{"title":"Pandemic, homo somatis, and Transformations of the Russian Orthodox Ethos","authors":"A. Agadjanian","doi":"10.46586/er.12.2021.9655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.12.2021.9655","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The article examines the reactions within the Russian Orthodox Church to the coronavirus pandemic, especially its first year of 2020. Based on materials from the official institutions, press, religious and secular Internet portals, and online forums, the article systematizes the nature of the responses of church leadership, priests, and laity to the unprecedented curtailment of liturgical practices and social interactions during the quarantine period. The extraordinary challenges of the period of the pandemic made evident some important trends in the rhetoric and practices of the Orthodox environment and reveal tensions that are rooted in the ambivalent relationship of religious culture with the key epistemes of late modern society.\u0000","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82692915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Agendas of the First New Christians in Israel and the Portuguese Empire (Sixteenth Century)","authors":"J. A. Tavim","doi":"10.46586/er.13.2022.9662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.13.2022.9662","url":null,"abstract":"This paper aims to reveal and interpret the messianic messages arising from the Inquisition of Évora (Portugal) trials against a group of first generation converts following the general expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1496 respectively. These messages point to a memorialist construction on the phenomenon of the expulsions of Jews from France until they reached Portugal. Consequentially, both their new status as Christians and the context of the Portuguese imperialist expansion are considered essential predestined stages for the meeting of the Lost Tribes and the final redemption. These messages also reveal a 'contamination' of other records, such as the famous *Toledot Yeshu* or the Christian or Jewish versions of the Story of Barlaam and Josafat, and must be overlooked in the context of other known (more or less) contemporary texts of a teleological nature.","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84348061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Popular Ijtihad’ and Entangled Islamic Discourse on the Covid-19 Pandemic in Russia","authors":"Sofya A. Ragozina","doi":"10.46586/er.12.2021.8919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.12.2021.8919","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this article, I examine initial reactions of the Russian Muslim community in social networks to the spread of the Coronavirus. My two main questions are: Who and how reinterprets the category of Islamic piety in the context of the pandemic, and to what extent does the online environment transform the Islamic tradition? To answer them, I focus on the following key narratives of Russian Muslims’ online discourse on the pandemic: Covid-19 as a retaliation against China for the persecutions of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang region, the search for signs of the coming doomsday, as well as various approaches to the reinterpretation of religious piety. Moreover, I consider how the pandemic sped up an entangled glocalised discourse. In the context of the increased role of the transnational online Muslim community, I suggest the term ‘popular ijtihad’ to describe individualised forms of religious engagement that the crisis situation stimulated.\u0000","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75149194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hijab and Niqab: A Cross-Religious COVID-19 Safety Measure in Madina Zongo","authors":"Kauthar Khamis","doi":"10.46586/er.12.2021.9650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.12.2021.9650","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of hijab and niqab (face veil), typically associated with Islamic fundamentalism and banned in some parts of Europe and Africa, have gained currency in multi-religious communities such as Madina Zongo (strangers’ quarters in Hausa) in Accra, Ghana. For some Muslim women in Madina, hijab and niqab appeared to be a perfect replacement for the face mask even without an official statement from medical authorities or state officials on its protective capacity. Wearing these veils allowed them to simultaneously follow their religious tradition and attempt to protect themselves from the disease. Interestingly, some Christian women in the community have also been donning these Muslim veils. Employing Laura Fair’s (2013) proposition that veiling contains a wide range of possible material uses, in this article, I show why and how hijab and niqab are adapted to suit COVID-19 safety measures and appropriated as a face mask by some women in Madina. The chapter also discusses the implications of these innovations in the religiously pluralistic setting of Madina Zongo. \u0000","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82741237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Muḥammad, the Monk, and the Jews: Comparative Religion in Versions of the Baḥīrā Legend","authors":"David M. Freidenreich","doi":"10.46586/er.13.2022.9644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.13.2022.9644","url":null,"abstract":" Early Muslims told a tale about Baḥīrā, a Christian monk who identified the young Muḥammad as the long-awaited prophet and warned the boy’s guardian to protect him from murderous Jews. This legend proved so popular that not only later Muslims but also Christians, Samaritans, and Jews themselves retold it in widely divergent ways. This study analyzes the foundational version of the Baḥīrā legend that appears in the Sīra of Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq (d. ca. 768 CE) alongside others whose genealogical relationship to it is demonstrable. Within these tales, comparison functions as a powerful rhetorical tool by means of which premodern authors denigrate their targets. Academic comparison of the Baḥīrā legend’s many versions, in contrast, reveals the distinctive ways in which premodern authors from different communities understood the similarities and differences not only between their own community and its rivals but also among those rivals. This article demonstrates the utility of Oliver Freiberger’s methodological framework for comparative religion and, more specifically, the analytical value of juxtaposing sources in order to generate insights that deepen understanding of each comparand in its own right.","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82692480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“You Still Believe Like a Jew!”: Polemical Comparisons and Other Eastern Christian Rhetoric Associating Muslims with Jews from the Seventh to Ninth Centuries","authors":"David