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In recent years, scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the history of scholarship in general and, more specifically, to the emergence of critical historical and anthropological literature from and within ecclesiastical scholarship. However, few studies have discussed the Jewish figures who took part in this process. This paper analyzes the role played by historiographical and ethnographical writing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian Jewish–Christian polemics. Tracing various Christian polemical ethnographical depictions of the Jewish rite of shaking the lulav (sacramental palm leaves used by Jews during the festival of Sukkot), it discusses the variety of ways in which Jewish scholars responded to these depictions or circumvented them. These responses reflect the Jewish scholars’ familiarity with prevailing contemporary scholarship and the key role of translation and cultural transfers in their own attempts to create parallel works. Furthermore, this paper presents new Jewish polemical manuscript material within the relevant contexts, examines Jewish attempts to compose polemical and apologetic ethnographies, and argues that Jewish engagement with critical scholarship began earlier than scholars of this period usually suggest

A transnational flow of capital exchange during the 19th and early 20th centuries brought planning ideas and modernity into China. Since European countries and America used violence to place China ...

This article examines a largely unexplored component of China’s classical garden system – the gardens of salt merchants in Tianjin during the Qing Dynasty (1636-1911). Beyond existing works, which tend to focus on imperial and scholar gardens – gardens of the ruling elites – this examination of merchant gardens contributes to garden history by revealing that merchants created gardens to improve their low social status. It further reveals shifts in the functions, architectural design and flora of the gardens which reflects both individual aesthetics and the changing fortunes of Tianjin’s salt merchants in general. Salt merchant gardens in Tianjin initially presented idyllic scenery to create literary-based, self-immersed spaces. Then beginning in the 1720s, they evolved into a showcase of rising merchant power displaying affluence, thereby enabling merchants to improve their social rank. Finally, from the 1840s, salt merchant gardens gradually became extravagant enclosures as the collapse of the established social structure unfolded.

RésumésL’objectif de cet article est de proposer un examen détaillé des apports et des limites de la modélisation en histoire à partir du cas de la Shoah. Il s’appuie sur une enquête qui a permis de reconstituer les « trajectoires de persécution » des 992 Juifs de Lens pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, dont 527 seulement ont survécu. 491 ont été arrêtés, 468 ont été déportés et 449 ont été exterminés. Les données prosopographiques sont utilisées ici pour répondre à une question simple : est-il possible de modéliser la persécution ? En d’autres termes, est-il possible de construire une représentation simplifiée mais heuristique des processus causaux complexes qui ont déterminé les chances de survie face à la persécution nazie à partir de données standardisées sur un nombre relativement important d’individus ? L’article discute les apports et les limites d’une succession de méthodes quantifiées : celles qui s’inscrivent dans ce qu’Andrew Abbott appelle le « programme standard » des sciences sociales, ainsi que l’analyse des réseaux et l’analyse séquentielle. Pour chacune d’entre elles, sont plus particulièrement discutées les manières de rendre compte des interactions entre les individus, de l’historicité des comportements et des processus déterminant ces chances de survie. Les tentatives de modélisation à partir de données historiennes apportent ainsi de véritables renouvellements de connaissances, notamment lorsqu’elles sont menées de manière cumulative sur une même enquête. En passant d’une logique de propriétés individuelles à une logique de trajectoires interconnectées, ces approches permettent de mieux comprendre les interactions sociales et locales, et offrent ainsi des perspectives stimulantes pour la microhistoire de l’Holocauste.

The present study describes the function of small-scale maiolica sanctuaries and chapels created in Italy in the sixteenth century. The so-called eremi encouraged a multisensory engagement of the faithful with complex structures that included receptacles for holy water, openings for the burning of incense, and moveable parts. They depicted a saint contemplating a crucifix or a book in a landscape and, as such, they provided a model for everyday pious life. Although they were less lifelike than the full-size recreations of holy sites, such as the Sacro Monte in Varallo, they had the significant advantage of allowing more spontaneous handling. The reduced scale made the objects portable and stimulated a more immediate pious experience. It seems likely that they formed part of an intimate and private setting. The focused attention given here to works by mostly anonymous artists reveals new categories of analysis, such as their religious efficacy. This allows discussion of these neglected artworks from a more positive perspective, in which their spiritual significance, technical accomplishment and functionality come to the fore.

