Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe

Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Richard I. Cohen
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0822980363
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
David B. Ruderman's groundbreaking studies of Jewish intellectuals as they engaged with Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment have set the agenda for a distinctive historiographical approach to Jewish culture in early modern Europe, from 1500 to 1800. From his initial studies of Italy to his later work on eighteenth-century English, German, and Polish Jews, Ruderman has emphasized the individual as a representative or exemplary figure through whose life and career the problems of a period and cultural context are revealed. Thirty-one leading scholars celebrate Ruderman's stellar career in essays that bring new insight into Jewish culture as it is intertwined in Jewish, European, Ottoman, and American history. The volume presents probing historical snapshots that advance, refine, and challenge how we understand the early modern period and spark further inquiry. Key elements explored include those inspired by Ruderman's own work: the role of print, the significance of networks and mobility among Jewish intellectuals, the value of extraordinary individuals who absorbed and translated so-called external traditions into a Jewish idiom, and the interaction between cultures through texts and personal encounters of Jewish and Christian intellectuals. While these elements can be found in earlier periods of Jewish history, Ruderman and his colleagues point to an intensification of mobility, the dissemination of knowledge, and the blurring of boundaries in the early modern period. These studies present a rich and nuanced portrait of a Jewish culture that is both a contributing member and a product of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Ruderman has fostered a community of scholars from Europe, North America, and Israel who work in the widest range of areas that touch on Jewish culture. He has worked to make Jewish studies an essential element of mainstream humanities. The essays in this volume are a testament to the haven he has fostered for scholars, which has and continues to generate important works of scholarship across the entire spectrum of Jewish history.

Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe

Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: Richard I. Cohen
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0822980363
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Get Book Here

Book Description
David B. Ruderman's groundbreaking studies of Jewish intellectuals as they engaged with Renaissance humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment have set the agenda for a distinctive historiographical approach to Jewish culture in early modern Europe, from 1500 to 1800. From his initial studies of Italy to his later work on eighteenth-century English, German, and Polish Jews, Ruderman has emphasized the individual as a representative or exemplary figure through whose life and career the problems of a period and cultural context are revealed. Thirty-one leading scholars celebrate Ruderman's stellar career in essays that bring new insight into Jewish culture as it is intertwined in Jewish, European, Ottoman, and American history. The volume presents probing historical snapshots that advance, refine, and challenge how we understand the early modern period and spark further inquiry. Key elements explored include those inspired by Ruderman's own work: the role of print, the significance of networks and mobility among Jewish intellectuals, the value of extraordinary individuals who absorbed and translated so-called external traditions into a Jewish idiom, and the interaction between cultures through texts and personal encounters of Jewish and Christian intellectuals. While these elements can be found in earlier periods of Jewish history, Ruderman and his colleagues point to an intensification of mobility, the dissemination of knowledge, and the blurring of boundaries in the early modern period. These studies present a rich and nuanced portrait of a Jewish culture that is both a contributing member and a product of early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. As director of the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Ruderman has fostered a community of scholars from Europe, North America, and Israel who work in the widest range of areas that touch on Jewish culture. He has worked to make Jewish studies an essential element of mainstream humanities. The essays in this volume are a testament to the haven he has fostered for scholars, which has and continues to generate important works of scholarship across the entire spectrum of Jewish history.

A Rich Brew

A Rich Brew PDF Author: Shachar Pinsker
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479827894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Finalist, 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience, presented by the Jewish Book Council Winner, 2019 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award, in the Jewish Literature and Linguistics Category, given by the Association for Jewish Studies A fascinating glimpse into the world of the coffeehouse and its role in shaping modern Jewish culture Unlike the synagogue, the house of study, the community center, or the Jewish deli, the café is rarely considered a Jewish space. Yet, coffeehouses profoundly influenced the creation of modern Jewish culture from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. With roots stemming from the Ottoman Empire, the coffeehouse and its drinks gained increasing popularity in Europe. The “otherness,” and the mix of the national and transnational characteristics of the coffeehouse perhaps explains why many of these cafés were owned by Jews, why Jews became their most devoted habitués, and how cafés acquired associations with Jewishness. Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar M. Pinsker argues that cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City and Tel Aviv. A Rich Brew explores the Jewish culture created in these social spaces, drawing on a vivid collection of newspaper articles, memoirs, archival documents, photographs, caricatures, and artwork, as well as stories, novels, and poems in many languages set in cafés. Pinsker shows how Jewish modernity was born in the café, nourished, and sent out into the world by way of print, politics, literature, art, and theater. What was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse touched thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern culture that redefined what it meant to be a Jew in the world.