M. Freidenreich","doi":"10.46586/er.11.2022.9643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.11.2022.9643","url":null,"abstract":"Patriarch Timothy I and Theodore bar Koni, late eighth-century members of the Church of the East, brand Muslims as “new Jews,” in Timothy’s words, on account of their refusal to accept Christian doctrines about Christ. Like many other Eastern Christians, these authors employ the discourse of anti-Judaism against Muslim targets to reinforce the faith of their Christian audiences. Timothy and Theodore, however, are the only known authors of the initial Islamic centuries who employ the rhetorical device of polemical comparison when associating Muslims with Jews. Analysis of the elements with which Timothy and Theodore construct their comparisons reveals the goals that they hoped to achieve through their innovative use of traditional anti-Jewish discourse as well as the distinctive contributions of this rhetorical device to their arguments on behalf of Christian truth claims. This essay demonstrates a broadly applicable method for rhetorical analysis of polemical comparisons.","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74386587","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Armenian-Jewish Connections in the Light of Pre-Modern Armenian Polemical Literature from Iran and Its Wider Context","authors":"A. Ohanjanyan","doi":"10.46586/er.13.2022.9626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.13.2022.9626","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The reconstruction of Armenian-Jewish relations in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries is not an easy task due to the scarcity of historical material. Both peoples underwent resettlement, segregation, coercive conversions under Muslim rule (fighting the side-effects of religious policies for social disciplining), political agendas, the influx of Catholic missionaries, and interstate wars throughout the Safavid to Qajar periods. The current article attempts to revisit the perceptions about Jews and Armenians within inter-confessional debates by examining the early modern polemical literature from the Iranian Armenian context and by employing textual material from the Ottoman Armenian milieu that complements the Iranian case. It further aims to reveal the specifics of the Armenian-Jewish connections in the Persianate Muslim environment and detect the reasons for the ambiguous silence in the Armenian literature from the period in question. \u0000","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87998103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Enoch-Metatron Revisited: Prayers, Adjurations, and Metonymical Hermeneutics in Premodern Jewish Mystical and Magical Texts","authors":"A. Paluch","doi":"10.46586/er.13.2022.9519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.13.2022.9519","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay explores the construction of interpretive authority as a process of both creation and re-creation of meanings, and their self-legitimization in texts. The process of interpretation in that sense does not simply replace one set of meanings with another but rather metonymically enlarges the pool of signifiers by juxtaposing the traditional and the innovative, thus safeguarding the whole range of possible meanings of texts. The cluster of topoi relating to Enoch-Metatron, a supreme angel featuring in Jewish textual traditions, has often been employed in Jewish exegesis and magical practices in a manner that enabled the new interpretation to nest within the set of older imaginaire, the authority of which is never denied nor supplanted but rather empowers the new reading. This article explores the uses the Enoch-Metatron cluster of motifs as a textual device that served as an organizing principle of interpretive process and conferred authority to new interpretations and new compilations of texts in multiple-text handwritten volumes. The article thus foregrounds a mode of reading and refashioning of earlier Jewish textual traditions of commenting on angelic names, such as that of Enoch-Metatron. It forefronts the perspective of the producers of individual practical compilations as participants in the collective enterprise of authorship and authorization of textual units comprised in each handwritten multiple-text volume. \u0000","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89315616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Neglected Hebrew Versions of Myths of the Two Fallen Angels","authors":"M. Idel","doi":"10.46586/er.13.2022.9518","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.13.2022.9518","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The present study presents and discusses two Hebrew versions of the myth of fallen angels previously unknown to modern scholarship. Their protagonists are Shemhaza’el and ‘Azza, and the mythical drama whose actors they are takes place at the beginning of the process of creation. Those versions are preserved in two late thirteenth-century books, one written in Northern France and the other in Catalunia. Those versions are quoted as ’Aggadah and, respectively, as Midrash; they do not depend on each other but reflect an earlier Rabbinic myth that developed in two different directions. The working hypothesis of this article assumes that these versions preserved material that entered the Ashkenazi (Germano-French) center of Jewish culture as part of a stream of traditions which also preserved other, known and unknown, versions of the myth of the fallen angels. The above results, together with other historical reconsiderations mentioned in this study, call into question and invite a profound revision of recent theories of “back borrowing” from Muslim and Christian sources of material concerning this myth among most Jewish authors. \u0000","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80853304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transfer, Begegnung, Skandalon? Neue Perspektiven auf die Jesuitenmissionen in Spanisch-Amerika, edited by Esther Schmid Heer, Nikolaus Klein, and Paul Oberholzer","authors":"Görge K. Hasselhoff","doi":"10.46586/er.13.2022.9618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.46586/er.13.2022.9618","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This contribution offers a review of Esther Schmid Heer, Nikolaus Klein, Paul Oberholzer (eds.). 2019. Transfer, Begegnung, Skandalon? Neue Perspektiven auf die Jesuitenmissionen in Spanisch-Amerika. Studien zur christlichen Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 26. Basel: Schwabe / Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. ISBN 978-3-7965-3818-6 / 978-3-17-035494-4 \u0000","PeriodicalId":36421,"journal":{"name":"Entangled Religions","volume":"29 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88276793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}