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Melitzah
Melitzah () is a medieval Hebrew literary device in which a mosaic of fragments and phrases from the Hebrew Bible as well as from rabbinic literature or the liturgy is fitted together to form a new statement of what the author intends to express at the moment. It is similar to cento. In Hebrew the word ''melitzah'' means satire, mocking, taunting, enigma or witticism. In ''Freud's Moses'' (1991), Yosef Yerushalami wrote: "''Melitzah'', in effect, recalls Walter Benjamin's desire to someday write a work composed entirely of quotations. At any rate, it was a literary device employed widely in medieval Hebrew poetry and prose, then through the movement known as ''Haskalah'', Hebrew for “enlightenment,” and even among nineteenth-century writers both modern and traditional" (p. 71). Yerushalami argues: "In ''melitzah'' the sentences compounded out of quotations mean what they say; but below and beyond the surface they reverberate with associations to the original texts, and th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and transitioned into the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery. The Middle Ages is the middle period of the three traditional divisions of Western history: classical antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern period. The medieval period is itself subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Population decline, counterurbanisation, the collapse of centralised authority, invasions, and mass migrations of tribes, which had begun in late antiquity, continued into the Early Middle Ages. The large-scale movements of the Migration Period, including various Germanic peoples, formed new kingdoms in what remained of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East—once part of the Byzantine Empire� ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sefaria
Sefaria is an online open source, free content, digital library of Jewish texts. It was founded in 2011 by former Google project manager Brett Lockspeiser and journalist-author Joshua Foer. Promoted as a "living library of Jewish texts", Sefaria relies partially upon volunteers to add texts and translations. The site provides cross-references and interconnections between various texts. Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic texts are provided under a free license in the original and in translation. The website also provides a tool for creating source sheets. Sefaria is maintained by an eponymous non-profit organization which employs 18 engineers. According to their chief data officer Lev Israel, in 2019, the service received 250,000 unique visitors monthly. Etymology The name ''Sefaria'' derives from the words ''sefer'', or "book", and ''sifria'' ("library") in Hebrew. History Sefaria was originally founded in 2011 by journalist Joshua Foer and Brett Lockspeiser, a former produc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Language And Mysticism
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning. Estimates of the number of human languages in the world vary between and . Precise estimates depend on an arbitrary distinction (dichotomy) established between languages and dialects. Natural languages are spoken, signed, or both; however, any language can be encoded into secondary media usin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jewish Medieval Literature
Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, religion, and community are highly interrelated, as Judaism is their ethnic religion, though it is not practiced by all ethnic Jews. Despite this, religious Jews regard Gerim, converts to Judaism as members of the Jewish nation, pursuant to the Conversion to Judaism, long-standing conversion process. The Israelites emerged from the pre-existing Canaanite peoples to establish Kingdom of Israel (Samaria), Israel and Kingdom of Judah, Judah in the Southern Levant during the Iron Age.John Day (Old Testament scholar), John Day (2005), ''In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel'', Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 47.5 [48] 'In this sense, the emergence of ancient Israel is viewed not as the cause of the demise of Canaanite culture but as its upshot'. Originally, J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Waste Land
''The Waste Land'' is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English-language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine '' The Criterion'' and in the United States in the November issue of '' The Dial''. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins". ''The Waste Land'' does not follow a single narrative or feature a consistent style or structure. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy, and features abrupt and unannounced changes of narrator, location, and time, conjuring a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. It employs many allusions to the Western canon: Ovid's ''Metamorphoses'', the legend of the Fisher King, Dante's ''Divine Comedy'', Chaucer's ''Canterbury Tale ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Haskalah
The ''Haskalah'' (; literally, "wisdom", "erudition" or "education"), often termed the Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, with a certain influence on those in Western Europe and the Muslim world. It arose as a defined ideological worldview during the 1770s, and its last stage ended around 1881, with the rise of Autoemancipation, Jewish nationalism. The movement advocated against Jewish reclusiveness, encouraged the adoption of prevalent attire over traditional dress, while also working to diminish the authority of traditional community institutions such as rabbinic courts and boards of elders. It pursued a set of projects of cultural and moral renewal, including a revival of Hebrew for use in secular life, which resulted in an increase in Hebrew language, Hebrew found in print. Concurrently, it strove for an optimal integration in surrounding societies. Practitioners promoted the study of Exogeny, exo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( ; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western Marxism, and neo-Kantianism, post-Kantianism, he made contributions to the philosophy of history, metaphysics, historical materialism, Aesthetics, criticism, aesthetics and had an oblique but overwhelmingly influential impact on the resurrection of the Kabbalah by virtue of his life-long epistolary relationship with Gershom Scholem. Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Gershom Scholem, Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Riddle
A riddle is a :wikt:statement, statement, question, or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: ''enigmas'', which are problems generally expressed in metaphorical or Allegory, allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, and ''conundra'', which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer. Archer Taylor says that "we can probably say that riddling is a universal art" and cites riddles from hundreds of different cultures including Finnish, Hungarian, American Indian, Chinese, Russian, Dutch, and Filipino sources amongst many others. Many riddles and riddle-themes are internationally widespread. In the assessment of Elli Köngäs-Maranda (originally writing about Malaita, Malaitian riddles, but with an insight that has been taken up more widely), whereas myths serve to encode and establish social norms, "riddles make a point of playing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hebrew Language
Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and remained in regular use as a first language until after 200 CE and as the liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. The language was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, and is the only successful large-scale example of linguistic revival. It is the only Canaanite language, as well as one of only two Northwest Semitic languages, with the other being Aramaic, still spoken today. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taunt
A taunt is a battle cry, sarcastic remark, gesture, or insult intended to demoralize or antagonize the recipient. Taunting can exist as a form of social competition to gain control of the target's cultural capital (i.e., status). In sociological theory, the control of the three social capitals is used to produce an advantage in the social hierarchy, to enforce one's position in relation to others. This can also be used as a tactic to gain advantage of their opponent's irrational reaction. Taunting is committed by either directly or indirectly encouraging others to taunt the target. The target may give a response in kind to maintain status, as in fighting words and trash-talk. Taunts are also a genre of folklore according to "The Poetic Rites of Conversation," by John H. McDowell, published in the ''Journal of Folklore Research''. The practice of taunting has a rich historical context, dating back to ancient times. In medieval warfare, for instance, taunting was a common psycho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mockery
Mockery or mocking is the act of insulting or making light of a person or other thing, sometimes merely by taunting, but often by making a caricature, purporting to engage in imitation in a way that highlights unflattering characteristics. Mockery can be done in a lighthearted and gentle way, but can also be cruel and hateful, such that it "conjures images of corrosion, deliberate degradation, even subversion; thus, 'to laugh at in contempt, to make sport of' (OED)". Mockery appears to be unique to humans, and serves a number of psychological functions, such as reducing the perceived imbalance of power between authority figures and common people. Examples of mockery can be found in literature and the arts. Etymology and function The root word ''mock'' traces to the Old French ''mocquer'' (later ''moquer''), meaning to scoff at, laugh at, deride, or fool, although the origin of ''mocquer'' is itself unknown. Labeling a person or thing as a mockery may also be used to imply that i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
