The 2023/2024 war in Gaza is testing Catholic–Jewish relations. It uncovers three layers of tension in the Church’s relationship with the Jewish people and the State of Israel: First, the differences in the Catholic historical interpretation of the Hamas attack and the war in Gaza in respect to the Jewish one. Second, a theological tension between Catholic teachings on Jews and Judaism and the concept of universal fraternity—how unique is the relationship with the Jewish people compared to all of humanity? Third, a tension between supporting Christians in the Holy Land and their political aspirations and maintaining positive relations with the State of Israel while avoiding a theological stance on Zionism. These tensions lead to intra-Catholic and ecumenical challenges in the theology of Jews, Judaism, and the Land of Israel, particularly in discussions on antisemitism, anti-Judaism, universal fraternity, and violence. This study relies on analyzing relevant press articles and statements from Catholic hierarchs and Jewish leaders, contextualizing them with recent developments in the Catholic theology of war and violence.
Catholicism has long been hostile towards Jews. It has even been claimed that its anti-Judaism was the matrix of twentieth-century anti-Semitism. This contribution sets out to show that the pontificate of John Paul II marks a break in the history of the Church in this respect. A relative break perhaps: the Polish Pope is following in the footsteps of the Second Vatican Council, one of whose major texts, the declaration Nostra aetate (1965), revokes the idea of the Jewish people's guilt in Christ's death sentence and accepts that the Jews are still part of the Alliance with God. However, there was one decisive break: influenced by his education between the wars, which brought him into contact with nineteenth-century literature favourable to an inclusive nationalism, he accentuated the “philo-Judaism” of the conciliar period by developing a new approach to the Jewish community, linking recognition of the State of Israel with a request for forgiveness for the sins of Christians addressed to the “Jewish People”.
This article investigates the justifications of mass violence in Deuteronomistic historiography through the lens of cultural trauma. The analysis concentrates on the representation and justification of mass violence, that is mass killings and other forms of violence against non-combatants, in Israel’s conquest of the promised land in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua as well as during the loss of the land at the hand of the Assyrian and Babylonian armies, as narrated in 2 Kings 17–25. A comparison of these texts and their respective historical backgrounds helps to profile the contrasts and continuities between them. Trauma theory sheds light on both narratives as media to recover agency and to reconstruct collective identity for emerging Judaism via the historiographical representation of cultural trauma.
In the past two years, against the backdrop of the Covid-19 epidemic, civil disobedience has been on the rise in Israeli society. While civil disobedience preserves the boundaries of discourse and democracy, it also poses a real danger to the existence of society. Attitudes toward civil disobedience reflect the core values of a particular culture. Thus, attitudes toward obedience or disobedience in Israeli society must be examined with respect to the religious roots of Jewish culture. This article examines attitudes towards the issue of obedience in the formative texts of Jewish culture. Revealing the religious past of the culture enables a re-evaluation of values and stances. To understand the sources of the values relevant to obedience in Israeli society today, I will analyze religious texts using the genealogical method. The subject area of genealogy is the past, yet its purpose is to understand and critique contemporary reality. The main finding is that obedience and disobedience do not appear to be in a dialectical relationship in today’s society. Despite the fact that controversy is welcome and prevalent in Judaism, obedience and disobedience do not manifest as contentious or as two sides of a single issue.
This article offers some insights to read Rafael Cansinos Assens’ novel Las luminarias de Janucá. On the one hand is emphasised the documentary character of the story, a filosefardi campaign at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the other hand prominence is given to the spiritual testament or legacy left by the author. In his work Cansinos Assens achieves a so-called ‘double return’ of past through a subtle recalling. We point out the close connection that the author creates between his character’s individual destiny and the country’s collective destiny. The article focuses on describing some core points of the story also through the characters who made that campaign. Concepts such as memory chain, transmission of knowledge and tradition, teacher-disciple relationship are some of the topics of this study that could become remarkable keys of interpretation.
French literature - Italian literature - Spanish literature - Portuguese literature
The present article examines the drama Birds of a Kind by the Lebanese-Canadian author Wajdi Mouawad. It analyses the allegorical character of Wazzan which is based on the historical figure Leo Africanus, a Moroccan diplomat and polymath of Granadan origin who in the early 16th century was kidnapped by Christian pirates and offered to Pope Leon X. Following his conversion from Islam to Catholicism he became the first author to present Africa to the Europeans through his works, published under the patronage of two popes from the Medici family.
