Judaism and Emotion

Judaism and Emotion breaks with stereotypes that, until recently, branded Judaism as a rigid religion of laws and prohibitions. Instead, authors from different fields of research discuss the subject of Judaism and emotion from various scholarly perspectives; they present an understanding of Judaism that does not exclude spirituality and emotions from Jewish thought. In doing so, the contributions account for the relation between the representation of emotion and the actual emotions that living and breathing human beings feel in their everyday lives. While scholars of rabbinic studies and theology take a historical-critical and socio-historical approach to the subject, musicologists and scholars of religious studies focus on the overall research question of how the literary representations of emotion in Judaism are related to ritual and musical performances within Jewish worship. They describe in a more holistic fashion how Judaism serves to integrate various aspects of social life. In doing so, they examine the dynamic interrelationship between Judaism, cognition, and culture.

Sarah Ross obtained her PhD at the University of Music and Theatre Rostock, Germany. She currently works as a university assistant (post-doc researcher), lecturer, and study counselor at the Department of Musicology as well as at the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Berne, Switzerland. She is a winner of the Hadassah-Brandeis-Institute Research Award, Brandeis University/USA (2004). From 2006 to 2009, she obtained a doctoral fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). She has published widely on American Jewish women’s music and other subjects. Gabriel Levy obtained his PhD in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is the author of Judaic Technologies of the Word: A Cognitive Analysis of Jewish Cultural Formation (2012). Soham Al-Suadi obtained her PhD at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is currently a university assistant (post-doc), lecturer, and researcher at the Institute of Biblical Studies (New Testament) at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Berne. She is in the process of writing her second book on early Christian prophecy.