History: Bibliography
Patai, Raphael, The Hebrew Goddess, New York,
Avon Books, 1967.
 One
of the first, and still among the most complete, discussions
of ancient, Medieval and modern female deities and spirits in
Judaism. Chapters on Ashera, Astarte, Anath, the Cherubim, the
Shekinah, the Kabbalistic family of deities, the Matronit, Lilith
and the Sabbath Queen. —Rachael Stark, c. 2002 |
Pollack, Herman, Jewish Folkways in Germanic Lands (1648-1806):
Studies in Aspects of Daily Life, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971.
An
absolute gem. Charms, curses, spells, calendar custom, ritual
clothing, ritual food and more. Centuries of magic in the Ashkenazi
tradition. With two hundred pages of text and another two hundred
of footnotes, this is also an excellent place to find leads
to lessor known works in several languages. —Rachael Stark,
c. 2002 |
| Pritchard, James B., The Ancient Near East,
Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1958.
A
classic scholarly work that provides background on the religions
of the entire ancient Near East. Offerings include poems about
Anath and Baal, the Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld and
pictures of ancient Goddesses. —Rachael Stark, c. 2002 |
Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna Queen
of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer,
Harper and Row, New York, 1983
The
genuine article from the ancient Near East. Samuel Noah Kramer
is a grand old man of Sumerian scholarship and Diane Wolkstein
is a feminist scholar of ancient Goddesses. They worked together
on accurate, but impressively poetic, translations of some of
the most ancient texts on Earth, hymns to the Goddess Inanna.
The poems and the deities they describe are not all sweetness
and light, by any means. They can be erotic and romantic, imperial
and even violent. But you won't forget them. - Rachael Stark,
c. 2002 |
Note on usage and rights: Rachael
Stark retains all rights to her annotations. Members of Unitarian
Universalists for Jewish Awareness, and others with related interests,
are welcome to make use of this material, copy it and share it,
as long as they cite Rachael Stark as the author and do not publish
or sell it in any way without her express written permission in
advance.
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