Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity

Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity PDF Author: Mitchell Bryan Hart
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804738248
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This book traces the emergence and development of an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and the United States. The Zionist movement provided the initial impetus as it looked to the social sciences to provide the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. The social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of the Jewish diaspora, and also charted emancipation and assimilation, viewed as dissolutions of and threats to Jewish identity. Liberal, assimilationist scholars also utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance

Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity

Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity PDF Author: Mitchell Bryan Hart
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804738248
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book traces the emergence and development of an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and the United States. The Zionist movement provided the initial impetus as it looked to the social sciences to provide the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. The social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of the Jewish diaspora, and also charted emancipation and assimilation, viewed as dissolutions of and threats to Jewish identity. Liberal, assimilationist scholars also utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance

Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity

Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity PDF Author: Mitchell B. Hart
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781503618602
Category : SOCIAL SCIENCE
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Why did the social sciences become an integral part of Jewish scholarship beginning in the late nineteenth century? What part did this new scholarship play in the ongoing debate over emancipation and assimilation, Zionism and diasporism, the nature of Jewish identity, and the problem of Jewish continuity and survival. To answer these questions, this book traces the emergence and development of an organized Jewish social science in central Europe, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other social science modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and in the United States. The author locates the initial impetus for an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science in the Zionist movement, as Zionists looked to the social sciences to provide them with the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. In particular, the social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of Jewry in the diaspora. Social science also charted emancipation and assimilation, which were viewed as disintegrative agents for the dissolution of Jewish identity, and hence as a threat to the Jewish future. For Zionists, nationalism offered the means to reverse the process of dissolution. Yet Zionists were not alone in turning to the social sciences to advance their political agenda. This study also examines the involvement of non-Zionists in Jewish social science, focusing on the way liberal, assimilationist scholars utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance.

Jewish Primitivism

Jewish Primitivism PDF Author: Samuel J. Spinner
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503628280
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.

The Modernity of Others

The Modernity of Others PDF Author: Ari Joskowicz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788405
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

Jews and Race

Jews and Race PDF Author: Mitchell Bryan Hart
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584657170
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
An anthology of writings by Jewish thinkers on Jews as a race

The Business of Identity

The Business of Identity PDF Author: Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804787166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
The Cairo Geniza is the largest and richest store of documentary evidence for the medieval Islamic world. This book seeks to revolutionize the way scholars use that treasure trove. Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman draws on legal documents from the Geniza to reconceive of life in the medieval Islamic marketplace. In place of the shared practices broadly understood by scholars to have transcended confessional boundaries, he reveals how Jewish merchants in Egypt employed distinctive trading practices. Highly influenced by Jewish law, these commercial practices served to manifest their Jewish identity in the medieval Islamic context. In light of this distinctiveness, Ackerman-Lieberman proposes an alternative model for using the Geniza documents as a tool for understanding daily life in the medieval Islamic world as a whole.

From Rebel to Rabbi

From Rebel to Rabbi PDF Author: Matthew B. Hoffman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804753715
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book examines the ways modern Jewish thinkers, writers, and artists appropriated the figure of Jesus as part of the process of creating modern Jewish culture.

Shaking the Pillars of Exile

Shaking the Pillars of Exile PDF Author: Talya Fishman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804728201
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
This book explores a heretical blueprint for Jewish modernization written by a Venetian rabbi (under cover of pseudonym) in the early seventeenth century, almost two centuries before political emancipation. The analysis of this text, Kol Sakhal ("Voice of a Fool"), highlights the ways in which it harnessed concepts and methods drawn from the texts of rabbinic Judaism itself in order to reform Jewish culture from within. This book thus challenges the assumption that pre-modern Jewish society was culturally monolithic and unquestioningly obedient to rabbinic authority. In so doing, it raises fresh and unsettling questions about the periodization of Jewish history. Like the contemporaneous political and religious struggle that the Republic of Venice was waging against papal Rome, this remarkable Jewish attack on rabbinic authority targets—and revises—both the traditional historiography of sacred institutions and the legal canon itself. The text's very iconoclasm is shown to derive from the corpus of rabbinic Judaism, for the preservation of certain strains of inquiry in traditional sources makes them a virtual repository of tolerated dissent. Conjecture about the possible influence that a recently discovered work by a heretical Iberian Jewish convert to Catholicism may have had on the composition of "Voice of a Fool" leads to a discussion of the types of heterodoxy that threatened rabbinic Jewish communities in Italy and elsewhere in the early modern period. Reflections on the significance of the mask adopted by the text's author and on his (false) claim that the work was composed in 1500 in Spain facilitate speculation about his motives in trying to reinvent history. The second half of the book presents the first annotated English translation of "Voice of a Fool." Three appendixes analyze evidence concerning the date and place of the text's composition, the identification of its author, and its various manuscripts.

The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science

The Quest for Jewish Assimilation in Modern Social Science PDF Author: Amos Morris-Reich
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135900922
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This book examines the connection between the nineteenth century transformation of the human sciences into the social sciences and notions of Jewish assimilation and integration, demonstrating that the quest for Jewish assimilation is linked to and built into the conceptual foundations of modern social science disciplines.

From Continuity to Contiguity

From Continuity to Contiguity PDF Author: Dan Miron
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804775028
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 559

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Book Description
Dan Miron—widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on modern Jewish literatures—begins this study by surveying and critiquing previous attempts to define a common denominator unifying the various modern Jewish literatures. He argues that these prior efforts have all been trapped by the need to see these literatures as a continuum. Miron seeks to break through this impasse by acknowledging discontinuity as the staple characteristic of modern Jewish writing. These literatures instead form a complex of independent, yet touching, components related through contiguity. From Continuity to Contiguity offers original insights into modern Hebrew, Yiddish, and other Jewish literatures, including a new interpretation of Franz Kafka's place within them and discussions of Sholem Aleichem, Sh. Y. Abramovitsh, Akhad ha'am, M. Y. Berditshevsky, Kh. N. Bialik, and Y. L. Peretz.