Discourse on the State of the Jews

Discourse on the State of the Jews PDF Author: Simone Luzzatto
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110528231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
In 1638, a small book of no more than 92 pages in octavo was published “appresso Gioanne Calleoni” under the title “Discourse on the State of the Jews and in particular those dwelling in the illustrious city of Venice.” It was dedicated to the Doge of Venice and his counsellors, who are labelled “lovers of Truth.” The author of the book was a certain Simone (Simḥa) Luzzatto, a native of Venice, where he lived and died, serving as rabbi for over fifty years during the course of the seventeenth century. Luzzatto’s political thesis is simple and, at the same time, temerarious, if not revolutionary: Venice can put an end to its political decline, he argues, by offering the Jews a monopoly on overseas commercial activity. This plan is highly recommendable because the Jews are “wellsuited for trade,” much more so than others (such as “foreigners,” for example). The rabbi opens his argument by recalling that trade and usury are the only occupations permitted to Jews. Within the confines of their historical situation, the Venetian Jews became particularly skilled at trade with partners from the Eastern Mediterranean countries. Luzzatto’s argument is that this talent could be put at the service of the Venetian government in order to maintain – or, more accurately, recover – its political importance as an intermediary between East and West. He was the first to define the role of the Jews on the basis of their economic and social functions, disregarding the classic categorisation of Judaism’s alleged privileged religious status in world history. Nonetheless, going beyond the socio-economic arguments of the book, it is essential to point out Luzzatto’s resort to sceptical strategies in order to plead in defence of the Venetian Jews. It is precisely his philosophical and political scepticism that makes Luzzatto’s texts so unique. This edition aims to grant access to his works and thought to English-speaking readers and scholars. By approaching his texts from this point of view, the editors hope to open a new path in research into Jewish culture and philosophy that will enable other scholars to develop new directions and new perspectives, stressing the interpenetration between Jews and the surrounding Christian and secular cultures.

Discourse on the State of the Jews

Discourse on the State of the Jews PDF Author: Simone Luzzatto
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110528231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Get Book

Book Description
In 1638, a small book of no more than 92 pages in octavo was published “appresso Gioanne Calleoni” under the title “Discourse on the State of the Jews and in particular those dwelling in the illustrious city of Venice.” It was dedicated to the Doge of Venice and his counsellors, who are labelled “lovers of Truth.” The author of the book was a certain Simone (Simḥa) Luzzatto, a native of Venice, where he lived and died, serving as rabbi for over fifty years during the course of the seventeenth century. Luzzatto’s political thesis is simple and, at the same time, temerarious, if not revolutionary: Venice can put an end to its political decline, he argues, by offering the Jews a monopoly on overseas commercial activity. This plan is highly recommendable because the Jews are “wellsuited for trade,” much more so than others (such as “foreigners,” for example). The rabbi opens his argument by recalling that trade and usury are the only occupations permitted to Jews. Within the confines of their historical situation, the Venetian Jews became particularly skilled at trade with partners from the Eastern Mediterranean countries. Luzzatto’s argument is that this talent could be put at the service of the Venetian government in order to maintain – or, more accurately, recover – its political importance as an intermediary between East and West. He was the first to define the role of the Jews on the basis of their economic and social functions, disregarding the classic categorisation of Judaism’s alleged privileged religious status in world history. Nonetheless, going beyond the socio-economic arguments of the book, it is essential to point out Luzzatto’s resort to sceptical strategies in order to plead in defence of the Venetian Jews. It is precisely his philosophical and political scepticism that makes Luzzatto’s texts so unique. This edition aims to grant access to his works and thought to English-speaking readers and scholars. By approaching his texts from this point of view, the editors hope to open a new path in research into Jewish culture and philosophy that will enable other scholars to develop new directions and new perspectives, stressing the interpenetration between Jews and the surrounding Christian and secular cultures.

Discourse on the State of the Jews

Discourse on the State of the Jews PDF Author: Luzzatto Simone
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783110487336
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration

Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration PDF Author: Vyacheslav Karpov
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030540464
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This book challenges the modern myth that tolerance grows as societies become less religious. The myth inseparably links the progress of toleration to the secularization of modern society. This volume scrutinizes this grand narrative theoretically and empirically, and proposes alternative accounts of the varied relationships between diverse interpretations of religion and secularity and multiple secularizations, desecularizations, and forms of toleration. The authors show how both secular and religious orthodoxies inform toleration and persecution, and how secularizations and desecularizations engender repressive or pluralistic regimes. Ultimately, the book offers an agency-focused perspective which links the variation in toleration and persecution to the actors of secularization and desecularization and their cultural programs.

Masters of Discourse

Masters of Discourse PDF Author: Israel Shamir
Publisher: Booksurge Publishing
ISBN: 9781419692437
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Welcome to the new world order, where mass media, a fully integrated public-opinion-forming machine of mind control had rendered the Left and Right obsolete and subservient to Zionism. Who are the people who own and operate this machine? Are they actually the Jewish Lobby? No, says Shamir. The formidable Jewish Lobby is just the visible tip of the iceberg, while below there are miles and miles of solid ice: media lords, chief editors, their favourite university pundits – in short, the Masters of Discourse. In this third volume of his writing, Israel Shamir travels around the world to find the reason for their captive hold over our thinking.

