The Jews for Urban Justice is an organization of radical individuals living in the Washington, D.C. area. One of the most striking characteristics of this group is its inability to avoid conflicts with the established Jewish community of Washington. My thesis investigates this phenomenon from the analytical observations of Will Herberg in Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Herberg, writing in the 1950's, indicates that each generation of Jews within North America, changes in its approach to Judaism from preceeding generations. The first generation abandoned Judaism in favor of acceptance by Christian America; the approach of the second generation was secularism, but it "showed the impress of the religion they were abandoning." (Herberg, p.185). The third generation, more secure in its Judaism and Americanness than either of the preceeding two, endeavoured to return to Judaism as a basic tenent of North American life. The fourth generation, including the Jews for Urban Justice, are even more secure in their Americanness, and strive to return even further to more basic principles of Judaism, than other generations. It is at this point that the conflict between JUJ (fourth generation) and the Washington Jewish community (third generation) becomes irreconcilable. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

The Dead Sea Scrolls provide verifiable everyday depictions of mixed communities of elite and ordinary Essenes in the Second Temple period. However, to date, scholarship on purity and impurity in the Dead Sea Scrolls has been mainly concerned with establishing an elite - predominantly male focused - history. This thesis aims to redress this imbalance through the application of contemporary theories from Gender Studies to selected purity passages of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to challenge the view that women are an uncontrollable and leaky problem when they are impure and to bring the uncontrollable aspects of the impure and vulnerable male into discussion. This will be achieved in four ways. Firstly, by applying Raewyn Connell’s hegemonic masculinity framework, I will use references to the Rule of the Community (in its 1QS form) and the War Scroll (in its 1QM form), to demonstrate the vulnerable and uncontrollable aspects of ordinary male impurities. This will reveal the evolving vulnerability of men when impure and the dimensions at play between masculinity and purity/impurity. Secondly, the embodied and empowered aspects of impure women will be revealed through an application of embodiment theories to selected passages from 4QD (4Q266 and 4Q272) and 4QTohorot A (4Q274). This will demonstrate from an empowered and embodied perspective how the impure female is regulated. Thirdly, I will be applying Susies Scott’s three conceptual features for understanding the everyday to the Temple Scroll (11QTa) and the Rule of the Congregation (1QSa) to demonstrate the changing dynamics between ordinary impure males and impure females. When necessary Scott’s three conceptual features will be used throughout each of the three principal chapters to reveal how impurity disrupts the construction of daily life. Fourthly, underlying each of these points is the premise that gender and purity in the Dead Sea Scrolls communities are performative, dynamic and constantly changing categories. To conclude, the application of inter-disciplinary approaches provides an enhanced understanding of the everyday realities experienced by the pure and impure ordinary members of the Dead Sea Scrolls communities and forms the basis for additional studies in this topic area.

Israeli society is diverse and complex, with a great variety of religious worldviews, both with regard to the various religions that are present in the country, as well as within Judaism. This research is focused on the latter, the variety of Jewish worldviews, and the wealth of social movements that developed out of them. The spectrum is vast, and this has far reaching consequences for attitudes towards the political and social situation in Israel and the relationship with its neighbors. With this research, I aim to get insight into these widely diverging attitudes, especially when it comes to a vision of peace. We are often led to believe that peace is a singular thing, but the reality is that peace as a concept and an idea is as diverse as any idea, and can mean vastly different things to different people. In this research, I analyze what peace means to different groups of people, what it looks like, and how they think peace can and will be achieved in the world they are living in. I have a special interest in the role religious tradition plays in this and the ways in which religion has helped people to come to this perception. In a way, it is an exercise of creative thinking, because the goal is to overcome normative and theoretical ideas of peace, and to give meaning to peace beyond what is generally accepted. With this effort, I aim to open up a new avenue of thinking about peace, peacebuilding, and peace processes, and challenge academics and professionals to look beyond what they perceive as an acceptable peace.

