Honor the King, and His Friends : The Extent of Early Hasmonean Statehood

Peer reviewe

The vertical axis and the agôn between theatre and philosophy

This article explores the controversy between ancient Greek dramatists and their fellow philosophers over the vertical axis, with special reference to Socrates. I begin with a discussion of the vertical axis in Greek theatre, and turn to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to discuss the vertical as a manifestation of the tragic preference ascribed to our “divine” upper body over our “bestial” lower body. Then, I discuss the deus ex machina as an image of divine vertical intervention in the horizontal human plot, and claim that Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical critique of this theatrical convention fails to notice that the dramatists made a subversive use of the illogicality of this convention. The second part of the article is dedicated to the vertical as an expression of man’s desire to transcend the boundaries of the human sphere. I discuss the negative treatment of this desire by Greek dramatists, who regard it as an unworthy aspiration, compared to its positive treatment by Greek philosophers, who presents it as a worthy aspiration, since it is only through such an ascent that one can get a glimpse of the eternal. In this context, I examine two representations of Socrates: his deus ex machina appearance in Aristophanes’ Clouds, implying the hubristic stance of philosophers; and his habit of long immobile standings as introduced in Plato’s Symposium, implying the philosophers’ superiority over the dramatists. However, the publicly-visible nature of Socrates’ standstills also turns them into a display of philosophizing, meaning that Socrates of the Symposium is a philosopher who (perhaps unfairly) theatricalizes his verticality so as to challenge the art of theatre

Who opened wide the language to the demons? Bialik against Ben-Yehuda

The text critically analyzes the manifestations of the Israeli national poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, regarding the broad performance of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, known as the invigorator of the Hebrew language.O texto esmiuça de forma crítica as manifestações do poeta nacional israelense, Chaim Nachman Bialik, a respeito da ampla atuação de Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, conhecido com o revigorador da língua hebraica

Multimodal Earth observation data fusion: Graph-based approach in shared latent space

Multiple and heterogenous Earth observation (EO) platforms are broadly used for a wide array of applications, and the integration of these diverse modalities facilitates better extraction of information than using them individually. The detection capability of the multispectral unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and satellite imagery can be significantly improved by fusing with ground hyperspectral data. However, variability in spatial and spectral resolution can affect the efficiency of such dataset's fusion. In this study, to address the modality bias, the input data was projected to a shared latent space using cross-modal generative approaches or guided unsupervised transformation. The proposed adversarial networks and variational encoder-based strategies used bi-directional transformations to model the cross-domain correlation without using cross-domain correspondence. It may be noted that an interpolation-based convolution was adopted instead of the normal convolution for learning the features of the point spectral data (ground spectra). The proposed generative adversarial network-based approach employed dynamic time wrapping based layers along with a cyclic consistency constraint to use the minimal number of unlabeled samples, having cross-domain correlation, to compute a cross-modal generative latent space. The proposed variational encoder-based transformation also addressed the cross-modal resolution differences and limited availability of cross-domain samples by using a mixture of expert-based strategy, cross-domain constraints, and adversarial learning. In addition, the latent space was modelled to be composed of modality independent and modality dependent spaces, thereby further reducing the requirement of training samples and addressing the cross-modality biases. An unsupervised covariance guided transformation was also proposed to transform the labelled samples without using cross-domain correlation prior. The proposed latent space transformation approaches resolved the requirement of cross-domain samples which has been a critical issue with the fusion of multi-modal Earth observation data. This study also proposed a latent graph generation and graph convolutional approach to predict the labels resolving the domain discrepancy and cross-modality biases. Based on the experiments over different standard benchmark airborne datasets and real-world UAV datasets, the developed approaches outperformed the prominent hyperspectral panchromatic sharpening, image fusion, and domain adaptation approaches. By using specific constraints and regularizations, the network developed was less sensitive to network parameters, unlike in similar implementations. The proposed approach illustrated improved generalizability in comparison with the prominent existing approaches. In addition to the fusion-based classification of the multispectral and hyperspectral datasets, the proposed approach was extended to the classification of hyperspectral airborne datasets where the latent graph generation and convolution were employed to resolve the domain bias with a small number of training samples. Overall, the developed transformations and architectures will be useful for the semantic interpretation and analysis of multimodal data and are applicable to signal processing, manifold learning, video analysis, data mining, and time series analysis, to name a few.This research was partly supported by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Intramural Research Found Career Development, Association of Field Crop Farmers in Israel and the Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (projects 20-02-0087 and 12-01-0041)

