POSTGRADUATE COURSES IN JEWISH STUDIES
Courses in Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester are offered in a number of departments, particularly the Department of Religions and Theology. Not all courses are available every year. (You may also take 30 credits from among the other RELT-coded courses, or as directed reading courses, or from other subject areas, e.g., History, subject to the approval of your programme director.) Here is a provisional list of course units (Exact units are subject to change. See main website for provisional timetable):
POSTGRADUATE COURSES | DIRECTED READING COURSES
RELT 70561: Jews among Christians and Muslims - Prof. Daniel Langton, Dr. Renate Smithuis and Dr. Jean-Marc Dreyfus: This course will approach the subject from the perspective of the history of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, specifically, Jewish engagement with Christian and Islamic religious cultures, and with Western modernity. As a team taught course, it draws on expertise in modern Jewish-Christian relations, medieval Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, European history and Holocaust Studies. The course aims to enable you to develop an awareness of the profound level of interaction between Jewish thought and culture with non-Jewish thought and culture in history, and to develop skills in analysis of the arguments of scholars of Jewish Studies and to develop skills in researching, presenting and defending conclusions on a topic of Jewish/Non-Jewish historical interaction.
RELT 70001: Bible and Early Judaism in Context - Prof. George Brooke, Dr. Renate Smithuis, Dr. Todd Klutz and Dr. Peter Oakes: The course has two elements. In the weekly one-hour course seminar, various members of the Biblical studies staff will discuss approaches that they use, in their research, for analysing Biblical texts in context. The seminars will provide opportunites for students to explore and evaluate these approaches and how they can be put to use. The second element is the weekly Ehrhardt Seminar at which scholars from Manchester and elsewhere present current research projects. Students will develop skills in analysing these presentations. The course can be successfully taken without knowledge of Hebrew or Greek. However, some of the research projects discussed will inevitably turn on issues related to Hebrew or Greek so, the greater a student’s knowledge of these languages is, the more they are likely to gain from the course.
RELT 70992: Dead Sea Scrolls - Prof. George Brooke: This course enables you to come to terms with one or more aspects of the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some prior knowledge is assumed and it is hoped that you will come to the course wanting to seize the opportunity for pursuing your own interests in this fascinating material.
RELT 60082: Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean World - Dr. Todd Klutz: This course aims to to introduce you to a range of biblical and related ancient materials that either narrate or at least partially constitute performances of a magico-religious type and to enable you to assess the role of ideology in scholarly constructions of ‘magic’ as a category and the use of these constructs in modern interpretation of the ancient sources.The course will begin by analysing modern scholarly usage of ‘magic’ and related terminology (e.g., ‘superstition’) as an example of difficulties inherent in the task of constructing categories for classifying and interpreting text and discourse from an alien cultural system. Critical awareness of those difficulties and of various ways of negotiating them will be deepened throughout the seminar programme by means of interpretive dialogue with a selection of biblical and other ancient Mediterranean texts that either include rhetoric about ‘magic’ or ‘magicians’, or have been classified themselves in modern scholarship as exemplifying a ‘magical’ world-view. Required readings in the ancient primary sources include selections from Jewish Scripture, ancient Greek philosophical and medical writings, the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament and other early Christian literature; and various late antique Egyptian spells, curses, and magico-religious handbooks of ritual power.
RELT 60131: The Holocaust in History - Dr. Jean-Marc Dreyfus: The course will begin with one session on the theoretical framework of Holocaust research and one on pre-Nazi anti-Semitism. It will then be pursue chronologically, with sessions dedicated to a theme. For example: “Jewish life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939”; “Ghettoisation”. The final session will be on the aftermath of the Holocaust in general. This course aims to provide a core course in Holocaust studies, dealing with the most important facts and interpretations of the events, to analyse the main theories in the field of politics explaining the genocide, to describe the main chapters of the persecution of the Jews, first of all in Germany from 1933 then all over Europe, to cover all the countries in Europe, including the neutral ones, to question the aims and goals of perpetrators, whether they were German or non-German, to assess the different Jewish responses to the persecutions, including the religious one, to describe the attitude of the so-called witnesses, whether in Europe or among the Allied Nations and finally to consider the latest trends in Holocaust research in Europe, the United States and Israel.
