Lisa Lampert. Gender and Jewish Difference: From Paul to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 277 pp.
In Gender and Jewish Difference, Lisa Lampert proposes that we consider a “hermeneutical woman” alongside the well-documented “hermeneutical Jew” that underpins literary constructions of Christian theology in patristic, medieval, and Renaissance texts (10). The “hermeneutical Jew,” a term coined by...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Review |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Pennsylvania Press
2006
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| In: |
AJS review
Year: 2006, Volume: 30, Issue: 1, Pages: 191-193 |
| Further subjects: | B
Book review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | In Gender and Jewish Difference, Lisa Lampert proposes that we consider a “hermeneutical woman” alongside the well-documented “hermeneutical Jew” that underpins literary constructions of Christian theology in patristic, medieval, and Renaissance texts (10). The “hermeneutical Jew,” a term coined by Jeremy Cohen, is the originary Christian—the Jew who brought the Christian to “the book” and all its exegetical possibilities but who is incapable of seeing the spirit beyond the letter of the law. The hermeneutical woman is, according to Lampert, the hermeneutical Jew's mate, so to speak; she is another major locus of symbolic projections of the Christian self onto the “other.” Both the hermeneutical Jew and the hermeneutical woman are, as Lampert puts it, “hermeneutically handicapped” (43); they read—the Jew because of his literal-mindedness, the woman because of her feeble-mindedness—with spiritual impediments. They are also, within medieval Christian fiction and drama, profoundly “embodied,” threatening the very foundations of Christian faith—conversion, incarnation, and transubstantiation. According to Lampert, these three tenets of faith, which exist on the border of the body and the spirit, represent ambiguous moments in Christian theology, and they are best captured by “the woman” and “the Jew,” who serve as figures of the spirit subsumed by the body, of transcendence gone awry. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4541 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Association for Jewish Studies, AJS review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0364009406220099 |