2019 | 1

Browsing 2019 | 1 by Title

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  • Article
    Between Erudition and Faith: Jean-Jacques Chifflet’s Tract on the Shroud of Besançon (1624)
    von Wyss-Giacosa, Paola (2019)
    The shroud of Besançon, a large cloth considered being a precious relic, an “imprint” left by Christ’s body on his burial linen, knew a period of intense veneration and public debate from the early 16th century to the end of the 18th century. With the publication of De linteis sepulchralibus Christi servatoris crisis historica (Antwerp, 1624), a treatise that was as erudite as it was intellectually and conceptually biased, the Bisontine author Jean-Jacques Chifflet significantly contributed to his local shroud’s perception and reception. A noteworthy selection of visual material, among it the very first reproduction of the shroud of Besançon in a print medium, was an important part of the book’s argument. The present article offers a close reading of parts of Chifflet’s treatise, with a particular attention given to the author’s targeted use of engravings as illustrationes (images meant to, quite literally, illuminate the text, its meaning and intention), thus looking at this representation of a local relic as a part and as a product of a cultural practice and of shared notions.
  • Review
  • Review
  • Review
  • Article
    Constructing Space, Changing Reality of Israel through Film
    Radovic, Milja (2019)
    This paper investigates the ways in which filmmakers through cinematic space frame reality, mediating the issues of conflict and reconciliation, religion and identity(ies) within Israel. Cinematic space depicts and expresses borders through elements of film language, such as mise-en-scène, montage and the disruption of temporal reality. By (re) framing meanings cinema questions existing socio-political realities, and their impact on the individual or whole communities. The microcosmic realities which constitute different communities within Israel’s wider socio-political reality are built and confronted through the cinematic space. The cinema thus becomes a site through which existing realities are reflected and new realities are constructed, opening up possibilities for transformation. In other words, how film frames an ‘alternative reality(ies)’ is a question related to the construction of space, which will be addressed in this paper. The paper focuses on two films: WEST OF THE JORDAN RIVER (Amos Gitai, 2017) and GEULA (Joseph Madmony, Boaz Yehonatan Yacov, 2018). I juxtapose these two diametrically different films in order to assess the ways in which the cinematic space functions as a direct site for negotiating the identities, religious belonging, and the different communities’ relation to the geographical space of Israel. The analysis of these two films aims to ‘sharpen the focus’ on cinematic space as a continuum in which such complex realities are expressed, renegotiated, and transformed.
  • Review
  • Review
  • Article
    The Hidden Jesus. The Nazarene in Jewish Polemical Literature: The Case of the 16th-Century Text Sefer Ḥizzuq Emunah
    Benfatto, Miriam (2019)
    The aim of this article is to retrace the figure of Jesus that was hidden under the polemical and apologetic strategy of the text known under the title Sefer Ḥizzuq Emunah (Strengthening of the Faith), composed at the end of the sixteenth century by Lithuanian Karaite scholar Isaac ben Abraham Troki (c. 1533–1594). Despite his belonging to a Karaite group, Isaac ben Abraham uses very often rabbinic quotations and Jewish classical commentators and this material was therefore perfectly intelligible to wider Jewish community, becoming also much more accessible to non-Jews and Marranos. Indeed, this text was translated in Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Latin before the XVII century. The Sefer Ḥizzuq Emunah was a privileged example of what the Christians knew about Jewish anti-Christian literature and was read by important European intellectuals and philosophers. This text circulated widely among European thinkers, becoming an important source of anti-Christian ideas among non-Jewish intellectuals. The influence of the Sefer Ḥizzuq Emunah demonstrates how closely the Jewish and Christian worlds interact and connect during early modern period.
  • Article
    The Historical Jesus and the Christ of Early Cinema: A Complicated Relationship
    Facchini, Cristiana (2019)
    When at the onset of the twentieth century, the influential German theologian Albert Schweitzer published a historiographical account of the ‘historical Jesus’, a discrete number of silent films devoted to the life and death of Christ had already appeared in Europe and the United States. This article analyses the rise of early silent films about Christ against the backdrop of the debate enhanced by the rise of the ‘historical Jesus’, presenting some of the relevant similarities and divergences that representations of the life of Jesus produced through different media and within an increasing relevance of mass culture.
  • Article
    Some Remarks on Toledot Yeshu (The Jewish Life of Jesus) in Early Modern Europe
    Barbu, Daniel (2019)
    The Jewish Life of Jesus (Toledot Yeshu) is perhaps one of the most infamous retellings of the gospel narrative of the pre-modern era. The present essay explores its reception and circulation of among both Jews and Christians in the period before and after the first editions of the work, by J.C. Wagenseil in 1681 and J.J. Huldreich in 1705. The work was an object of fascination for early modern scholars of Judaism and was regularly invoked in discussions concerned with the Talmud and other Jewish books alleged to be “blasphemous.” For Jewish scholars, it was a source of embarrassment, although both the manuscript and documentary evidence demonstrates that many Jews did view Toledot Yeshu as a culturally significant narrative, worthy of being transmitted. It is here suggested that Toledot Yeshu, with its direct and emotional cogency, combining history, humour, and polemics, was indeed recognized by early-modern Jews and crypto-Jews as a powerful story, to which they could articulate their identity.
  • Article
    The Soundscape of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
    Martellozzo, Nicola (2019)
    IL VANGELO SECONDO MATTEO (1964), by the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, is one of the most interesting and widely acclaimed film representations of the life of Jesus. Its reception in the Catholic world has reflected the alternating fortunes of Pasolini himself, but over the years critics have come to fully appreciate its merits. While the director made faithful use of the dialogues in the Gospel, he constructed a new – but plausible – imagination, or “architecture of reality”, based on an intertextual code with intersecting pictorial, architectural, biblical and sound references. This essay aims in particular to employ a semiotic approach to analyse the musical motifs in the film, and the way in which they convey precise meanings and values to the viewer about the figure and life of Jesus. Songs and musical compositions are leitmotifs that punctuate the narrative, interweaving with the visual component to form a full-blown language in its own right.
  • Article
    Understanding Jesus in the Early Modern Period and Beyond. Editorial
    Facchini, Cristiana; von Wyss-Giacosa, Paola (2019)
    The exceptional and yet very human life of Jesus has been represented in a vast breadth of forms, from the visual to the textual, in a kind of intertextual relationship that is highly complex, in that it outreaches an impressive amount of different cultures both in terms of chronological depth and geographical reach. In order to properly appreciate the richness of early modern scholarship on these topics, a more inclusive approach might be of use, one that is capable of grasping and conveying how scholars belonging to different communities of faiths performed their historical quest on such charged theological themes. Jewish, Catholic, and different Protestant scholars left interesting traces of their understanding of the historical context where Jesus lived. Their work often reached vast clandestine circulation to become part of a shared library of religious reformers and enlighteners, not to mention fervid critics of Christianity. The collection of articles presented here combines various methodological lines of inquiry. At the same time, it brings together, albeit very selectively, the early modern and the modern period, including the second half of the twentieth century; we believe that this selection of case studies offers a composite view on different, and often contrasting practices of historiographical writing, which may belong to different religious, anti-religious, and neutral traditions that span across a few centuries
  • Journal Issue