Leo Africanus was introduced to Mouawad by the American scholar Natalie Zemon Davis. In her study Trickster Travels (2006) she discusses the ambiguity and the evasiveness of this enigmatic historical figure whose character she highlights through the story of the amphibious bird. It is a parable placed as the author’s paratextual notice at the beginning of The Book of Cosmography and Geography of Africa (1526 [1550]), Leo Africanus’s most important scholarly work, and in spite of many possible sources, it is definitely his own invention.
This article aims to demonstrate how Mouawad distanced his dramatic character from the original figure – the historiographic image of a trickster – by changing the point of the aforementioned parable. The story of the amphibious bird in Birds of a Kind, told by Wazzan to a Jew who right before his death is revealed to have an Arabic origin, is transformed form the parable of a trickster into a legend of someone who manages to overcome prejudice in order to find his identity. For Mouawad, Wazzan personifies the reconciliation between Judaism and Islam, transmitting at the same time an idea of the world dreamed of by the humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
Este escrito procura elucidar o aforismo 44 de “O Anticristo”, em que Nietzsche parece assinalar a perspectiva de que a constituição do cristianismo primitivo seria a consequência de um andamento histórico em que, para a “comunidade inicial” cristã sobreviver e conservar-se, fez-se necessário um falseamento psicológico, moral e religioso de sua própria história, assim como antes fizeram os judeus no período de sua decadência nacional. Para a realização dessa tarefa, destacar-se-á o posicionamento de Nietzsche em “O Anticristo” em relação ao judaísmo histórico, à suposta corrupção psicológica, moral e religiosa operacionalizada pelos sacerdotes judeus no período pós-exílico que confluiria para a repetição histórica do método de autoconservação judeu por parte do cristianismo primitivo.
This paper aims to show the need to study both classical and modern theories in business ethics. It is necessary because social relations in production change, as do production conditions, the relationship between owners and workers, employees. The aim of the article is also to demonstrate the possible deviations from the natural, basic principles of ethical behavior in business and to look for opportunities to regulate them and limit the opportunities for their manifestation. This study has an epistemological character, dedicated to studying the evolution of fundamental ethical theories explaining the interaction between subjects in the ethical ecosystem. In developing the article, descriptive analysis was used to identify, analyze, and summarize the main features of poodle theories in business ethics. This paper has its theoretical basis of a rich category of tools and classical theories in aesthetics; new business ethics theories are being developed as an inalienable part of the ethical ecosystem. The evolution of the productive forces has had its irreversible impact on the ethical relations in the social system and on each business unit as a whole. The interrelations between the main religions professed by mankind − Christianity, Judaism and Islamic religion with the main category assessing the return on investment, namely the interest rate, are analyzed. The conclusions have been drawn about this type of income in the older religions and newer religions. Basic new business ethics theories are analyzed, such as the Theory of moral hazard, Agency Theory, Diamond’s Theory of delegated monitoring, Rent-Seeking. Research on the evolution of basic business economics theories is usually done based on theoretical analysis and much less based on specific business cases. Here is presented the manifestation of modern theories in business ethics, particular cases of changes in the state of business ecosystems and possibility that basis can also serve as a legal and regulatory initiative to precisely regulate these deviations and their sanction. The chosen form of research is sharing the opinions of the author of the study. In this article, the author seeks the connection, the integration of ethics in the functioning of the business system due to the severance of the direct relationship between owners and employees and the emergence of intermediaries as agents to whom decision-making rights are delegated. The severance of this relationship is at the heart of the evolutionary development of the ethical business side in the context of existing constraints.
El presente artículo analiza el discurso sobre la naturaleza procreadora de las mujeres tal y como aparece reflejado en la lengua hebrea bíblica. Haciendo uso de una perspectiva de género y una metodología filológica, se estudian diversas raíces ( עק''ר ,שכ''ל ,יל''ד ) y una expresión idiomática (- יל''ד על ברכ ) que continúan siendo objeto de debate académico hasta la fecha y que aparecen empleadas para describir – y prescribir– el rol reproductivo de la mujer israelita. La nominalización de la maternidad, su ausencia y el recurso a la explotación de esclavas como solución ante la falta de descendencia son los temas que esta investigación pretende abordar. Se dedica especial atención a la semántica del lexema ,עקרה discutiendo su traducción convencional de ‘estéril’ y realizando una propuesta que, si bien no completamente novedosa, nunca ha sido sometida a una argumentación minuiciosa.