RELT 71122: Darwinism and Jewish Thought - Prof Daniel Langton: While much has been written about Christian engagement with Darwinian and other kinds of evolutionary theory, little attention has been paid to Jewish engagement. In fact, a wide variety of traditionalist and progressive Jewish religious thinkers wrote on how Judaism could and should respond to science in general and evolution in particular. And Social Darwinism, the application of a biological theory to social theory, led to highly significant developments in modern Jewish history, such as the emergence of ‘scientific’ anti-Semitism and some racial conceptions of Zionism. Thus an appreciation of the influence of evolutionary theory is vital for understanding the development of modern Jewish thought and identity. Key figures to be considered in this course include: Samson Raphael Hirsch, Isaac Meyer Wise, Mordecai Kaplan, and Hans Jonas. This course aims to explore Jewish religious engagement with biological evolutionary theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to explore the impact of Social Darwinism upon the Jewish people.
MEST 10210: Modern Hebrew Language 1 - Mrs. Sophie Garside: This is a beginner’s level language course which teaches the skills of reception (reading and listening), production (speaking and writing) in the target language and mediation between the target language and English (translation and interpretation). The aim is to familiarize the students with the spoken and written forms and grammar of the language and to enable them to begin to express themselves in writing, simple role-play and simple dialogues, and to begin to read simple authentic texts and translate to and from the target language.
MEST 20210: Modern Hebrew Language 2 - Mrs. Sophie Garside: This is a lower intermediate level language course which teaches the skills of reception (reading and listening), production (speaking and writing) in the target language and mediation between the target language and English (translation and interpretation).
MEST 30270: Modern Hebrew Language 4 - Mrs. Sophie Garside: This is an advanced level language course which teaches the skills of reception (reading and listening), production (speaking and writing) in the target language and mediation between the target language and English (translation and interpretation). The aim is to enable students to master complex structures with high fluency in a range of situations and for a variety of purposes.
You may be able to take 30 credits as a Directed Reading course unit (RELT60612). This is subject to the approval of your programme director and is also subject to the agreement of the lecturer concerned (who would be taking on extra, untimetabled teaching to do this).
As well as your assessed courses, above, you may attend further MA or undergraduate RELT-coded courses, subject to the permission of the course unit director. In particular, the following are available:
RELT 30611: Consequences of the Holocaust on Western Societies and Jewish History - Dr. Jean-Marc Dreyfus: Some consequences of the Holocaust only appear after decades of silence and repression. More than just considering the memory of the event, this course will try to deal with different aspects of the aftermath. The changes in Jewish history after the Holocaust will be particularly considered: demography, new Jewish consciousness, the importance of the State of Israel and the interpretation in Jewish theology. The course will study different aspect of Holocaust consequences, in the fields of memorialisation, diplomacy and Jewish history. The sessions will handle, among others, the following themes: - Discovering the camps and the catastrophe: 1944-1946 - Restitution and reparation policies - Holocaust denial: facts and fights - the German Federal Republic facing its past - Holocaust memory and politics in the new Europe : an East-West divide.
RELT 30701: The Jewish-Christian-Muslim Controversies from the Earliest Times to the Middle Ages - Dr. Renate Smithuis: The course will fall into four main parts: Part 1 will investigate the reasons for the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity in the first few centuries of the current era: how did Christianity, which began as a sect within Second Temple Judaism become a separate religion? We will consider the theological points at issue between Judaism and Christianity as reflected in Patristic and Rabbinic sources, paying particular attention to debates over the interpretation of Scripture, centred on key themes such as the unity of God, the identity of the Messiah, the abrogation of Torah, and the election of Israel. Part 2 will cover the early Islamic period, and concentrate on the “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity on the one hand and Islam on the other. Having briefly traced the emergence of Islam, we will consider the attitudes towards Jewish tradition and towards Jesus in the Quran, and the more generally the early Muslim theologies of Judaism and Christianity, as well as the Jewish and Christian theologies of Islam. Part 3 will cover the high Middle Ages, when, in the wake of intense political, cultural, economic and social interaction, the three-way controversy reached its height. We will focus on a number of key writers, such as Judah Halevi, Petrus Alfonsi, Ibn Hazm, Ibn Qutayba, Ibn Rabban, as well as key debates such as the Paris Disputation of 1240, the Barcelona Disputation of 1263, before treating thematically the topics of prophethood, abrogation, the corruption of Scripture, and the unity of God. Part 4: the course will conclude by summarizing the points of agreement and difference between the three faiths, considering the role of inter-faith controversy within the three traditions, and how it shaped their identities, evaluating the debating strategies used and the strength of the arguments, and assessing the continuing impact of the controversy on world history.
