AP/JWST 3843 3.00

Jerusalem: Holy City, Bloody City

The course's learning objectives are multifold. Substantively, the course aims to impart to students a sense of the major periods in the life of Jewish religious expression and illustrate how an essential matrix of elements (God, Torah, Israel) has structured, in a recognizably continuous way, the lives of Jews while also generating new and at times highly distinct visions of God, Jewish doctrine, life cycle events, and the like. Methodologically, it emphasizes study of primary sources in translation (apart from a very few primary sources originally composed in English). In so doing, the course seeks to hone student awareness of the peculiarities of genre, the frequent indeterminacy of evidence, and difficulties involved in formulating careful historical assessments.