By Michael Stanislawski
Autobiographical Jews examines the character of autobiographical writing by means of Jews from antiquity to the current, and the ways that such writings can legitimately be used as resources for Jewish heritage. Drawing on present literary thought, which questions the very nature of autobiographical writing and its courting to what we typically designate because the fact, and, to a lesser quantity, the recent cognitive neurosciences, Michael Stanislawski analyzes a couple of the most important and intricate autobiographical texts written through Jews throughout the ages.
Stanislawski considers The lifestyles through first-century historian Josephus; compares the early smooth autobiographies of Asher of Reichshofen (Book of thoughts) and Glikl of Hameln (Memoirs); analyzes the greatly diversified autobiographies of 2 Russian Jewish writers, the Hebrew Enlightenment writer Moshe Leib Lilienblum and the recognized Russian poet Osip Mandelstam; and appears at autobiographies written out of utter melancholy within the midst and within the wake of worldwide struggle II, Stefan Zweig’s the realm of the day past and Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat.
These writers’ makes an attempt to painting their deepest and public struggles, anxieties, successes, and screw ups are expressions of a uncomplicated force for selfhood that is either undying and time-bound, common and culturally particular. The problem is to try to solve the wide awake from the subconscious distortions in those texts and to treat them as artifacts of people’ quests to make feel in their lives, before everything for themselves after which, if attainable, for his or her readers.
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At Tarichaeae, the inhabitants, on hearing of the treachery of the Tiberians, urged Josephus, he then claimed, to attack Tiberias and to reduce all its men, women, and children to slaves, a position shared by his friends who had escaped from there. ” He therefore made his way to Sepphoris, to preach his moderate position. The inhabitants of Sepphoris, however, had decided to remain loyal to Rome and paid Jesus, a brigand chief, to kill Josephus; soon, however, Josephus learned of this plot, tricked the brigand into submission, and showed him clemency—thus proving two other aspects of his virtue: cunning and forgiveness.
The people of Galilee were totally loyal to him and worried more about his own safety than the fate of their wives and children taken into slavery. But his first major opponent, the brigand John of Gischala, son of Levi, came to Tiberias to try to induce the inhabitants to abandon their allegiance to him and join the rebellion. Hearing of this threat, Josephus mustered two hundred men and marched all night long to Tiberias, where, on reaching the stadium, he dismissed his troops, except for one bodyguard and ten soldiers; standing on a high parapet he addressed the crowd, trying to convince them to remain loyal to him: I had not completed my speech when I heard one of my men bidding me to come down, as it was no time for me to be thinking of my own life and how to elude my foes.
Once more, when I was sent by Titus Caesar with Cerealius and a thousand horses to a village called Tekoa, to prospect whether it was a suitable place for an entrenched camp, and on my return saw many prisoners who had been crucified, and recognized three of my acquaintances among them, I was cut to the heart and came and told Titus with tears what I had seen. He gave orders immediately that they should be taken down and receive the most careful treatment. 20 Many scholars of Josephus have wondered, pondering this account, what happened to the rest of Josephus’s family—perhaps even his parents, his other brothers and sisters?