its responsibility for the atomic bomb, and worrying that in its postwar prosperity it had betrayed its values, recognized in Faust the disturbing image of its soul.