Racial Zionism A Source Book of Essential Texts from Noah to Herzl and Beyond

Racial Zionism A Source Book of Essential Texts from Noah to Herzl and Beyond PDF Author: Christopher Bjerknes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781716373572
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several prominent Zionists warned that the Jewish People were disappearing due to assimilation and antisemitism. They believed that the best means to preserve the "Jewish race" was to found a new Jewish State. This source book republishes the following foundational texts of these racial Zionists: Mordecai Manuel Noah, Discourse, "Delivered at the Consecration of the Synagogue of [K.k. She'erit Yisra'el] in the City of New-york, on Friday, the 10th of Nisan, 5578, Corresponding with the 17th of April, 1818", C. S. Van Winkle, New York, (1818); "Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel", James Van Norden, New York, (1837); "Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews: Delivered at the Tabernacle, Oct. 28 and Dec. 2, 1844", Harper & Brothers, New York, (1845). Moses Hess, "Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism", Bloch Publishing Company, New York, (1918). Leo Pinsker, "Auto-Emancipation", The Maccabaean Publishing Company, New York, (1906). Theodor Herzl, "A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question", The Maccabæan Publishing Co., New York, (1904). Israel Zangwill, "The Problem of the Jewish Race", The Judaen Publishing Company, New York, (1914). Ignatz Zollschan, "Jewish Questions: Three Lectures", Bloch Publishing Company, New York, (1914). Louis Dembitz Brandeis, "The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It", Zionist Essays Pub. Committee, New York, (1915). Rabbi Max Reichler, "Jewish Eugenics: A Paper Read Before the New York Board of Jewish Ministers", Bloch Publishing Company, New York, (1916). Arthur Balfour as quoted in: "Mr. Balfour on Zionism. The Case for a National Home." London Times, (12 February 1919), page 9.

A Rhetorical Conversation

A Rhetorical Conversation PDF Author: Jordan D. Finkin
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271036303
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
"Describes the role of traditional Jewish texts in the development of modern Yiddish literature, as well as the closely related development of modern Hebrew literature"--Provided by publisher.

At Wit's End

At Wit's End PDF Author: Louis Kaplan
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823287572
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE A scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the twentieth century. At Wit’s End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust. The first in-depth study to explore the Jewish joke as a crucial rhetorical figure in larger cultural debates in Germany, author Louis Kaplan presents an engrossing and lucid work of scholarship that examines how “der jüdische Witz” (referring to both Jewish wit and jokes) was utilized differently in a number of texts, from the Weimar Republic to the rise of National Socialism, and how it was re-introduced into the public sphere after the Holocaust with the controversial publication of Salcia Landmann’s collection of Jewish jokes in the reparations era (Wiedergutmachung). Kaplan reviews the claims made about the Jewish joke and its provocative laughter by notable writers from a variety of ideological perspectives, demonstrating how their reflections on this complex cultural trope enable a better understanding of German–Jewish intercultural relations and their eventual breakdown in the Third Reich. He also illustrates how selfcritical and self-ironic Jewish Witz maintained a fraught and ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism. In reviewing this critical and traumatic moment in modern German–Jewish history through the deadly discourse on the Jewish joke, At Wit’s End includes chapters on the virulent Austrian anti-Semitic racial theorist Arthur Trebitsch, the Nazi racial propagandist Siegfried Kadner, the German Marxist cultural historian Eduard Fuchs, the Jewish diasporic historian Erich Kahler, and the Jewish cabaret impresario Kurt Robitschek, among others. Shedding new light on anti-Semitism and on the Jewish question leading up to the Holocaust, At Wit’s End provides readers with a unique perspective by which to gain important insights about this crucial historical period that reverberates into the present day, when potentially offensive humor coupled with a toxic political climate and xenophobia can have deadly consequences.

Sovereign Jews

Sovereign Jews PDF Author: Yaacov Yadgar
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438465335
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Offers a novel exploration of the relationship between religion and the state in Israel. The question of Jewish sovereignty shapes Jewish identity in Israel, the status of non-Jews, and relations between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, yet its consequences remain enigmatic. In Sovereign Jews, Yaacov Yadgar highlights the shortcomings of mainstream discourse and offers a novel explanation of Zionist ideology and the Israeli polity. Yadgar argues that secularism’s presumed binary pitting religion against politics is illusory. He shows that the key to understanding this alleged dichotomy is Israel’s interest in maintaining its sovereignty as the nation-state of Jews. This creates a need to mark a majority of the population as Jews and to distinguish them from non-Jews. Coupled with the failure to formulate a viable alternative national identity (either “Hebrew” or “Israeli”), it leads the ostensibly secular state to apply a narrow interpretation of Jewish religion as a political tool for maintaining a Jewish majority. “This book makes an important contribution to the study of Zionist ideology and the relationship between state and religion in Israel. As the author shows rather convincingly, Zionism and the State of Israel needed the Jewish tradition to supply meaning to their political-theological project. This is a fascinating argument that expands our critical understanding of the ideological foundations of the Jewish national movement.” — Eran Kaplan, author of Beyond Post-Zionism

The State of the Jews

The State of the Jews PDF Author: Edward Alexander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351473344
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies—busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing—and also its internal enemies. These are anti-Zionist Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel's creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today's progressives and New Diasporists call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage.Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel's throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander's book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book's pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry.

The Talmud's Theological Language-Game

The Talmud's Theological Language-Game PDF Author: Eugene B. Borowitz
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791467022
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Analyzes the structure and logic of aggadic discourse in the Talmud.