Department of Middle Eastern Studies

The research paper focuses on the internal character of the conflict and the symbiosis of the parties in it. It provides a further understanding of the personal and national security context in relation to the political situation on the West Coast of Yemen, with the focus on Tareq Saleh, nephew of the late Ali Abdullah Saleh, and his personally created militia, Yemeni National Resistance.

This study focuses on life and works of professor Jaroslav Oliverius (*1933), a prominent Czech arabist and hebraist, who is currently professor emeritus at the Institute of Near Eastern and African Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. First, authors concentrate on his life and studies during which he met some outstanding Czechoslovak orientalists. The authors also pay attention to more than five decades of his dedicated teaching within both Arabic and Hebrew studies. However, in the very core of the article the authors attempt to review Oliverius’ scholarly work comprising domains such as Arabic folk literature, classical and modern Arabic literature, Egyptian literary criticism and Egyptian drama. The last part of the study deals with Oliverius’ translation activities from both classical and modern Arabic literature.

In this synchronic study we scrutinize multi-word sequences of different structure and complexity that fulfil the function of prepositions in contemporary Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Many of these structures such as bi-sababi “because of”, natīǧatan li- “as a result of”, ‘alā r-raġmi min “in spite of”, bi-ġaḍḍi n-naḍari ‘an “regardless of” and ǧanban ʼilā ǧanbin ma‘a “side by side with”, which occur especially in more formal registers of MSA (including Media Arabic), underwent the process of grammaticalization and became a part of the Arabic lexicon. We gathered 230 multi-word sequences of this type and analyzed them as to their structure, syntax and semantics using a large corpus of newspaper texts. The complex prepositions in question, representing Prep-N, Prep1-N-Prep2 and indefNacc-Prep structural types, are used mainly as heads of prepositional phrases functioning as adjuncts, which express miscellaneous semantic relations.
Keywords: Modern Standard Arabic, Media Arabic, prepositions, complex prepositions, syntax, semantics.

In this paper, I examine the changing role of apostates in medieval Jewish-Christian polemic. Using three case studies, I suggest that Jewish converts to Christianity were not merely instruments in the hands of Christian theologians. Rather, they were self-conscious participants in the debate with their own aims and purposes. Far from disowning their Jewish past, they used it in order to mould the debate and influence Christian perceptions of post-biblical Judaism. Analysing their argumentation, it is thus possible to identify traces of conflict and dissonance within Jewish communities.

"From earliest times, mysticism was an important element of Jewish spiritual landscape in Eastern Europe. However, from the fourteenth century onwards, philosophy also slowly gained ground in Ashkenaz. In my paper I examine Jewish perceptions of dissonance between philosophical and Kabbalistic ideas. I focus on testimonies of three Ashkenazic rabbinic authorities who were active at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Prague and who are known to have studied and propagated philosophy: Avigdor Kara, Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen and Menahem Shalem.

I discuss in detail a hitherto unpublished letter concerning the Maimonidean explanation of sacrifices addressed by Menahem Shalem to one of his colleagues or students. The letter vividly documents the confusion caused by contradictions between philosophical ideas and kabbalistic doctrines among Ashkenazic students interested in esoteric lore. It also illustrates how Shalem conceptualised superiority of philosophical knowledge over Kabbalistic tradition. In his critique of certain Kabbalistic ideas, Shalem goes as far as to draw an analogy between contemporary Kabbalists and ancient Sabians, the paradigmatic idol worshippers. In contrast to Shalem’s partisan position, Avigdor Kara and Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen presented a more sympathetic view to Kabbalah and attempted to harmonise philosophical and mystical ideas.

I argue that the strategies employed by these scholars to confront dissonance and contradiction within the Jewish tradition offer valuable insights into late medieval models and practices of advanced Jewish education, theories of hierarchy of knowledge, and perceptions of Jewish intellectual diversity. As such, they shed more light on theoretical structures undergirding the spiritual life of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe."

Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen (fl. around 1400) was one of the most versatile Jewish scholars in late-medieval Ashkenaz. In his works, he demonstrated interest in natural science, philosophy, and Kabbalah, combining these metahalakhic pursuits in a remarkable synthesis. However, his most influential text was the compendium of apologetic Sefer niẓaḥon, which enjoyed wide popularity and is preserved in numerous manuscripts.

In the preface, Lipman claimed that the purpose of his book was to defend Jewish faith against the attacks of its enemies. In my paper, I analyse rhetorical strategies used by Lipman to categorise and describe these enemies. The constructed nature of these categories suggest, I believe, that Lipman’s Sefer niẓaḥon participated in a wider project of re-imagining of the Jewish community and I examine how this project is embedded in the literary structure of the book. I argue that through the rhetoric of difference employed in Sefer niẓaḥon, Lipman attempted to re-negotiate  communal boundaries at the time of significant crisis and disruption. I also analyse the extent to which contemporary Christian preoccupations with heresy and Christian identity could have stimulated Lipman’s vision of an ideal Jewish community.

Furthermore, I attempt to place Lipman’s Sefer niẓaḥon in the context of contemporary book culture, with its transformations of notions of the role of the intellectual in the public sphere. I suggest that Lipman’s attitudes towards literary authorship, as well as his preoccupation with the reception of his texts and their use, show remarkable affinities with the concerns of his Christian colleagues.

The late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were a tumultuous time for the Jewish community of Prague. Throughout this period, the Jews retained a marginal, yet highly visible presence in the urban landscape of the imperial capital, and one loaded with meaning. While set apart by virtue of being servants of the royal chamber, the Jews interacted with the inhabitants of the town in various ways: socially, economically, as well as intellectually. In this paper, I explore how Jewish and Christian inhabitants perceived and conceptualized Jewish presence in the city of Prague. Examining the sources connected with the infamous 1389 attack on the Jewish community and a later polemical work Sefer nizahon by Yom Tov Lipman Mühlhausen, who was active in Prague, I explore the ways in which for Christians the Jews disturbed their conceptualizations of urban space and community, as well as Jewish reactions to this trend. I suggest that the Jews were aware of contemporary Christian religious discourse and used this knowledge in polemical encounters to fashion themselves as full-fledged members of the urban community and to claim a place in its urban landscape.