Elite Influence? Religion, Economics, and the Rise of the Nazis

Adolf Hitler's seizure of power was one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century. Yet, our understanding of which factors fueled the astonishing rise of the Nazis remains highly incomplete. This paper shows that religion played an important role in the Nazi party's electoral success -- dwarfing all available socioeconomic variables. To obtain the first causal estimates we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the geographic distribution of Catholics and Protestants due to a peace treaty in the sixteenth century. Even after allowing for sizeable violations of the exclusion restriction, the evidence indicates that Catholics were significantly less likely to vote for the Nazi Party than Protestants. Consistent with the historical record, our results are most naturally rationalized by a model in which the Catholic Church leaned on believers to vote for the democratic Zentrum Party, whereas the Protestant Church remained politically neutral

Nouvelles inscriptions tumulaires du premier cimetière de Bâle

Avneri Zvi. Nouvelles inscriptions tumulaires du premier cimetière de Bâle. In: Revue des études juives, tome 121, n°1-2, janvier-juin 1962. pp. 181-193

The Emergence of the Hasmonean Dynasty on the Margins of the Seleukid Empire

This dissertation examines the establishment of Hasmonean dynastic rule through its brokerage of Seleukid imperial power in second-century BCE Judea. It builds on the historical-critical and sociocultural analysis of ancient Judean historiographical sources, namely, the books of First and Second Maccabees and Daniel, alongside epigraphical and papyrological records and comparative evidence from the ancient Near East. The dissertation shows that rather than being anti-imperial, as is often thought, these Judean texts participate in a discourse of empire to situate the first Hasmonean dynasts and their local authority within the Seleukid imperial system as its most competent interlocutors. The dissertation demonstrates how the early Hasmonean dynasts (namely, Jonathan, Simon, and John Hyrkanos; ca. 160–110 BCE) conceptualized their hegemony in late Seleukid Judea, not as replacing the Seleukid Empire but as forming its logical continuation and conclusion. Consequently, the Hasmoneans presented themselves as the most apt brokers of imperial power and thus sought to secure their regional king-like authority. This study not only illuminates aspects of local autonomy and independence in the Hellenistic period, but also sheds light on the political power structures of the Levant more broadly, as well as the dynamic interplay between “local” and “imperial” elites in the empires of the ancient world. This dissertation thus transforms common understandings of Judean society in the second century BCE by situating Hellenistic Judea in the context of imperial control over the southern Levant, elite politics, and court dynamics under empire. It also exposes the intrinsic link between religion and power in the ancient world and adds to the social mapping of Hellenistic-period Judea by uncovering how contemporary views on Hasmonean ascendancy were expressed through terminology concerned with cult and ritual. This study therefore calls for the reimagination of local politics in antiquity and scholarly understandings of emerging Judaism.Tässä väitöskirjassa tarkastellaan hasmonialaisten dynastisen vallan vakiintumista Seleukidien imperiaalisen vallan kautta Juudeassa toisella vuosisadalla eaa. Tutkimus perustuu muinaisten juudealaisten historiankirjoituksellisten lähteiden eli ensimmäisen ja toisen makkabealaiskirjan sekä Danielin kirjan historialliskriittiseen ja sosiokulttuuriseen analyysiin, sekä epigrafisiin ja papyrologisiin lähteisiin, ja muinaisesta Lähi-idästä peräisin oleviin vertailtaviin todisteisiin. Väitöskirjassa osoitetaan, että sen sijaan, että nämä Juudean tekstit olisivat imperiuminvastaisia, kuten usein ajatellaan, ne osallistuvat imperiumin diskurssiin, jossa ensimmäiset hasmonialaiset hallitsijat ja heidän paikallinen auktoriteettinsa sijoitetaan Seleukidien imperiaaliseen järjestelmään. Tutkimus vaatii näin ollen antiikin aikaisen paikallispolitiikan ja varhaisen juutalaisuuden tieteellisen ymmärtämisen uudelleentarkastelua