Between Crescent and Cross - Jewish Civilization from Mohammed to Spinoza (Ruderman TTC 2005)[Eng][h33t][1Maven]

Between Crescent and Cross - Jewish Civilization from Mohammed to Spinoza (Ruderman TTC 2005)[Eng][h33t][1Maven]

The Teaching Company (TTC) Great Courses series, Course No. 4652
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W7EBT2/
http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/CourseDescLong2.aspx?cid=4652

Audio Book format: WMA 128kbps, stereo, 44.1 KHz (English)
24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture, plus two Course Guidebooks
Author/Narrator: David B. Ruderman, Ph.D., 
University of Pennsylvania, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

What is it like to practice your faith in an environment dominated by another? To evolve as a people when all of the world around you moves to religious and cultural rhythms very different from your own? To maintain your unity as a living communityand always to be aware of that sense of communityeven when your numbers have been scattered across many lands, without a common government, a common country, or even a common language? 

Moreover, how might these circumstances affect not only your own history, but also the history of those other cultures through which you move? What might you take from them? 

For 10 formative centuries, the answers to questions like these helped define a developing Judaism, whose history was forever affected by its encounters with the surrounding social, economic, political, and intellectual environments of both medieval Islam and Christendom. As a result of those encounters, new pathways of philosophical inquiry and religious spirituality would be formed. The Hebrew language would find new ways of artistic expression. And the role of Jews in the life of the surrounding community would be changed forever, sometimes even increased, as was the paradoxical case in Italy, by the very ghettoization meant to keep them isolated.

"Between Cross and Crescent: Jewish Civilization from Mohammed to Spinoza" presents an overview of Jewish culture and society from its rabbinic foundations in late antiquity until the dawn of modernity in the 17th century. In so doing, it places a special focus on Judaism's creative encounter with Christianity and Islam, giving us a unique perspective from which to examine the three major Western religions as they interact over time, and noting especially their ability or inability to tolerate and even appreciate the "other," as viewed from the vantage point of the Jewish minority. 

Course Lecture Titles
1. On Studying Jewish History 
2. The Rabbinic Legacy prior to Islam 
3. The Beginnings of Jewish Life under Islam 
4. Baghdad and the Gaonic Age 
5. Saadia Gaon and His World 
6. The Philosophy of Saadia Gaon 
7. The Rise of the Spanish Jewish Community 
8. Judah ha-Levi’s Cultural Critique 
9. Moses Maimonides’s Philosophy of Judaism 
10. Jewish Beginnings in Christian Europe 
11. The Church and the Jews prior to 1096 
12. The Crusades and the Jews 
13. Patterns of Jewish Culture—Rabbinic Learning 
14. Patterns of Jewish Culture—Kabbalah 
15. Patterns of Jewish Culture—German Pietism 
16. The Medieval Jewish-Christian Debate 
17. Understanding Medieval Anti-Semitism 
18. Notes on the Medieval Jewish Family 
19. The Decline and Expulsion of Spanish Jewry 
20. Italian Jewry in the Early Modern Period 
21. Kabbalah and Society in 16th-Century Safed 
22. Shabbetai Zevi—The Mystical Messiah 
23. The Rise of Eastern European Jewry 
24. The Sephardim of Amsterdam