Related Papers
From Josephus to Yosippon and Beyond
The Christian Reception of Sefer Yosippon in Western Europe (proof, prepublished)
2024 •
Nadia Zeldes
Christian reception of the Book of Yosippon in the Middle-Ages and Renaissance rested on the assumptions that it was authored by Josephus, that it could serve to confirm the historicity of Christianity, and that it could be used in religious polemics against the Jews. Yosippon’s account of the destruction of the Second Temple was considered proof that Christianity had superseded Judaism, demonstrating how divine punishment had been meted out to the Jews for rejecting Jesus. Christians were also interested in Yosippon for its opening chapter’s narrative, loosely based on Virgil’s Aeneid, depicting the fictitious biblical hero Zepho ben Eliphaz as the founder of Rome. Modern scholarship interprets this narrative as an attempt to create a Jewish historiography of the Roman Empire. For Jewish writers, the myth of Zepho serves to create founding myths that confirm and validate Jewish presence in Christian Europe by attributing the founding of cities and lands to this biblical figure. The article explores these facets of Yosippon’s reception in Christian circles.This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
- (2014) “Ancient Jewish historiography in Arabic garb: Sefer Josippon between South Italy and Coptic Cairo,” in Zutot 11, pp. 70-80.
Ronny Vollandt
Abstract In this brief contribution, I examine multiple histories of the Hebrew narrative Sefer Josippon, trace back its reception and impact in thirteenth-century Coptic Cairo, and call for a renewed scholarly investigation into its Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic versions. Keywords Sefer Josippon – Kitāb akhbār al-yahūd – Jewish-Christian relations – Judaeo-Arabic – Second Temple period – Flavius Josephus – Maccabees
Judaica. Neue digitale Folge
Nadia Zeldes, Reading Jewish History in the Renaissance: Christians, Jews, and the Hebrew Sefer Josippon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020
Carson Bay
Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion
Questioning Traditions Readings of Annius of Viterbo’s Antiquitates in the Cinquecento: The Case of Judah Abarbanel
2023 •
Maria Vittoria Comacchi
Volume chapter published in "Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion", ed. Ze'ev Strauss and Isaac Slater, Leiden- Boston: Brill, 2023, vol. 2, pp. 131–166. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Jewish and Christian Perspectives 39
Eric Ottenheijm, Marcel Poorthuis, and Annette Merz, eds.The Power of Parables. Essays on the Comparative Study of Jewish and Christian Parables Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series, Volume: 39 (Leiden: Brill, 2024) xiv, 476 pp, with indices
2024 •
Eric Ottenheijm
Case studies and methodology on the comparative study of parables in Synoptic, Rabbinic, and Early Christian sources. Papers delivered at the Utrecht 201i9 closing Conference of the project Parables and the Partings of the Ways (2014-2020)
“Historiography among Byzantine Jews – the Case of Sefer Yosippon“, in: R. Bonfil et al. (Hg.), Jews in Byzantium. Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, Leiden 2012, pp. 953–970
Saskia Dönitz
Judaica
2022 •
Carson Bay
This article provides the first close comparative analysis of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew versions of the 'Maria Story' or teknophagia, the account of the mother who ate her child within a besieged Jerusalem first recorded in Flavius Josephus' Jewish War 6.201-213. Josephus wrote his original account in Greek in the first century. Within the following half millennium, three Latin editions of the story emerged: those of 1) the Latin translation of the War, 2) Rufinus of Aquileia's translation of Eusebius' Church History, which contains Josephus' Greek version of the story, and 3) the Latin adaptation of PseudoHegesippus or On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano). This latter text comprises a late fourthcentury Christian rewrite of the Greek War and served as the most important source for a Jewish text that would emerge five hundred years later: the so-called Sefer Yosippon, an early tenthcentury Hebrew text which is arguably the first and most important installment of medieval Jewish historiography. Each of these texts has received scholarly attention, and sometimes several have been discussed together. Nor has the Maria Story itself escaped scholarly treatment. Yet the exact relationship between these texts and their renditions of the Maria Story has never been closely examined and clearly explained. This article fills this gap in the research and uses the Maria Story to explore source critical, literary, philological, and rhetorical questions pertaining to these five versions of the Maria Story, with an emphasis upon De Excidio and Sefer Yosippon, the most understudied iterations of this ancient and medieval tradition.
Die Entwicklung jüdischer Historiographie von der Antike bis in die Frühe Neuzeit - unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Josephus-Yosippon Komplexes
MA-Bibliography.pdf
2018 •
Florian Leubner
«Ayn gevaltiker kenig». Alessandro il Macedone nella letteratura yiddish antica”, Medioevi 2 (2016), pp. 151–186.
Claudia Rosenzweig
ABSTRACT: Alexander of Macedonia is one of great kings in Jewish history and legend. Several Jewish sources, from the period of the Second Temple onward, tell of his adventures and his gesta, both the historically attested and the legendary. The rich narrative material of this tradition appears in Yiddish in the Early Modern period. This paper presents stories from the ‘Matter of Alexander’, notably the version found in manuscript 8° 7308 of the National Library of Israel, and explores the reception of these ‘Alexan- der mayses’, most of which are based on Talmudic haggadot.
Josippon: Jüdische Geschichte vom Anfang der Welt bis zum Ende des ersten Aufstandes gegen Rom
dagmar boerner-klein