More than 200 years after the translation of the Guide into Hebrew, the Spaniard Pedro de Toledo first translated this work into a modern language. The importance of this translation (Mostrador e enseñador de los turbados) lies not only on this fact, relevant in itself, but also on the whole set of circumstances linked to the manuscript in which Pedro de Toledo’s work has been preserved. Currently, this codex, the Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, ms. 10289, is the only text that we have of this Spanish translation. This manuscript in which the translation stands side by side with hundreds of comments in marginal annotations clearly shows the social crisis in Hispanic Judaism and the Spanish cultural atmosphere at the time. Our aim in this article is to illustrate these issues by analyzing some of the most meaningful passages in Pedro de Toledo’s translation and notes, as well as the numerous glosses by an anonymous scholar that reread Pedro de Toledo’s work decades later.
Elżbieta Bernaciak, Paulina Farbicka, Aleksandra Jaworska-Czerwińska
et al.
Introduction: Medical staff in Poland increasingly take care of a person representing a different culture.
Aim: To know nurses' knowledge about the customs of people presenting different religions and cultural issues in modern health care.
Method: The authoring three-part questionnaire was used to assess the knowledge of multiculturalism. Nonparametric tests were used for the comparison of variables: Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA and Wilcoxon pair order.
Results: The overall level of knowledge of different cultures /religions was 8.00 for the whole study group. The highest level of knowledge among nurses was knowledge about Buddhism (1.00) and the lowest level about Hinduism (0.40).
Conclusions: Most people did not have any lecture on multiculturalism in medicine during their education. The basic concepts of Judaism, Islam and Christianity are very well known. The knowledge of customs in different religions is small. Adaptation of multicultural education curricula in medical schools is an essential factor to ensure patients and their families appropriate conditions in the Polish health service.
There was no conflict of interest.
The long exile of the Jewish people, and its consequent geographical dispersion, had decisive influence in languages who they spoke, and another territorial linguistic aspect, which is the onomastic. The dialect we are dealing about has the particularity, responding, as others, that is the consecuence of linguistic fragmentation in Italy. The development of several dialectal languages ocurred because it was late when national unificaticon process adopted a single language. This is how there are dialects judeo-ferrarese, florentino, mantovano, modenese, livornese, etc. Accordingly, Jews living in the Piedmont spoke the local dialect. However, the difficulty to find the proper idiomatic expression and other needs, as Diena holds, made that some hebrew words were introduced, all these changed conformed a strange body from the linguistically point of view, unless,you hold the idea that the Semitic and Indo-European languages have a common trunk. In synthesis, it is a minor structure of meager heritage lexicon, fundamentally oral – in spite of the existence of literary texts-, without its own phonetic, morphological or syntactic system, with few lexemes, characterized by having voice-overs and Hebrew expressions embedded in the Piedmontese dialect. As a result, phonetic and syntactic treatment was preferably Piedmontese.
Ethnology. Social and cultural anthropology, Judaism
Benford’s law states that the occurrence of significant digits in many data sets is not uniform but tends to follow a logarithmic distribution such that the smaller digits appear as first significant digits more frequently than the larger ones. We investigate here numerical data on the country-wise adherent distribution of seven major world religions i.e. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism and Baha’ism to see if the proportion of the leading digits occurring in the distribution conforms to Benford’s law. We find that the adherent data of all the religions, except Christianity, excellently does conform to Benford’s law. Furthermore, unlike the adherent data on Christianity, the significant digit distribution of the three major Christian denominations i.e. Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy obeys the law. Thus in spite of their complexity general laws can be established for the evolution of religious groups.
Ao fazer referência em seu título à Ética dos Pais, coletânea mishnaica de ditos e anedotas dos primeiros rabinos de Israel, este artigo tenciona analisar as opções, atitudes e dilemas éticos dos primeiros escritores, falantes nativos de hebraico, da moderna literatura israelense. Essa análise se dará a partir do estudo da longa tradição literária judaica da diáspora e em relação ao ambiente sociopolítico efervescente da Palestina do Mandato Britânico e dos primeiros anos da fundação do Estado de Israel. Nesse sentido, procurar-se-á analisar em que medida e de que modo a atuação literária e política desses intelectuais e artistas impactou a tessitura estética de suas obras