German-Jewish History in Modern Times

German-Jewish History in Modern Times PDF Author: Michael A. Meyer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231074728
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description

German-Jewish History in Modern Times

German-Jewish History in Modern Times PDF Author: Michael A. Meyer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231074728
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Emancipation and acculturation, 1780-1871

German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Emancipation and acculturation, 1780-1871 PDF Author: Mordechai Breuer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231074742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
This four-volume collective project by a team of leading scholars offers a vivid portrait of Jewish history in German-speaking countries over nearly four centuries. This series is sponsored by the Leo Baeck Institute, established in 1955 in Jerusalem, London, and New York for the purpose of advancing scholarship on the Jews in German-speaking lands.

German-Jewish History in Modern Times

German-Jewish History in Modern Times PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231074728
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


German Idealism and the Jew

German Idealism and the Jew PDF Author: Michael Mack
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022611578X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
In German Idealism and the Jew, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it.

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions PDF Author: Jonathan Skolnik
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804790590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is the first comprehensive study of how German-Jewish writers used images from the Spanish-Jewish past to define their place in German culture and society. Jonathan Skolnik argues that Jewish historical fiction was a form of cultural memory that functioned as a parallel to the modern, demythologizing project of secular Jewish history writing. What did it imply for a minority to imagine its history in the majority language? Skolnik makes the case that the answer lies in the creation of a German-Jewish minority culture in which historical fiction played a central role. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Jewish writers and artists, both in Nazi Germany and in exile, employed images from the Sephardic past to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. The book goes on to show that this past not only helped Jews to make sense of the nonsense, but served also as a window into the hopes for integration and fears about assimilation that preoccupied German-Jewish writers throughout most of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, Skolnik positions the Jewish embrace of German culture not as an act of assimilation but rather a reinvention of Jewish identity and historical memory.

Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation

Redefining Judaism in an Age of Emancipation PDF Author: Christian Wiese
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047410394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
Based on a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, this volume for the first time interprets the biography and philosophy of the German Jewish thinker Samuel Holdheim (1806-1860), shedding new light on a neglected phenomenon of nineteenth century Jewish intellectual history – the radical Reform Movement that started in Germany and culminated in the American Jewish Reform ideology. Leading scholars of modern Jewish history and thought from Germany, France, Belgium and the United States present a thorough reading of Holdheim’s influential writings in the broader context of the debates within German Jewry about the modernization of Jewish identity in an age of political emancipation and cultural integration, including such controversial issues as the authority of the rabbinical tradition or the re-interpretation of the ceremonial laws.

From Maimonides to Microsoft

From Maimonides to Microsoft PDF Author: Neil Weinstock Netanel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199707332
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Jewish copyright law is a rich body of jurisprudence that developed in parallel with modern copyright laws and the book privileges that preceded them. Jewish copyright law owes its origins to a reprinting ban that the Rome rabbinic court issued for three books of Hebrew grammar in 1518. It continues to be applied today, notably in a rabbinic ruling outlawing pirated software, issued at Microsoft's request. In From Maimonides to Microsoft, Professor Netanel traces the historical development of Jewish copyright law by comparing rabbinic reprinting bans with secular and papal book privileges and by relaying the stories of dramatic disputes among publishers of books of Jewish learning and liturgy.. He describes each dispute in its historical context and examines the rabbinic rulings that sought to resolve it. Remarkably, the rabbinic reprinting bans and copyright rulings address some of the same issues that animate copyright jurisprudence today: Is copyright a property right or just a right to receive fair compensation? How long should copyrights last? What purposes does copyright serve? While Jewish copyright law has borrowed from its secular law counterpart at key junctures, it fashions strikingly different answers to those key questions. The story of Jewish copyright law also intertwines with the history of the Jewish book trade and with steadfast efforts of rabbinic leaders to maintain their authority to regulate that trade in the face of the dramatic erosion of Jewish communal autonomy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book will thus be of considerable interest to students of Jewish law and history as well as copyright scholars and practitioners.

The Continuities of German History

The Continuities of German History PDF Author: Helmut Walser Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139471252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book opens the debate about German history in the long term – about how ideas and political forms are traceable across what historians have taken to be the sharp breaks of German history. Smith argues that current historiography has become ever more focused on the twentieth century, and on twentieth-century explanations for the catastrophes at the center of German history. Against conventional wisdom, he considers continuities - nation and nationalism, religion and religious exclusion, racism and violence - that are the center of the German historical experience and that have long histories. Smith explores these deep continuities in novel ways, emphasizing their importance, while arguing that Germany was not on a special path to destruction. The result is a series of innovative reflections on the crystallization of nationalist ideology, on patterns of anti-Semitism, and on how the nineteenth-century vocabulary of race structured the twentieth-century genocidal imagination.

The Formation of a Modern Rabbi

The Formation of a Modern Rabbi PDF Author: Samuel Joseph Kessler
Publisher: SBL Press
ISBN: 1951498933
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
An intellectual biography that critically engages Adolf Jellinek’s scholarship and communal activities Adolf Jellinek (1821–1893), the Czech-born, German-educated, liberal chief rabbi of Vienna, was the most famous Jewish preacher in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an innovative rhetorician, Jellinek helped mold and define the modern synagogue sermon into an instrument for expressing Jewish religious and ethical values for a new era. As a historian, he made groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Zohar and medieval Jewish mysticism. Jellinek was emblematic of rabbi-as-scholar-preacher during the earliest, formative years of communal synagogues as urban religious space. In a world that was rapidly losing the felt and remembered past of premodern Jewish society, the rabbi, with Jellinek as prime exemplar, took hold of the Sabbath sermon as an instrument to define and mold Judaism and Jewish values for a new world.

The Scholems

The Scholems PDF Author: Jay Howard Geller
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731572
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The evocative and riveting stories of four brothers—Gershom the Zionist, Werner the Communist, Reinhold the nationalist, and Erich the liberal—weave together in The Scholems, a biography of an eminent middle-class Jewish Berlin family and a social history of the Jews in Germany in the decades leading up to World War II. Across four generations, Jay Howard Geller illuminates the transformation of traditional Jews into modern German citizens, the challenges they faced, and the ways that they shaped the German-Jewish century, beginning with Prussia's emancipation of the Jews in 1812 and ending with exclusion and disenfranchisement under the Nazis. Focusing on the renowned philosopher and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem and his family, their story beautifully draws out the rise and fall of bourgeois life in the unique subculture that was Jewish Berlin. Geller portrays the family within a much larger context of economic advancement, the adoption of German culture and debates on Jewish identity, struggles for integration into society, and varying political choices during the German Empire, World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi era. What Geller discovers, and unveils for the reader, is a fascinating portal through which to view the experience of the Jewish middle class in Germany.