Beguiling Guidance : Zechariah Alḍāhirī's Sefer Hamusar, a Hebrew Maqāma from 16th-Century Yemen /

Beguiling Guidance : Zechariah Alḍāhirī's Sefer Hamusar, a Hebrew Maqāma from 16th-Century Yemen /

The only Hebrew picaresque maqāma from Yemen, Sefer hamusar captivates its readers with trickster tales of wandering and adventure while offering moral guidance and a spiritual ascent via kabbalistic study. In Beguiling Guidance , Adena Tanenbaum explores these tensions, along with the literary, soc...

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Main Author: Tanenbaum, Adena (Author)

Format: eBook

Language: English

Published: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2025.

Series: Études sur le judaïsme médiéval ; 101.
Late Antiquity and Medieval Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2025

Subjects:

Jewish Studies.

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Call Number: DS101

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Table of Contents:
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1 Historical Context
  • 2 Medieval Versus Early Modern
  • 3 Authorial Sensibilities
  • 4 Distinguishing Features of Sefer hamusar
  • 5 Literary Continuities and New Departures
  • 6 Kabbalah and Philosophy
  • 7 Receptivity to Printed Books
  • 8 A Unique Case?
  • 9 Earlier Perspectives on Sefer hamusar
  • 10 Postscript: Sefer hamusar as Auto/biography Manqué?
  • 11 Chapter Outline
  • 1 Literary Dimensions: Maqāma, Musar , Narrative and Poetic Techniques
  • 1 Setting the Scene: Author's Introduction
  • 2 The Maqāma Genre
  • 3 The Idea of Fiction in Medieval Arabic and Hebrew Literature
  • 4 Sefer hamusar: Structure, Texts, and Paratexts
  • 5 Stylistic and Narrative Techniques
  • 6 The Role of the Formal Poems
  • 2 Travel in Many Guises: Journeys Real and Imagined
  • 1 Reassessing Pre-modern Arabic and Hebrew Travel Narratives
  • 2 Toponyms
  • 3 Reading the Travel Accounts in Sefer hamusar
  • 4 Arabic and Hebrew Antecedents to the Travel Narratives
  • 5 Links between Framing Itineraries and Embedded Tales
  • 6 Symbolic Links: Damascus
  • 7 Thematic and Lexical Links: Ḥaḍramawt
  • 8 Socio-Cultural Relevance: Cochin
  • 9 Stasis and Movement: Writing from Prison
  • 10 Alḍāhirī's Conception of Space
  • 11 Periphery and Center
  • 12 Stimuli to Travel in Sefer Hamusar
  • 13 Mobility and the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge and Practices
  • 14 Journeying and Questions of Identity
  • 15 The Significance of Place Names
  • 16 Cultural Orbits of the Travel
  • 17 Crossing Boundaries and Depicting Other Jewish Subcultures
  • 18 Other Eastern Jews
  • 19 Ashkenazim
  • 20 Romaniots?
  • 3 A Distinctive Sense of Self: Transregional Contacts with Jews in the Land of Israel
  • 1 Introduction
  • 2 Encounters with the Emissary from the Holy Land
  • 3 Talmud Study in the Land of Israel
  • 4 Ottoman Sephardi Dominance
  • 5 Pronunciation as a Marker of Difference
  • 6 The Impact of Print Culture
  • 4 Representations of Muslims: Perspectives on the Dominant Faith
  • 1 Techniques of Representation
  • 2 Conclusion: Historical and Imaginary Muslims
  • 5 Didacticism or Literary Legerdemain? Philosophy, Ethics, and the Picaresque
  • 1 Philosophical and Medical Conceptions of the Soul: The "Internal Senses"
  • 2 The Soul's Moral Qualities
  • 3 A Poetic Coda
  • 4 Reliable Transmission?
  • 5 Pietist Pose
  • 6 Medical Imposture and Abstract Cures
  • 7 Sham Preachers and Moral Ambiguities
  • 6 A Conduit for Kabbalah: Belles-Lettres as a Medium for Mysticism
  • 1 The Kabbalistic Chapters
  • 2 Alḍāhirī as a Conduit for Kabbalistic Learning and its Reception in Yemen
  • 3 Alḍāhirī's Relationship to Lurianic Kabbalah and the Poetry of the Safed Mystics
  • 4 Recurrent Kabbalistic Themes
  • 5 The Interplay between Kabbalistic and Narrative Elements
  • 6 Conclusions
  • 7 The Urge to Be Immortalized: Auto-Epitaphs, Eulogies, and the Afterlife of Sefer hamusar
  • 1 The Conflation of Author and Protagonists
  • 2 The Structural Function of the Epitaphs
  • 3 The Epitaph: Apology or Swan Song?
  • Bibliography
  • Indices.