Haskalah and Beyond
Haskalah and Beyond

Author: Moshe Pelli

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2012-07-10

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0761852042

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Haskalah and Beyond deals with the Hebrew Haskalah (Enlightenment) — the literary, cultural, and social movement in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. It represents the emergence of modernism and perhaps the budding of some aspects of secularism in Jewish society, following the efforts of the Hebrew and Jewish enlighteners to introduce changes into Jewish culture and Jewish life, and to revitalize the Hebrew language and literature. The author classifies these activities as a 'cultural revolution.' In effect, the Haskalah was a counter-culture intended to modify or replace some of the contemporary rabbinic cultural framework, institutions, and practices and adopt them for its own envisioned 'Judaism of the Haskalah.' The pioneering work of the 'founding fathers' of the early Haskalah had greatly impacted the later developments of the Haskalah in the 19th century. Its reception in that century is studied as is the reception of one of the major figures of the early Haskalah, Isaac Euchel, and of one of the important German Enlightenment poets and philosophers, Johann Gottfried Herder, in the 19th-century Haskalah. The study of reception continues on the language of the sublime and the poetic imagery used in Haskalah, melitzah, as well as on the three major journals of Haskalah as instruments of change and of disseminating the Haskalah ideology. Finally, the aftermath of the Haskalah is addressed.

Haskalah and Beyond
Haskalah and Beyond

Author: Moshe Pelli

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0761852034

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The author classifies these activities as a "cultural revolution." In effect, the Haskalah was a counter-culture intended to modify or replace some of the contemporary rabbinic cultural framework, institutions, and practices and adopt them for its own envisioned "Judaism of the Haskalah." --

Haskalah
Haskalah

Author: Olga Litvak

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2012-12-13

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0813554373

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Commonly translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Olga Litvak argues that the idea of a Jewish modernity, championed by adherents of this movement, did not originate in Western Europe’s age of reason. Litvak contends that the Haskalah spearheaded a Jewish religious revival, better understood against the background of Eastern European Romanticism. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Most importantly, she challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism. In Litvak’s ambitious interpretation, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals emerge as the authors of a Jewish Romantic revolution. Fueled by contradictory longings both for community and for personal freedom, the poets and scholars associated with the Haskalah questioned the moral costs of civic equality and the achievement of middle-class status. In the nineteenth century, their conservative approach to culture as the cure for the spiritual ills of the modern individual provided a powerful argument for the development of Jewish nationalism. Today, their ideas are equally resonant in contemporary debates about the ramifications of secularization for the future of Judaism.

The Jewish Enlightenment
The Jewish Enlightenment

Author: Shmuel Feiner

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-08-17

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 0812200942

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At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity. The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.

Trauma, Memory and Identity in Five Jewish Novels from the Southern Cone
Trauma, Memory and Identity in Five Jewish Novels from the Southern Cone

Author: Debora Cordeiro Rosa

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2012-04-19

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0739172980

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The Jewish presence in Latin America has produced a remarkable body of literature that gives voice to the fascinating experience of Jews in Latin American lands. This book explores how trauma and memory influence the formation of Jewish identity for the fictional Jewish characters of five novels written by Jewish authors born in the Southern Cone.

Cultural Revolution in Berlin
Cultural Revolution in Berlin

Author: Shmuel Feiner

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781851242917

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The process of secularization, which is one of the sources of present-day democracy, has its radical origins in eighteenth-century Europe. Criticism of religious norms and discipline, institutions and ideology led to the movement known as the Enlightenment. Its Jewish protagonists (the maskilim), a young intellectual elite, undertook the role of culturally revolutionizing eighteenth-century Jewish society. They aimed at overturning the monopolistic control of rabbinic scholars over education, publications, and social behaviour in favour of secular intellectual values. They sought to promote political rights and religious tolerance, embraced humanism, rationalism, and freedom of opinion. In turn, the end of Jewish isolation brought about a significant contribution to philosophy, science, and art, and participation in the culture of modern European society.This introduction to the emergence of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) in Germany pays special attention to its most famous figure, Moses Mendelssohn, who was active at the centre of the Enlightenment in Berlin. The volume is richly illustrated with images of eighteenth-century manuscripts, books, and pamphlets, some of which are published here for the first time, and which derive from a collection assembled by the famous nineteenth-century scholar Leopold Zunz. This is an attractive book providing an excellent guide to the major cultural metamorphosis represented by Jewish Enlightenment.

