Religious History

""Où que l’on regarde aux États-Unis, la religion n’est jamais bien loin : on la trouve dans la politique, bien entendu ; les faits divers, souvent ; les affiches le long des routes, rappelant à l’automobiliste l’imminence du retour du Christ ou simplement son amour ; la profusion de lieux de culte de toutes les sensibilités imaginables et, de façon plus insolite, jusque dans les rubriques sportives des médias.
Vue de France, cette omniprésence paraît étrange et exotique, difficilement compréhensible. Pour l’éclairer, Lauric Henneton propose d’en revenir aux origines : il cherche les racines de la religiosité américaine dans le protestantisme européen, pour suivre ensuite les différentes branches auxquelles elles ont donné naissance au fil des siècles jusqu’à nos jours.
Il propose donc une approche originale en s’inscrivant dans le courant de l’historiographie dite « atlantique », qui s’efforce de resituer les Treize Colonies puis les États-Unis dans un cadre géographique, culturel, politique et économique large, à l’échelle du bassin atlantique.
De la religion stricte des premiers puritains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre aux megachurches contemporaines, des quakers de Pennsylvanie aux réveils évangéliques qui secouent le pays aux XVIIe et XIXe siècles, ce livre offre pour la première fois un tableau complet des phénomènes religieux aux États-Unis, depuis la fondation des premières colonies jusqu’à nos jours.""

"This volume publishes for the first time an untitled anti-Hasidic manuscript, which the editors have called Reshit Hokhmah (The Origin/Beginning of Wisdom), from the Joseph Perl Archive in Tarnopol. The manuscript was copied in 1819, the year that Perl’s Megale Temirin was published. It is housed today in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. The identity of the author is unknown, but he probably came from Galicia and was associated with Mitnagdim and Maskilim. The book expresses harsh and detailed criticism of the hagiographic work, Shivhei ha-Besht (In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, Kapost 1815), which is the first extensive engagement with this book. Moreover, the work is erudite and anticipates the views of Isaac Baer Levinson in his work Te‘udah be-Yisrael (A Warning to Israel, Vilna and Grodno 1828). The manuscript was read by many Maskilim in Galicia and it seems to have influenced both Joseph Perl and Isaac Baer Levinson. This work is therefore of great importance as an example of anti-Hasidic literature, which influenced nineteenth-century Haskalah literature. A transcription of the manuscript is presented in this volume, accompanied by explanatory notes, references to literature that influenced the author, references to anti-Hasidic literature, and an introduction that describes the character of the work and its reception.

Table of Contents

Early Manuscripts in Joseph Perl Archive / Jonatan Meir
Introduction / Shmuel Werses

Reshit Hokhmah (1819): Critical Edition
Introduction • The History of Heresy • In Praise of Wisdom and The Sages • On the Ways of the Fools • Hasidic Tales and their Secrets • On the Besht’s Path • The Besht’s Family • The Secret of Healing a Barren Woman • A Hasidic Sermon on Wine and Sons • Another Question and a Sermon on the Secrets • A Question and Sermon on Hasidic Tales • A Story about the Wonders of the great Tzaddik • On the Besht and a Priest who had an Accidental Emission • Another Story on the Besht and a Priest • The Besht and Wine • The Besht and Adultery • The Besht and the Messiah • Exaggerated Praise Concerning the Besht and the Origins of Praise • An Elegy on the Heretics, the Besht, and the Hasidim • A Reproach against the Besht’s Sayings Concerning the Messiah • Stories of False Tzaddikim • Two Types of Hasidic Rabbis • On the Tzaddikim and the Damage They Cause • Praising Wisdom and Work

Bibliography
Indexes


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This article is mainly concerned with the dissemination of Jacob Boehme’s writings rather than their reception and accordingly focuses upon the contribution of intermediaries, patrons, translators, biographers, printers, and publishers.  It shows how Boehme’s texts were copied, transmitted, issued and translated, demonstrating the key role Samuel Hartlib’s circle played in facilitating the project.  Furthermore, it uncovers the translators’ networks, revealing their ties through kinship and friendship, as well as shared professional and commercial interests.  Indeed, these extensive connections, which included sympathetic publishers, largely explains why Boehme’s works were acquired so readily in printed English translations and later selectively rendered into Welsh.

Anche se gli studi sull'argomento sono per lo più relativi all'area francese non mancano pellegrinaggi penitenziali italiani. Esiste un documento fiammingo del tardo Cinquecento contenente una lista dei luoghi in cui si era soliti mandare i condannati al pellegrinaggio giudiziale. Tra gli altri ve ne sono indicati alcuni italiani: quelli che tra i molti santuari venivano ritenuti più importanti per la penitenza.

"The ports and coastal zones constituted the most important points of interaction between the interior of Anatolia and the Mediterranean world; only along the 600 km long coast of Lycia and Pamphylia, for instance, medieval sources list almost 100 ports and landing places.  With the (anew) advance of the Seljuks towards the coast (conquest of Attaleia/Antalya in 1207, conquest of Sinope in 1214) and the increasing presence of Italian merchants in the harbours of the Aegean, the Black Sea and the Levant, maritime Asia Minor became a zone of intensive contacts between Byzantines (after 1204 in the exile realms of Nicaea and Trebizond), Armenians (in the Kingdom of Cilicia), Turks, Persians and Arabs (in the Sultanate of Konya) and “Latins” respectively “Franks”, thus also between Orthodox, Oriental and Western Churches as well as Islam (in its various denominations). With the fragmentation of Seljuk central power after the defeat against the Mongols in 1243 into various Emirates and their expansion especially into Western Asia Minor towards the Aegean and the establishment of Italian colonies (including “Catholic” bishoprics) in coastal towns and offshore islands (e. g. the Genoese on Chios and in Phokaia/Foça) and of the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes, the number of zones of interaction, but also conflict increased (relocation of crusading efforts towards the Aegean in the 14th century, for instance). At the same time, Venetians and Genoese integrated all these locations and regions as hubs and nodes into their commercial networks and into the late medieval “World System”.  With the Ottoman Expansion, these territories were absorbed into one imperial framework once more (as it has existed under Byzantine rule until the 11th century), which finally also included the remaining western colonies (Rhodes in 1522/1523, Chios in 1566, Cyprus in 1571). During this period, “no other region of Europe or the Mediterranean became a cynosure of so many ethnicities in such a small place”.
Some of these aspects, such as the intensive trade between Venetian Crete and the Emirates in South-western Anatolia or the Genoese and the Turks in the 14th and 15th century , the military conflict between Crusaders and Turks in the Aegean  or the establishment of Latin monastic communities and bishoprics in the region  have already been analysed in greater detail. The same is true for aspects of religious transformations (especially conversions to Islam) in the region in the early modern period  as well as in late medieval centuries, but less so for maritime aspects of the organisation, identity and dynamics of various religious groups.  A view from the sea towards the coasts of Anatolia also opens a new perspective away from a “continental” overlapping of competing territorial claims towards a sum of potential nodal points within the late medieval network of socioeconomic interactions, which often modified or even overcame lines of religious, ethnic or political differentiation.
As we demonstrate in this paper, there existed various and manifold channels of encounters across religious border in maritime Asia Minor; their systematic survey and mapping contributes to a further embedding of the processes of political, economic and religious transformation in Anatolia in these centuries within the late medieval Mediterranean and Islamic world, complementary to already existing projects just as “The Islamisation of Anatolia” (https://www.islam-anatolia.ac.uk/).
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