RELT 30332: Holocaust Theology - Prof. Daniel Langton: The course surveys a number of Jewish and Christian theological responses to the Holocaust. It explores the differing ways that their religious concepts, beliefs, principles and practice have been affected by the theological challenge of the Holocaust, which has undoubtedly brought about a wide-spread crisis of identity and meaning for many religious thinkers. Among other areas of interest, it considers the wider context of Jewish-Christian relations (in particular Christian anti-Judaism), the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, the debate surrounding the phenomenon of Jewish self-definition in terms of the Holocaust, and the future of Holocaust theology itself.
RELT 30912: Early Jewish Novels - Prof. George Brooke: The aims of the course are to introduce early Jewish novels, from Esther and Daniel, especially in their expanded forms, to 3 Maccabees and the Story of Aseneth, as well as several others, like Tobit and Judith. Many of these novels have a heady mix of politics and romance. They address many of the concerns of Jewish identity in the Second Temple period. Part of the course will be devoted to the subsequent cultural appropriation of these novels. Analysis of recent scholarly approaches to this material will also be undertaken.
RELT 20182: Ancient Israel's Prophetic Literature - Prof. George Brooke: This course discusses the definition of the term ‘prophet’ and its background in ancient Israel. Some account is given of so-called ‘primitive’ prophecy, but the course concentrates on the messages of certain key figures in the biblical prophetic tradition.
RELT 20611: Introduction to the History of Jewish-Christian Relations - Prof. Daniel Langton: The course provides an initial overview of the history of Jewish-Christian relations and highlights the development of the thought and theology of various individuals, concentrating particularly on the last hundred years or so. It examines Jewish approaches to Jesus and the apostle Paul, Christian approaches to Judaism and the study of Judaism, the history of Jewish and Christian attitudes to dialogue and to 'the other', and such controversial issues as the Holocaust, the State of Israel, Zionism, anti-Judaism in the New Testament, and conversion practices.
RELT 21012: Ethical Issues from Joshua to Jesus - Prof. George Brooke: The aims of this course unit are threefold: (1) to familiarize you with some key texts from the Jewish and Christian Scriptures; (2) to consider what kinds of ethical systems might illuminate such key texts; and (3) to consider how some of the texts have been used in modern ethical debates.
RELT 10140: Biblical Hebrew - Prof. George Brooke: This course introduces students to the basic vocabulary, grammar and syntax of Biblical Hebrew, beginning with the alphabet (designed for those who have no prior knowledge of the Hebrew language) and enables them to read the Book of Jonah in Hebrew. The course is primarily intended to prepare you to undertake the subsequent study of Hebrew texts, but those who have successfully completed it should be able to consult the Hebrew text of the Bible and make intelligent use of commentaries and other works which presume a basic knowledge of Hebrew.
RELT 20170: Biblical Hebrew Texts I - Prof. George Brooke and Dr. Renate Smithuis: This course involves translation and exegesis of selected passages of the Hebrew Bible (currently: Genesis 1-3; 2 Samuel 6-7; selected Psalms).
RELT 30380: Biblical Hebrew Texts II - Prof. George Brooke: This course aims to enable you to offer your own translation of and critical comments on the passages studied; and be able to engage with the textual footnotes in the prescribed edition of the Hebrew Bible (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) and other critical editions of the texts to be studied. It involves translation and exegesis of selected passages of the Hebrew Bible (currently: Judges 4-5, Jeremiah 1-5, Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) 1-3, selected passages from the Dead Sea Scrolls). Not running in 2011-12.
Teaching in Aramaic may be available less formally.
If you wish to be assessed on the subject of an undergraduate course, you should ask the course unit director if he or she is willing to offer additional support and assessment (normally a 6000-word essay) for you to do a Directed Reading course (RELT60612) on that subject, to be taken in conjunction with attendance at the undergraduate lectures.