In recent years, pre-modern beds have generated extensive scholarly interest. Their social, religious, and economic importance has been rightfully highlighted in the study of domestic piety. Yet, concern has primarily focused on beds in late medieval English homes. This essay uses Hebrew texts from thirteenth-century Southern Germany, primarily Sefer Hasidim, to further this analysis of the role of the bed in shaping medieval domestic devotion. Jewish notions about the social, moral, and sexual significance of the bed reflect those identified in late medieval Christian culture. These ideas inspired numerous rituals practiced in Jewish homes. Yet, the bed and the remnants of sex assumed to be found in it also frustrated Jewish attempts to perform domestic devotion. These findings highlight the complicated nature of the home and how medieval people had to navigate both its opportunities and challenges in order to foster a rich culture of domestic devotion.

In recent decades the relationship between tantric traditions of Buddhism and Śaivism has been the subject of sustained scholarly enquiry. This article looks at a specific aspect of this relationship, that between Buddhist and Śaiva traditions of practitioners of physical yoga, which came to be categorised in Sanskrit texts as haṭhayoga. Taking as its starting point the recent identification as Buddhist of the c.11th-century Amṛtasiddhi, which is the earliest text to teach any of the methods of haṭhayoga and whose teachings are found in many subsequent non-Buddhist works, the article draws on a range of textual and material sources to identify the Konkan site of Kadri as a key location for the transition from Buddhist to Nāth Śaiva haṭhayoga traditions, and proposes that this transition may provide a model for how Buddhist teachings survived elsewhere in India after Buddhism’s demise there as a formal religion.

We investigate the accuracy of how author names are reported in bibliographic records excerpted from four prominent sources: WoS, Scopus, PubMed, and CrossRef. We take as a case study 44,549 publications stored in the internal database of Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe. While our results indicate generally good accuracy for all bibliographic data sources considered, we highlight a number of issues that undermine the accuracy for certain classes of author names, including compound names and names with diacritics, which are common features to Italian and other Western languages.

Recent work on abstractive summarization has made progress with neural encoder-decoder architectures. However, such models are often challenged due to their lack of explicit semantic modeling of the source document and its summary. In this paper, we extend previous work on abstractive summarization using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) with a neural language generation stage which we guide using the source document. We demonstrate that this guidance improves summarization results by 7.4 and 10.5 points in ROUGE-2 using gold standard AMR parses and parses obtained from an off-the-shelf parser respectively. We also find that the summarization performance using the latter is 2 ROUGE-2 points higher than that of a well-established neural encoder-decoder approach trained on a larger dataset. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/sheffieldnlp/AMR2Text-summ} Accepted in EMNLP 2018

s zenith, the Jewish sages introduced special ecological regulations pertaining to its overall urban landscape. One of them was a prohibition against growing plants within the city in order to prevent undesirable odors or litter and thus maintain the city&rsquo s respectable image. The prohibition against growing plants within the city did not apply to rose gardens, maybe because of ecological reasons, i.e., their contribution to aesthetics and to improving bad odors in a crowded city. In the city&rsquo ) around the city of Jerusalem. Haggadic-Talmudic tradition tries to endow Jerusalem with a metaphysical uniqueness by describing fantastic plants that allegedly grew in it in the past but disappeared as a result of its destruction. s status is its flora and ecology. The current study aims to address the historical events and the Talmudic traditions concerning the flora and landscape of Jerusalem. In the city&rsquo The Second Temple period is considered both a pinnacle and a low point in the history of Jerusalem. One manifestation of the sharp fluctuations in Jerusalem&rsquo s decline, its agricultural crops and natural vegetation were destroyed when the beleaguered inhabitants were defeated by Titus&rsquo army. One Talmudic tradition voices hope for the rehabilitation of the flora (&ldquo shitim&rdquo