Naomi Janowitz

E-Scholarship

Books

• Acts of Interpretation: Ancient Religious Semiotic Ideologies and Their Modern Echoes (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2022)
• The Family Romance of Maccabean Martyrdom (London: Routledge Press,
  2017)
• Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity (University Park, PA: Penn
  State University Press, 2002)
• Magic in the Roman World (London: Routledge Press, 2001)
• The Poetics of Ascent: Theories of Language in a Rabbinic Ascent Text
  (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989)

Selected Articles

2021-2023

• “Framing the Intentions of Suicide Bombers.” Religions (Basel, Switzerland ), vol. 13, no. 9, 2022
• Erotic Love Magic and the Problem of Female Agency, Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies, 7 (1), 102-13 (2022)
• A Peircean Approach to Jewish Ascent Texts in van Boom, Jason Cronbach and Thoms-Andreas Põder (eds.), Sign Method, and the Sacred: New directions in semiotic methodologies for the study of religion (Semiotics of Religion, 5; De Gruyter: Berlin, Boston), 171-88, (2021)

2016-2020

• Aelian on Tortoise Sex and the Artifice of Love Magic in Conti, Fabrizia (ed.), Civilizations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Ritual, and Religious Experience in Late Antique, Medieval, and Renaissance Traditions (Advances In The History of Magic, Witchcraft, And Religion, 1; Budapest: Trivent), 13-30, (2020)
• Mediate, Meditation, Encyclopedia of the Bible Online, 18; (2020)
• Immediacy and mediation in Philo’s interpretation of divine names in Ponzo, Jenny, Robert A. Yelle,
  and Massimo Leone (eds.), Mediation and Immediacy: a key issue for the semiotics of religion  (Semiotics of Religion, 4; Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter) 19-32, (2020)
• The Magical Elements of Mysticism: Ritual Strategies for Encountering Divinity
  David Frankfurter (ed.) Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic (Religions in the Greco-Roman World) (Leiden, Brill, 2019) pp. 678-93
• Ancient Ineffability and Its Modern Echoes, Signs and Society (2018) pp. 45-63.
• Speech Acts and Divine Names: Comparing Linguistic Ideologies of Performativity in Language and Religion edited by Robert Yelle and Courtney Handman (DeGruyters, 2019)
• Theories of Divine Names in Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius, History of Religions 30:4 (May 1991)
• Demons and witchcraft in the early Church in Routledge History of Witchcraft ed.
  Johannes Wilfried Dillinger (London; Routledge, 2019) pp 36-45.

2011-2015

• Rereading Sacrifice: The Semiosis of Blood, Signs and Society 3 (2015) pp.193-208.
• Water, Word and Name: The Shifting Pragmatics of the Sotah/Suspected Adulteress Ritual, Forthcoming in Literature or Liturgy? Early Christian Hymns and Prayers in their Literary and Liturgical Context in Antiquity, eds. Leonhard Clemens and Helmut Löhr, Mohr, 2014.
• Natural, Supernatural, Religious, Magical: Late Antique Theories of Effective Action, in Practicing Gnosis: Ritual, Magic, and Theurgy in Nag Hammadi, Manichaean and other Late Antique Literature, eds. April D. DeConick, Gregory Shaw, and John Turner, Leiden: Brill, 2013.
• Inventing the Scapegoat: Theories of Sacrifice and Ritual, Journal of Ritual Studies 25:1 (2011), pp. 15–24.
• The Talking Cure as Action: Freud’s Theory of Ritual Revisited, American Journal of Psychoanalysis 71 (2011), pp. 217–237.

2006-2010

• Preface to “The Shadow’s Shadow: Essays on Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia.” Special Issue of American Imago (co-edited with Elizabeth Constable). Fall 2009
• Good Jews Don’t: Historical and Philosophical Constructions of Idolatry, History of Religions, (Fall/Winter 2008) 47:4, pp. 59–86.
• Envy of Maternal Functions in Sacrifice Rituals in Envy and Jealousy: New Views about Two Powerful Feelings, edited by Leon Wurmser and Heidrun Jarass, New York: Analytic Press 2008, pp. 117–128.
• Lusting for Death: Some Unconscious Fantasies in an Ancient Jewish Martyrdom Text, in Psychoanalytic Psychology (Fall 2006) 23:4, pp. 644–653

1993-2005

• Do Jews Make Good Protestants?: The cross-cultural Study of Ritual, in Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity. Ed. Jacob Olupona, London: Routledge, pp. 23–36. (2003)
• Rethinking Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity, in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, eds. Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex. London: Duckworth, 2000, pp. 205–219.
• Alchemy, in Guide to the Late Antique World, eds. Peter Brown and Glen Bowersock (Harvard University Press, 1999).
• Rabbis and Their Opponents: The Construction of the “Min” in Rabbinic Anecdotes Journal of Early Christian Studies 6:3 (1998), pp. 449–462.
• Re-creating Genesis: The Metapragmatics of Divine Speech, in Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, ed. J. Lucy (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 393–405.