Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture
  • Cited by 31
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
September 2013
Print publication year:
2013
Online ISBN:
9781139506380
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139506380
Subjects:
Ancient History, Judaism, Classical Studies, Classical Studies (General), Religion
Series:
Greek Culture in the Roman World
Information

Book description

This book studies the significance of sight in rabbinic cultures across Palestine and Mesopotamia (approximately from the first to seventh centuries). It tracks the extent and effect to which the rabbis living in the Greco-Roman and Persian worlds sought to appropriate, recast and discipline contemporaneous understandings of sight. Sight had a crucial role to play in the realms of divinity, sexuality and gender, idolatry and, ultimately, rabbinic subjectivity. The rabbis lived in a world in which the eyes were at once potent and vulnerable: eyes were thought to touch objects of vision, while also acting as an entryway into the viewer. Rabbis, Romans, Zoroastrians, Christians and others were all concerned with the protection and exploitation of vision. Employing many different sources, Professor Neis considers how the rabbis engaged varieties of late antique visualities, along with rabbinic narrative, exegetical and legal strategies, as part of an effort to cultivate and mark a 'rabbinic eye'.

Awards

Winner of the 2013 Salo Baron Prize

Honourable Mention, 2013 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards, Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity category

Reviews

'… highly recommended to anyone interested in late antique Jewish, Christian, and Graeco-Roman society and to scholars of rabbinic and patristic texts.'

Catherine Hezser Source: Theologische Literaturzeitung

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.