Since the mid 20th century, scholars have paid increasing attention to the anti-Judaism inherent in early Christian writings, identifying John Chrysostom's fourth-century homilies as a particularly hostile example of that heritage. As a "doctor of the church" and an important contributor to Christian orthodoxy as it developed in late antiquity, John is particularly well known for his eight sermons "Against the Jews," which invoke the apostle Paul as a central voice of authority for his thoroughly anti-Judaic Christianity. Yet, as is clear from his broader corpus, he encountered in Paul not only a fellow preacher who warned against Judaizing Christians, but also a self-identified Israelite who preached in Jewish places, observed elements of the Jewish law, and cried out for the salvation of Israel. In this dissertation, I argue that John's engagement with Paul's complex relationship to Judaism offers an especially productive, yet untapped, source for insight into John's anti-Judaic rhetoric. By offering a fresh analysis of John's sermons on Acts and the Pauline epistles, I place John's interpretation of Paul within a trajectory of classical moral philosophy wherein rhetoric was perceived as philosophical therapy for the soul. John frames Paul's persistent participation in Jewish places and practices and amiable rhetoric about his fellow Jews as strategic therapies deployed in order to manage Jewish emotions (pathe) and thus to guide diseased Jewish souls out of Judaism. Paul's own Jewishness is therefore mobilized to bolster a characterization of Jews as diseased and of Paul himself as an exemplary model of non-Jewish Christian orthodoxy. Attention to John's interpretations of Paul's "therapy of the soul" points to a more subtle and pervasive anti-Judaism than previously detected, one that stakes a claim to Christian orthodoxy, and therefore Christian identity more broadly, on the purportedly loving disavowal of Judaism by the apostle himself.

Before World War II, many Jewish communities began to worry for their children's safety. As a result, families and Jewish communities in Britain and Nazi- Occupied countries worked together to send their children to safety. Around 10,000 Jewish refugee children went to Great Britain on the Kindertransport transportations from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany. These children came from many different nationalities and economic backgrounds and went to many different types of foster homes. Some of these children ended up with Jewish foster families while many ended up with Christian foster families. Same came from religious backgrounds and some came from non-religious backgrounds. While researchers in the past examined the impact of their religion on their adjustment as refugees, not many researched how life as a refugee and a foster child impacted their relationship with religion. To understand the lives of these children fully, historians must examine all parts, including their religious and cultural identities. Considering Nazis persecuted these children and their families for their religious and cultural identities, researchers must examine this to when studying these children and their experiences. When telling their stories, historians must include everything, especially the parts Nazis determined to end. How did they develop their religious and cultural identities considering everything happening in the world around them? How did British Christian culture affect their identity transformation? How did Nazi persecution influence their ideas about their Jewish identity, religion, and culture? The study examined this using a content analysis of 15 oral histories, a memoir, and the documentary film Into the Arms of Strangers. Each child's different life experiences impacted their different identities. This study was not meant to be generalized to the larger public and only meant to be the beginning of a larger study of other Kindertransport children. This particular study only focused on the specific experiences of those studied.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / The recent discovery of documents at Qumran has provoked renewed interest in the possibility of Jewish influence on primitive Christianity in several areas. The purpose of this dissertation is to describe historically Jewish and Christian disciplinary procedures, particularly excommunication, in order to determine whether the practice of the church indicates indebtedness to pre-Christian Judaism. Since an important excursus, der Synagogenbann, in the Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch by H. Strack and P. Billerbeck is frequently referred to in works on church discipline, a secondary purpose of the dissertation is to examine the methodology and results of the excursus. The investigation covers the Old Testament, the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Manual of Discipline, the Damascus Document, rabbinic literature, the New Testament, and the Apostolic Fathers. The curses alah, arar, qalal, and especially herem, were used (often by intimidation)in the Old Testament to maintain moral and spiritual standards. Since anathema is the usual translation in the Septuagint for berem, its use in its classical setting is examined. In addition to the curse, the threat of immediate punishment or future divine judgment was employed to guard the purity of the worship of Yahweh. In the literature of the Intertestamental period, all traces of punishment have disappeared from the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha, except for the mention of the curse in a few poetic passages. However, an elaborate system of punishment is found in the Qumran literature. Further evidence of the practice of excommunication in this period is revealed in the rabbinic material. In IQS and CD the punishment for sins generally depended on whether the sins were considered to be against an individual or the community as a whole. Mild punishment was reserved for social infractions against one's neighbor, but irrevocable expulsion was the sentence for sins thought to have been prompted by an attitude that was not sympathetic with the ideals of the group. The conclusions of the excursus, der Synagogenbann, must be revised by giving closer attention to the problem of chronology. The synagogue at the time of Jesus knew of only one ban, the niddui. The shammatha, as a disciplinary measure, was an interchangeable term with niddui, but was confined to the Babylonian Jews. Herem probably did not appear as a term for excommunication in the synagogue until the third century. The principal reason for the pronouncing of the niddui was to safeguard the halakhah. The practice of excommunication in the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers scarcely appears, and the use of the curse as a means of discipline does not occur at all. The first Gospel shows that even though Matthew conceived of the church as a corpus mixtum, judgment was properly a (divine) matter for the future. The mark of a Christian in the church was a readiness to forgive an offending brother. In the crucial Pauline passages excommunication has no prominent place. Paul's use of anathema bore little relationship to church discipline. In the remainder of the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers a spirit of restraint with regard to excommunication characterized the early Christian movement. Thus, members in good standing were to take note of offenders, rebuke them, pray for them, invite and receive them back if they repented. Despite the conclusion that Judaism and the church exercised considerable restraint in the matter of discipline, one cannot claim with certainty the dependence of the church on known Jewish disciplinary practices.