Magical American Jew
Magical American Jew

Author: Aaron Tillman

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-11-15

Total Pages: 159

ISBN-13: 1498565034

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Efforts to describe contemporary Jewish American identities often reveal more questions than concrete articulations, more statements about what Jewish Americans are not than what they are. Highlighting the paradoxical phrasings that surface in contemporary writings about Jewish American literature and culture—language that speaks to the elusive difference felt by many Jewish Americans—Aaron Tillman asks how we portray identities and differences that seem to resist concrete definition. Over the course of Magical American Jew, Tillman examines this enigma—the indefinite yet undeniable difference that informs contemporary Jewish American identity—demonstrating how certain writers and filmmakers have deployed magical realist techniques to illustrate the enigmatic difference that Jewish Americans have felt and continue to feel. Similar to the indeterminate nature of Jewish American identity, magical realism is marked by paradox and does not fit easily into any singular category. Often characterized as a mode of literary expression, rather than a genre within literature, magical realism has been the subject of debates about definition, origin, and application. After elucidating the features of the mode, Tillman illustrates how it enables uniquely cogent portrayals of enigmatic elements of difference. Concentrating on a diverse selection of Jewish American short fiction and film—including works by Woody Allen, Sarah Silverman, Cynthia Ozick, Nathan Englander, Steve Stern, and Melvin Jules Bukiet— Magical American Jew covers a range of subjects, from archiving Holocaust testimony to satirical Jewish American humor. Shedding light on aspects of media, marginalization, excess, and many other facets of contemporary American society, the study concludes by addressing the ways that the magical realist mode has been and can be used to examine U.S. ethnic literatures more broadly.

Beyond the Pale
Beyond the Pale

Author: Benjamin Nathans

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-04-29

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780520242326

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A surprising number of Jews lived, literally and figuratively, 'beyond the Pale' of Jewish Settlement in tsarist Russia during the half-century before the Revolution of 1917. This text reinterprets the history of the Russian-Jewish encounter, using long-closed Russian archives and other sources.

Toward Modernity
Toward Modernity

Author: Jacob Katz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-08

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 1351317989

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The contributors to this volume throw light on one of the central problems of modern Jewish historiography: How has Jewry and Judaism survived the crisis of the breakup of Jewish traditional society, the transition from the dosed, ghetto existence into a more or less open environment? The process of development, starting in eighteenth-century Germany, gradually encompassed the entire world of European Jewish experience.Toward Modernity compares modernization in Germany with its counterparts in other countries to see if the German-Jewish development had any influence on what transpired elsewhere. The authors explore the history of Jewish modernization in Russia, Galicia, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Holland, France, England, Italy, and the United States. Topics covered include: the political and social authority of Jewish community institutions; external impediments and internal inhibitions for Jews to be absorbed by the dominant culture; the relationship of the state to the Jewish community; educational and religious reform; the influence of the rational scientific worldview; and the possibility of inclusion in the emerging middle classes.Contents: Jacob Katz, Introduction; Emanuel Etkes, Immanent Factors and External Influences in the Development of the Haskala Movement in Russia; Israel Bartal, 'The Heavenly City of Germany' and Absolutism a la Mode D'Autriche: The Rise of the Haskala in Galicia; Robert S. Wistrich, The Modernization of Viennese Jewry: The Impact of German Culture in a Multiethnic State; Hillel J. Kieval, Caution's Progress: The Modernization of Jewish Life in Prague, 1780-1830; Michael Silber, The German Jewish Experience and Its Impact on Hungarian Jewry, 1780-1870; Michael Graetz, The History of an Estrangement between Two Jewish Communities: German and French Jewry during the Nineteenth Century; Joseph Michman, The Impact of German-Jewish Modernization on Dutch Jewry; Lois C. Dubin, Trieste and Berlin: The Italian Role in the Cultural Politics of the Haskalah; Todd M. Endelman, The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England; Michael A. Meyer, German Jewish Identity in Nineteenth Century America.