GREAT BOOKS OF JEWISH HISTORY AND CULTURE

Credit Hours: 3 · Undergraduate Lower-Level

The Jewish people have often understood themselves as the “people of the book,” because of the Jewish tradition’s reliance on texts and textual study as a central component of religious culture and practice. This course will take the idea of the book as a starting point for a survey of Jewish history and culture. Spanning the biblical period to the present, we will read primary texts important to Jewish life and culture as well as scholarship from disciplines as varied as religion, history, anthropology, sociology, comparative literature, philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies. In doing so, we will learn about the varied communities that produced these texts; the languages they spoke and read; their particular religious and cultural practices; and how they have understood themselves in the context of other social and political communities over time, including in the ancient, medieval, and modern eras.