The images of the clown and the freak and representations of the grotesque body are recurrent motifs in modern Jewish literature, film, art, theatre and dance. Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis is an early prototype of the changeling who leaves conventional human appearance behind and is gradually transformed into an insect-like creature. The story served as a prototype for Woody Allen’s film Zelig, in which the main protagonist adopts a variety of different personas, amongst them a Nazi in the Third Reich. The (...) theme of morphing into a freak, clown, or grotesque body reappears in various forms in contemporary Jewish culture and art: The American Jewish writer Philip Roth declared in the 1960s that he was not a Jewish sage but a Jewish freak. Freakishness, clowns, and the circus have a subversive potential: they constitute a digression from what is considered normal appearance and behaviour and play with presumptions, expectations, and social values. A study of this subject reveals the constant dialogue between religion and culture as far as Judaism is concerned. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish attitudes towards slavery in Hellenistic and Roman times. Against the traditional opinion that after the Babylonian Exile Jews refrained from employing slaves, Catherine Hezser shows that slavery remained a significant phenomenon of ancient Jewish everyday life and generated a discourse which resembled Graeco-Roman and early Christian views while at the same time preserving specifically Jewish nuances.

This volume investigates for the first time whether and to what extent religious knowledge - e.g., "sacred" narratives, customary practices, legal rules, family traditions, festival observances - was accessible to and known by ordinary people beyond religious functionaries. This book is the first collaborative interdisciplinary study of this important subject area with chapters written by international experts on ancient Mesopotamia, the Hebrew Bible, Qumran literature, rabbinic literature, and early Christianity including apocrypha and monastic traditions.