^The José Faur Tora Studies Center
המרכז לתורת החכם יוסף פאור הלוי

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Books by José Faur (English)

The Naked Crowd: The Jewish Alternative to Cunning Humanity. In this book, José Faur articulates the political dimension of Judaism, the essence of the Jewish alternative to the cunning societies of world history. As Faur describes, thousands of years ago, the Jewish nation became what Nobel laureate Elias Canetti called a "naked crowd"; a society built on transparency and inclusiveness, impervious to the attempts of would-be tyrants to control the "crowd" through mind-games, linguistic manipulation, and mass hysteria. While the Jewish people have, over the course of history, occasionally lost touch with this foundation of their society, they have never lost the dream of a truly free society for all. This book serves as a comprehensive introduction to Judaism from the perspective of the Western political tradition. The last section examines Pauline Christianity and its origins in Greek and Roman pagan thought and culture.

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The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism (Volume 1) (Volume 2). This book is José Faur's magnum opus, a restatement of the basic ideas of the rabbinic mesora in contemporary terms. Summarizing and interweaving much of Faur's earlier work, each section of this book addresses a different aspect of the our tradition: The God of Israel describes the Jewish theology of God, the "divine Author"; The Books of Israel describes the foundations of Jewish nationalism, a literary society originating in the voluntary, bilateral covenant compacted at Sinai; The Governance of Israel describes the Jewish socio-political theory, identifying horizontal social organization as (thus far) a uniquely Jewish phenomenon; The Memory of Israel describes the origins, development, and purpose of the "Oral Tora" (otherwise known as National Memory); and lastly, The Folly of Israel describes the manner in which our abandonment of all of the foregoing in favor of foreign values and ideas has understandably resulted in the tribulations which have afflicted us throughout our history in exile. A multifaceted work, this book addresses key issues facing the Jewish people today - the constraints of prescriptive (and descriptive) theology, the displacement of the Tanakh from the heart of our culture, the abandonment of the Law due to the influence of deceptive ideologues, and our inability to hold our leaders accountable to the standards of the Law due to widespread and popular ignorance of the Law and its mechanics. Faur also offers compelling expository refutations of the foundations of "biblical criticism," Christianity, and pseudo-Kabbalah, a tremendous boon to skeptical and questioning readers of all backgrounds who are dissatisfied with the (often) anti-intellectual status quo.

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Appendices:

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Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed. This book is José Faur's seminal work on Jewish mysticism from the Maimonidean perspective (in contra-distinction to that of the Franco-German Kabbalists). Rather than simply translate the Guide for the Perplexed, Faur has restructured and reformulated the basic concepts of the Guide in contemporary terms and concepts, rendering the book more accessible to a modern audience unacquainted with the original Arabic. As Faur shows, even academics and rabbinical students have misunderstood and subsequently misconstrued the Guide as, respectively, an opus of Neo-Aristotelian philosophy (supposedly written by "Maimonides the rationalist") or a pre-Lurianic Kabbalistic text (supposedly written by "Maimonides the Kabbalist"). Over and against this dichotomous reading of the Guide, Faur's thesis is clear (and amply demonstrated): The Guide for the Perplexed is a book that will enable the successful reader to develop his or her own mysticism as a means of intellectually apprehending God. Jewish mysticism consists of an individual coming to the very limits of his or her conventional cognitive experience (a process termed "apophasis") and subsequently reorienting him- or herself to an external reality via the imagination (under the directing influence of the intellect). Overall, this book is an essential work for any student of Maimonidean rabbinics seeking an inroad to the field of classical rabbinic mysticism.

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In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity. This book focuses on the Iberian Jews and conversos, Jews who converted to Christianity. It explores the idea of the "other" in both Jewish and Christian traditions, the differences between the perspectives of the "persecuted" and "persecutors," and the vision of modernity among some of the Iberian Jews of the period. Special attention is devoted to da Costa and Spinoza, offering a new perspective on the Jewish history of ideas.

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Table of Contents:

1. Jewish Spain on the Eve of the Expulsion

2. On Being a "Faithful Christian"

3. Typology of the Converso

4. A Visceral View of Spain: Góngora and Lazarillo de Tormes

5. Alone in the "Valley of Tears": The Case of Fernando de Rojas

6. Francisco Sánchez and the Quest for a New Rationality

7. Uriel da Costa: The Man behind the Mirror

8. Spinoza and the Secularization of Western Society

9. The End of Philosophy and the Rise of Historical Rationality: A Postmodern Interpretation

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Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition.

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A project of Derusha Publishing LLC. Updated January 04 2010.