How Judaism Became a Religion

How Judaism Became a Religion PDF Author: Leora Batnitzky
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691130728
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A new approach to understanding Jewish thought since the eighteenth century Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality—or a mixture of all of these? In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religion in the modern period—and why Jewish thinkers have fought as well as championed this idea. Ever since the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers have debated whether and how Judaism—largely a religion of practice and public adherence to law—can fit into a modern, Protestant conception of religion as an individual and private matter of belief or faith. Batnitzky makes the novel argument that it is this clash between the modern category of religion and Judaism that is responsible for much of the creative tension in modern Jewish thought. Tracing how the idea of Jewish religion has been defended and resisted from the eighteenth century to today, the book discusses many of the major Jewish thinkers of the past three centuries, including Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Zvi Yehuda Kook, Theodor Herzl, and Mordecai Kaplan. At the same time, it tells the story of modern orthodoxy, the German-Jewish renaissance, Jewish religion after the Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish individual, the birth of Jewish nationalism, and Jewish religion in America. More than an introduction, How Judaism Became a Religion presents a compelling new perspective on the history of modern Jewish thought.

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

Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought

Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought PDF Author: Moshe Behar
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584658851
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
The first anthology of modern Middle Eastern Jewish thought

YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture

YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture PDF Author: Cecile Esther Kuznitz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139867385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
This book is the first history of YIVO, the original center for Yiddish scholarship. Founded by a group of Eastern European intellectuals after World War I, YIVO became both the apex of secular Yiddish culture and the premier institution of Diaspora Nationalism, which fought for Jewish rights throughout the world at a time of rising anti-Semitism. From its headquarters in Vilna, Lithuania, YIVO tried to balance scholarly objectivity with its commitment to the Jewish masses. Using newly recovered documents that were believed destroyed by Hitler and Stalin, Cecile Esther Kuznitz tells for the first time the compelling story of how these scholars built a world-renowned institution despite dire poverty and anti-Semitism. She raises new questions about the relationship between Jewish cultural and political work, and analyzes how nationalism arises outside of state power.

Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity

Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity PDF Author: Michael A. Meyer
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814338607
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Bringing together leading Jewish historians, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers and liturgists, Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity offers a collective view of a historically and culturally significant issue that will be of interest to Jewish scholars of many disciplines.

Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture

Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture PDF Author: Andrea Schatz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004393099
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The contributions to this volume trace for the first time how the modern Jewish reception of Josephus, the ancient historian who witnessed and described the destruction of the Second Temple, took shape within different scholarly, religious, literary and political contexts across the Jewish world, from Amsterdam to Berlin, Vilna, Breslau, New York and Tel Aviv. The chapters show how the vagaries of his tumultuous life, spent between a small rebellious nation and the ruling circles of a vast empire, between Jewish and non-Jewish cultures, and between political action and historical reflection have been re-imagined by Jewish readers over the past three centuries in their attempts to make sense of their own times. "The project and this volume can encourage greater awareness of the complex origins of Josephus’ controversial reputation as a Jewish priest, diplomat in Rome, military leader of the first Jewish revolt against the Romans, as an advocate for surrender to imperial forces, as a witness to the Hurban, as a citizen of Rome, and as a historian....Recommended highly for all Jewish and academic libraries." - David B Levy, Touro College, NYC, in: Association of Jewish Libraries News and Review 1.2 (2019)

Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy

Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy PDF Author: Lynette Bowring
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253060087
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Musical culture in Jewish communities in early modern Italy was much more diverse than researchers originally thought. An interdisciplinary reassessment, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy evaluates the social, cultural, political, economic, and religious circumstances that shaped this community, especially in light of the need to recognize individual experiences within minority populations. Contributors draw from rich materials, topics, and approaches as they explore the inherently diverse understandings of music in daily life, the many ways that Jewish communities conceived of music, and the reception of and responses to Jewish musical culture. Highlighting the multifaceted experience of music within Jewish communities, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy sheds new light on the place of music in complex, previously misunderstood environments.

Early Modern Jewry

Early Modern Jewry PDF Author: David B. Ruderman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691152888
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Early Modern Jewry boldly offers a new history of the early modern Jewish experience. From Krakow and Venice to Amsterdam and Smyrna, David Ruderman examines the historical and cultural factors unique to Jewish communities throughout Europe, and how these distinctions played out amidst the rest of society. Looking at how Jewish settlements in the early modern period were linked to one another in fascinating ways, he shows how Jews were communicating with each other and were more aware of their economic, social, and religious connections than ever before. Ruderman explores five crucial and powerful characteristics uniting Jewish communities: a mobility leading to enhanced contacts between Jews of differing backgrounds, traditions, and languages, as well as between Jews and non-Jews; a heightened sense of communal cohesion throughout all Jewish settlements that revealed the rising power of lay oligarchies; a knowledge explosion brought about by the printing press, the growing interest in Jewish books by Christian readers, an expanded curriculum of Jewish learning, and the entrance of Jewish elites into universities; a crisis of rabbinic authority expressed through active messianism, mystical prophecy, radical enthusiasm, and heresy; and the blurring of religious identities, impacting such groups as conversos, Sabbateans, individual converts to Christianity, and Christian Hebraists. In describing an early modern Jewish culture, Early Modern Jewry reconstructs a distinct epoch in history and provides essential background for understanding the modern Jewish experience.