Wout Jac. van Bekkum

Jan N. Bremmer

Arie L. Molendijk

In the terms of Durkheimian sociology, conversion is a fait social. Although they are rarely treated as a cultural phenomenon, conversions can obviously be examined for the norms, values and presuppositions of the cultures in which they take place. Thus conversion can help us to shed light on a particular culture. At the same time, the term evokes a dramatic appeal that suggests a kind of suddenness, although in most cases conversion implies a more gradual process of establishing and defining a new - religious - identity. From 21-24 May, 2003, the University of Groningen hosted an international conference on 'Cultures of Conversion'. The contributions have been edited in two volumes, which pay special attention to the modes of language and idiom in conversion literature, the meaning and sense of religious-ideological discourse, the variety of rhetorical tropes, and the effects of the conversion narrative with allusions to religious or political conventions and idealizations. The present volume offers in-depth studies of conversion that are mainly taken from the history of India, Islam and Judaism, ranging from the Byzantine period to the new Muslimas of the West. The other volume, Paradigms, Poetics and Politics of Conversion, in addition to stimulating case studies, contains theoretical contributions on the theory of conversion, with special attention to the rational choice theory and to the history of research into conversion.

Cultures of Conversions

Paul M. Cobb

The leading theme of this collection of essays and studies is the diversity of aspects of medieval communal identity. While the authors were selected for the very diversity of their interests, their final papers do tend to cohere around some recurrent themes. All of the studies in this volume touch upon one or more of the complex issues that lie at the heart of religious identity in the Middle Ages. They do so through concrete study of the very real practices by which medieval Jews, Christians and Muslims could police the perimeters of their spiritual communities. The authors were especially urged to note instances where religious identity was shaped without reference to dogmas, creeds, or sacred law. In no case are any of these papers satisfied with normative, legal definitions of Jew, Christian, or Muslim in medieval times. Sometimes small and subtle, sometimes explicit, dire, and violent, the techniques that emerge from these studies testify to the diversity of strategies of medieval communal identity over space and their changes over time.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Strategies of Medieval Communal Identity

The Qedushta'ot of Yehudah According to Genizah Manuscripts

This book represents a critical edition of the Alexander Romance found in MS Héb. 671.5 from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

A Hebrew Alexander Romance According to MS Héb. 671.5 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale

Jan Willem Drijvers

Alexander Cornelis Klugkist

This Festschrift honours Dr. Gerrit Reinink on the occasion of the end of his professional career as a senior lecturer of Syriac and Aramaic studies at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. The Festschrift includes, in addition to a brief biography and a complete bibliography of Reinink's scholarly writings, fifteen articles, arranged according to the chronology of their topics and covering a wide variety of subjects, ranging from the days of Julian the Apostate to the year of the fall of Constantinople, through the period of Late Antiquity, the Byzantine period, early Islam and the Middle Ages. The authors are all prominent experts in the field of Syriac studies and adjacent areas. The title of the book, Syriac Polemics, is a clear reference to one of Reinink's favourite research topics: Eastern Christian reactions to the rise of Islam. This volume is a valuable contribution to the study of Syriac literature and culture in general.

Studies in Honour of Gerrit Jan Reinink

Syriac Polemics

The aim of this study is a comparative analysis of the role of semantics in the linguistic theory of four grammatical traditions, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic. If one compares the organization of linguistic theory in various grammatical traditions, it soon turns out that there are marked differences in the way they define the place of 'semantics' within the theory. In some traditions, semantics is formally excluded from linguistic theory, and linguists do not express any opinion as to the relationship between syntactic and semantic analysis. In other traditions, the whole basis of linguistic theory is semantically orientated, and syntactic features are always analysed as correlates of a semantic structure. However, even in those traditions, in which semantics falls explicitly or implicitly outside the scope of linguistics, there may be factors forcing linguists to occupy themselves with the semantic dimension of language. One important factor seems to be the presence of a corpus of revealed/sacred texts: the necessity to formulate hermeneutic rules for the interpretation of this corpus brings semantics in through the back door.

Wout Jac. van Bekkum

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