The main aim of this dissertation is to provide an English-language edition of the poems written by Aleksander Wat in the last five years of his life (1962-1967), with annotations elucidating the complex literary, intellectual, historical and religious context and publication history of the poems, as well as an extensive biographical-critical essay examining the circumstances in which the poems arose - including political exile, physical pain, and philosophical doubt - and the triad of aesthetic, ethical and spiritual concerns that dominated the poet's final years. The essay also considers the problems of translation posed by Wat's poetry, the role in shaping his corpus and reputation played by Wat's widow Ola, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and the art by Jan Lebenstein used for Wat's book covers. The essay proposes a broader intellectual framework for the understanding of Wat's life and work that draws on Kierkegaard and Jewish studies. The main body of the translations consists of poems of 1962-1967 that Wat published in his posthumous volume Ciemne Świecidło (Lumen Obscurum) and poems written in the same period but not included in the book, some of which were subsequently published in periodicals. The dissertation also includes a basic chronology of Wat's life and contemporary events and a list of the poems translated in the order in which they were composed, to the extent this can be determined from available sources.

Bibliography: pages 346-384. / The study aims to portray the way of life and culture of the Modern Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox sectors of Johannesburg Jewry. It strives to show how this is translated into educational systems, and examines the attitudes and values of pupils at Johannesburg Jewish religiously orientated schools both towards their own education, as well as towards elements of Jewish and secular culture. An overview of Johannesburg Jewry is presented, and Jewish educational systems in Johannesburg are outlined. Although much of the study is descriptive and ethnographic, the focal point is the statistical analysis and discussion of the responses to a questionnaire which was administered to 159 pupils of four religiously orientated high schools. An overriding conclusion is that the samples exhibit a common pride in their Jewish heritage. The general level of religious practice and belief of the pupils of each school corresponds with that subgroup of Johannesburg Jewry with which the school is aligned. Thus the Ultra Orthodox are more comprehensive in religious practice than the Modern Orthodox. The level of religious practice of the pupils often exceeds that of their parents. This implies that the schools are, in certain cases, operating contra parentem.

This thesis studies identity among a group of Roman Catholic converts and accused heretics in Mexico City, called Crypto-Jews. The areas of identity that were examined in depth were, religious identity, gender identity, and racial identity. The records that exist for Crypto-Jews in Mexico City are limited but can be found among the records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. In order to study the documents of the Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City, I had to travel to the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. I was supported in this endeavor by the History Department at Utah State University during the Spring semester of 2017. While there, I found primary sources written by the Holy Office of the Inquisition that contained the Inquisition trial records of many accused Crypto-Jews. This thesis uses five Inquisition documents from the trials of Manuel de Lucena, Isabel de Carvajal, Leonor de Carvajal, Margarita Moreira, and Antonia Núñez. Other primary sources include a translated copy of Luis de Carvajal’s memoir. Through the study of these Inquisition documents, I have concluded that Crypto-Jewish identity was an amalgam of many cultural influences including Spanish, colonial, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and early medieval. The combination of these cultural influences was processed by Crypto-Jews to form a unique identity. This identity was specific to the people whose records I was able to study and is a unique contribution to the historical study of Crypto-Jews.

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