This book analyzes major transformations in Jewish life and thought: from idolatry to exclusive monotheism in the biblical age, from state-based identity to cultural nationalism in the Roman empire; and, in the European Diaspora, from theology to secularism and revived political nationalism in the modern period. Fundamental questions are asked about Jewish survival in a variety of topics including prophecy, Jewish law, Midrash, the Roman-Jewish wars, Stoicism, secular poetry in Muslim Spain, Marx and Freud, and Hebrew literature through the ages.
"Examining the entire span of Jewish history through the lens of thirty pivotal moments in the Jewish people's experience from biblical times through the present, Turning Points in Jewish History provides "the big picture": both a broad and a deep understanding of the Jewish historical experience"--
The Jewish intellectual tradition has a long and complex history that has resulted in significant and influential works of scholarship. In this book, the authors suggest that there is a series of common principles that can be extracted from the Jewish intellectual tradition that have broad, even life-changing, implications for individual and societal achievement. These principles include respect for tradition while encouraging independent, often disruptive thinking; a precise system of logical reasoning in pursuit of the truth; universal education continuing through adulthood; and living a purposeful life. The main objective of this book is to understand the historical development of these principles and to demonstrate how applying them judiciously can lead to greater intellectual productivity, a more fulfilling existence, and a more advanced society.
More than three years after the beginning of the wave of Arab uprisings, an understanding of the role of intellectuals in political change across the region has never been more important. This timely volume on Intellectuals in the Modern Middle East combines geographical and chronological breadth and draws on a diverse range of approaches including intellectual history, political science, art history, social policy and political philosophy. Together, the chapters provide a window into the diversity in intellectual trends across the Middle East from the early decades of the 20th century until the present day. While they do not, and cannot, provide a complete, or even representative, picture of intellectual dynamics in the modern Middle East, they collectively address a range of analytical and normative issues that bear on the role of the intellectual in contemporary Middle Eastern politics and society. This book was published as a special issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.
In The Grace of Misery. Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile 1919–1939 Ilse Josepha Lazaroms offers an account of the life and intellectual legacy of Joseph Roth, one of interwar Europe's most critical and modern writers.
Education is at the centre of Jewish life and this book charts that development from the earliest periods through to the present. With a special emphasis on the key Talmudic period the author has carefully scrutinised both Jewish texts as well as the Greco-Roman sources to provide a comprehensive history.
A full-length critical inquiry into the complex interrelationship between the British poet and the Jews. Despite their religious and geographic differences, the British poet Lord Byron shared certain attitudes about politics, institutionalized religion, and individual identity that made him very popular with Jewish readers. In Byron and the Jews, author Sheila A. Spector investigates why, of all the British Romantic poets, Byron is the most frequently translated into Hebrew and Yiddish and how Jews used translations of Byron's works to help construct a new Jewish identity. Spector begins by examining Byron's interaction with contemporary Jewish writers Isaac D'Israeli and Isaac Nathan and investigates how the writers translated each other. The following three chapters demonstrate how the Byron translations interrelated with intellectual leaders of the three cultural movements that dominated Jewish culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the Maskilim, the Yiddishists, and the Zionists. Spector's conclusion explores the theoretical inference implicit in this study—that the act of translation inevitably produces an allegorical reading of a text that may be contrary to an author's original intention. A useful appendix contains transcriptions of many of the texts discussed in this volume, as few of these Hebrew and Yiddish translations are readily available elsewhere. Not only are portions of all of the translations represented, but different versions are included so that readers can see for themselves how Byron was adapted for different Jewish interpretive communities. Scholars of Byron, Jewish identity, and those interested in translation and reception studies will appreciate this insightful volume.
Nationalism, War and Jewish Education explores historical circumstances leading to the emergence of a Jewish religious school system lasting to modern times and the process by which this system was broken down and adapted in secular form as Jewish nationalism grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Roman period, education became an essential part of rabbinic pacifist accommodation following Jewish defeats, while in the modern period, secular education was associated with nationalism and increasing militancy of emerging states. In both periods there was a revival of Hebrew and the creation of an educational system based on Hebrew texts. Both revivals were responses to anti-Semitism, which pushed large numbers of Jews away from assimilation into the dominant culture to a renewed Jewish national identity. The book highlights the centrifugal and centripetal shifts in Jewish identity, from messianic militarism to pacifism and back. It shows how changes in Jewish education accompanied these shifts. While drawing on historical scholarship for background, this book is essentially a literary study, showing how literary changes at different times and places reflect historical, socio-psychological, economic and political change. Nationalism, War and Jewish Education is original in showing how ancient Jewish education affected modern Jewish society, therefore it is a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in Jewish history and literature, education, development studies and nationalism.
This book uses historical, sociological, theological, social-psychological, and especially literary insights to depict various forms of European Jewish patriotism from the French Revolution until the Holocaust, combining scrutiny of long-term socio-historical and religious forces with more recent factors deriving from the rise of secular enlightenment, emancipation and nationalism.
Jewish Cultural Nationalism explores the development of Jewish nationalism from the Bible to modern times, focusing on particular movements and places as well as texts which signified, or themselves brought about, change: the Bible (Hebrew prayer book), and the modern Hebrew literature, particularly in Tsarist Russia. While the influence of the Hebrew Bible alone on nationalism in individual periods has been subject to much scholarly study, the present work is unusual in its emphasis on the continuity of Jewish cultural nationalism and its influences through Hebrew texts.
