The messianic idea that a redeemer sent by God will come to end the suffering of a persecuted people and inaugurate a new age of justice and peace has been one of the most powerful and influential concepts given by the Jewish people to western civilization. This book represents a sample of the most penetrating and provocative scholarly interpretations of Jewish messianic movement from various perspectives- historical, sociological, psychological, and religious.

Carey presents an introduction to the elements of apocalyptic discourse in the Hebrew Bible, the intertestamental texts of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts. He seeks to help modern readers perplexed by the rampant and somewhat outrageous depiction and interpretation of apocalyptic literature to see apocalyptic discourse as a flexible set of resources that early Jews and Christians could employ for a variety of persuasive tasks. Carey examines each of the literary works that exhibit apocalyptic discourse. He briefly introduces the date and language of each text and shows its basic contents. Then he examines the particular topics and purposes of the work. Carey concludes by showing a way to read the particular example of apocalyptic discourse as a whole in its own setting with its own purposes. Carey invokes discourse as a category of study in an attempt to bring together the literary, ideological, and social dimensions of apocalyptic language. He sees the genius of apocalyptic discourse in its ability to bring its audience into otherwise inaccessible mysteries concerning the future and the heavenly realms. As theology, apocalyptic discourse engages life's greatest questions-the nature of God, the desire for justice, and the frustrations of human finitude. As poetry, it expresses the theological imagination in vivid symbols and conventional literary forms.

Converso and Morisco are the terms applied to those Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity (mostly under duress) in late medieval Spain. "Converso and Moriscos Studies" examines the manifold cultural implications of these mass convertions.

British Romanticism and the Jews explores the mutual influences exerted by the British-Christian and British-Jewish communities on each other during the period between the Enlightenment and Victorianism. The essays in the volume demonstrate how the texts produced by the Jewish Enlightenment provided a significant resource for romantic intellectual revisionism, in much the same way that British romanticism provided the cultural basis through which the British-Jewish community was able to negotiate between the competing obligations to ethnicity and nationalism.

This title describes recent discoveries and insights into the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the modern day. From mystical outpourings in ancient Palestine to the Kabbalah Centre, this volume explores the various expressions of Jewish mysticism from antiquity to the present day.

This seventh volume of The Cambridge History of Judaism provides an authoritative and detailed overview of early modern Jewish history, from 1500 to 1815. The essays, written by an international team of scholars, situate the Jewish experience in relation to the multiple political, intellectual and cultural currents of the period. They also explore and problematize the 'modernization' of world Jewry over this period from a global perspective, covering Jews in the Islamic world and in the Americas, as well as in Europe, with many chapters straddling the conventional lines of division between Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Mizrahi history. The most up-to-date, comprehensive, and authoritative work in this field currently available, this volume will serve as an essential reference tool and ideal point of entry for advanced students and scholars of early modern Jewish history.