Postgraduate Course: Jewish Texts through the Ages (DIVI11078)
Course Outline
| School | School of Divinity |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course introduces students to the field of Jewish studies through case studies from different time periods, placing them in their historical, cultural and literary contexts. The course is organised chronologically from the ancient world to the present and equips students with an overview of the field and with a range of approaches to the study of Jewish history and culture. |
| Course description |
Academic Description
The course introduces students to the field of Jewish Studies by reading and interpreting texts from different chronological contexts. Students will develop skills in three kinds of reading: contextualisation, close analysis and comparison. They will read texts as reflections of their time and place while also identifying continuities, common concerns, developments and breaks across time. Students will discuss theoretical and methodological approaches to Jewish identity, history and culture and apply them to their reading.
Outline Content
The course will progress chronologically through a selection of texts from antiquity to the present day. Each week will focus on a different era or place, taking one key text as an entry point to explore Jewish history, culture and identity at that time.
Student Learning Experience
The course will be conducted through guided seminars, with the emphasis on student engagement and participation. Staff will foster discussion, and encourage students in forming their own arguments and research ideas related to the texts. The assessment aligns with this approach: students will develop their own research topic and question in connection with the material covered in the course, culminating in a research essay.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2025/26, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: None |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 4,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
170 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
10% in-course assessment that acts as feed-forward event
90% course essay of 4,000 words |
| Feedback |
Students will receive feedback on their in-course assessment. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- show familiarity with a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to Jewish identity, history and culture.
- recognize common themes, concerns and developments in Jewish literature across time.
- evaluate and utilize a variety of texts and different scholarly approaches to them.
- develop and sustain scholarly arguments in oral and written form by formulating appropriate questions and by selecting and utilizing relevant evidence.
- apply specialized research techniques and practices for a range of literature across epochs.
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Reading List
Alexander, P. S. (1984). Textual sources for the study of Judaism. Manchester University Press.
Bacchi, A.L. (2020) Uncovering Jewish creativity in Book III of the Sibylline oracles: gender, intertextuality, and politics (Leiden)
Bell, Dean Phillip, ed. 2015. The Bloomsbury Companion to Jewish Studies. 1. publ., Paperback ed. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Bell, Dean Phillip, ed. 2018. The Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Historiography. 1st ed. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, [2019]: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429458927.
Buitenwerf, R. (2003) Book III of the Sibylline oracles and its social setting (Leiden)
Hess, Jonathan/Samuels, Maurice/Valman, Nadia eds 2013, Nineteenth Century Jewish Literature: A Reader, Stanford University Press.
Honigman, S. (2003) The Septuagint and Homeric scholarship in Alexandria: a study in the narrative of the Letter of Aristeas (London).
Jockusch, Laura. 2015. Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kassow, Samuel D. 2018. Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive. The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mason, S. (2003) "Contradiction or Counterpoint? Josephus and Historical Method" Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6: 145-188.
Mendes-Flohr, P./Reinharz, J. eds 1995, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University press.
Niehoff, M. (2018) Philo of Alexandria. An Intellectual Biography (Yale)
Rajak, T. (1983) Josephus: The Historian and His Society (London)
Roskies, David G. Against the Apocalypse: Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Roskies, David G., and Samuel D. Kassow, eds. 2019. Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History. New Haven [Connecticut]: Yale University Press.
Sievers, J. and G. Lembi, eds. (2005) Josephus and Jewish History in Flavian Rome and Beyond. Papers presented at an international colloquium held in Rome on 21¿24 September 2003 (Leiden).
Valman, Nadia. Ed. 2014, British Jewish Women Writers, Wayne State UP.
Volkov, Shulamit. 2006. Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wright, B.G. (2015) The Letter of Aristeas: Aristeas to Philocrates or On the translation of the Law of the Jews (Berlin)
Zipperstein, Steven J. 2018. Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. First edition. New York¿; London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Jewish studies,Jewish history,Jewish culture,Jewish literature |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Hannah Holtschneider
Tel: (0131 6)50 8933
Email: H.Holtschneider@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
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