Pt. 1 deals with biblical and rabbinic texts on exile and relations with non-Jews. Pt. 2 deals with Zionism and the views of thinkers such as Herzl, Jacob Klatzkin, and Yehezkel Kaufmann, who believed that secular messianism would solve the "Jewish question" and tended to view antisemitism as a natural response to the Jewish refusal to assimilate. Examines changes in the perception of Jewish history as a result of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.
Galut is Hebrew for exile. Since the dispersion of the Jews from Palestine, the Jewish people have considered exile to be a basic tenet of their historical existence. The author, an eminent Palestinian historian, introduces students of Judaic history to the outstanding Jewish spokesmen who throughout the centuries have reflected on their people's condition in exile, among them Judah ha-Levi, Maimonides, Isaac Abravanel, Baruch Spinoza and others. First published in Hebrew, this edition is a reprint of the 1947 Schocken Press English translation, with a new Introduction by Jacob Neusner
Simon Rawidowicz was a strong advocate of the position that as long as the Diaspora existed, it had to develop an ideology of creative survival enabling it to enter into a relationship of equal partnership with the Jewish community of the Land of Israel. Rawidowicz's son has collected his essays and translated them into English.
First published in 1957, this one-volume source for everything Jewish has delighted and instructed several generations in the English-speaking Jewish world. Fully updated through 2007, it provides snapshots and in-depth entries on every important Jewish personality, place, concept, event and value in Israel, the United States, and all other parts of the world.
Examines responses to the Holocaust of hasidic leaders and their followers during the war years in Europe. Discovers a correlation between these responses and fundamental hasidic tenets dealing with God's relationship to man and to the Jewish people, redemption and the messianic era, Kiddush Hashem and Kiddush ha-Hayyim, the hasidic fraternal bond, and the relationship between the hasid and the zadik or rebbe. Hasidism offered a system of concepts that could be used to interpret the Holocaust, and provided a social framework and leadership to articulate these concepts. These may have served as shock absorbers for the hasidim facing the trauma of Holocaust events.
Paul Mendes-Flohr is emerging as the leading Jewish intellectual historian of the present generation. In particular, he is responsible for a significant amount of the important and pertinent scholarship in the field of German-Jewish intellectual history. No one else is quite as intimately knowledgeable with this material, the ambiguous legacy of one of the most inventive and poignant episodes of creativity in the life of the Diaspora. Divided Passions is a collection of published and unpublished essays and articles by Paul Mendes-Flohr from the past decade. In a manner that underscores their continued relevance and significance, Mendes-Flohr writes about the problems that Buber, Rosenzweig, Bloch, Simon, Scholem and others tried to crystallize and resolve. Mendes-Flohr moves with effortless authority among the disciplines of theology, philosophy, literature, history, and sociology. Fitted with these interdisciplinary resources, he enriches his treatment of themes and figures in ways that exceed the scope, to say nothing of the execution, found in other literature. The book conveys a rare metaphysical depth, for questions of faith, identity, and Dasein explored by the intellectual figures of the past are also personal ones for the author as well. Mendes-Flohr's exceptional ability to keep this body of work alive and available provides an outstanding source of commentary on the subjects that dominate the agenda of modern Jewish studies.
Professor S.N. Eisenstadt has written numerous essays on Jewish Identity over the years. This volume brings together some of these. The major argument of the essays follows the Weberian view of Jewish historical experience as that of a distinct civilization, as a distinct Great Religion, the first monotheistic civilization - without, however, accepting many of Weber's concrete analyses.
