Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam

Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam PDF Author: Anne O. Albert
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1802070753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This book untangles a web of ideas about politics, religion, exile, and community that emerged at a key moment in Jewish history and left a lasting mark on Jewish ideas. In the shadow of their former member Baruch Spinoza’s notoriety, and amid the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam underwent a conceptual shift that led them to treat their self-governed diaspora community as a commonwealth. Preoccupied by the question of why and how Jews should rule themselves in the absence of a biblical or messianic sovereign state or king, they forged a creative synthesis of insights from early modern Christian politics and Jewish law and traditions to assess and argue over their formidable communal government. In so doing they shaped a proud new theopolitical self-understanding of their community as analogous to a Christian state. Through readings of rarely studied sermons, commentaries, polemics, administrative records, and architecture, Anne Albert shows that a concentrated period of public Jewish political discourse among the community’s leaders and thinkers led to the formation of a strong image of itself as a totalizing, state-like entity—an image that eventually came to define its portrayal by twentieth-century historians. Her study presents a new perspective on a Jewish population that has long fascinated readers, as well as new evidence of Jewish reactions to Spinoza and Sabbatianism, and analyses the first Jewish reckoning with modern western political concepts.

Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam

Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam PDF Author: Anne O. Albert
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781789622294
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book untangles a web of ideas about politics, religion, exile, and community that emerged at a key moment in Jewish history and left a lasting mark on Jewish ideas. In the shadow of their former member Baruch Spinoza's notoriety, and amid the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam underwent a conceptual shift that led them to treat their self-governed diaspora community as a commonwealth. Preoccupied by the question of why and how Jews should rule themselves in the absence of a biblical or messianic sovereign state or king, they forged a creative synthesis of insights from early modern Christian politics and Jewish law and traditions to assess and argue over their formidable communal government. In so doing they shaped a proud new theopolitical self-understanding of their community as analogous to a Christian state. Through readings of rarely studied sermons, commentaries, polemics, administrative records, and architecture, Anne Albert shows that a concentrated period of public Jewish political discourse among the community's leaders and thinkers led to the formation of a strong image of itself as a totalizing, state-like entity--an image that eventually came to define its portrayal by twentieth-century historians. Her study presents a new perspective on a Jewish population that has long fascinated readers, as well as new evidence of Jewish reactions to Spinoza and Sabbatianism, and analyses the first Jewish reckoning with modern western political concepts.

Religion, Politics and Freedom of Conscience

Religion, Politics and Freedom of Conscience PDF Author: Yosef Kaplan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789081586016
Category : Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description


Betraying Spinoza

Betraying Spinoza PDF Author: Rebecca Goldstein
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 030751417X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Part of the Jewish Encounter series In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’ s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’ s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age. From the Hardcover edition.

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
Josephus in Modern Jewish Culture offers pioneering studies of the intense and varied reception of the historian’s work in scholarship, religious and political debates, and in literary texts, from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to the “trials” of Josephus in the twentieth century.

Early Modern Jewish Civilization

Early Modern Jewish Civilization PDF Author: David Graizbord
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040004784
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 471

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Book Description
This collection is an introductory historical survey and selective cultural analysis of the development, coalescence, and eventual waning of a diasporic civilization—that of the Jews of the early modern period (ca. 1391–1789) in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and key nodes of the Iberian Empires in the Americas. Each chapter explores key factors that shaped both distinctive early modern Jewish communities and a remarkably coalescent and far broader community-of-communities. The contributors engage and answer the following questions: What do historians mean by “early modernity,” and to what extent does the concept illuminate the history and culture(s) of Jews from the end of the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment? What were the general demographic contours of the Jewish diaspora over this period and how did they change? How did culture, politics, technology, economics, and gender shape diasporic Jewish communities across eastern and western Europe and the New World over the course of some 400 years? Ultimately, the work renders a portrait of coherence and diversity, continuity and discontinuity, in early modern Jewish life within and across temporal and geographic boundaries. Early Modern Jewish Civilization is essential reading for all students of Jewish history and civilization and early modern history more broadly.

Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise

Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise PDF Author: Jonathan Israel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139463616
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the most important philosophical works of the early modern period. In it Spinoza discusses at length the historical circumstances of the composition and transmission of the Bible, demonstrating the fallibility of both its authors and its interpreters. He argues that free enquiry is not only consistent with the security and prosperity of a state but actually essential to them, and that such freedom flourishes best in a democratic and republican state in which individuals are left free while religious organizations are subordinated to the secular power. His Treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent history of political thought, Enlightenment 'clandestine' or radical philosophy, Bible hermeneutics, and textual criticism more generally. It is presented here in a translation of great clarity and accuracy by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, with a substantial historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Israel.

Spinoza's Religion

Spinoza's Religion PDF Author: Clare Carlisle
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069122420X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A bold reevaluation of Spinoza that reveals his powerful, inclusive vision of religion for the modern age Spinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither. In Spinoza’s Religion, she sets out a bold interpretation of Spinoza through a lucid new reading of his masterpiece, the Ethics. Putting the question of religion centre-stage but refusing to convert Spinozism to Christianity, Carlisle reveals that “being in God” unites Spinoza’s metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza’s Religion unfolds a powerful, inclusive philosophical vision for the modern age—one that is grounded in a profound questioning of how to live a joyful, fully human life. Like Spinoza himself, the Ethics doesn’t fit into any ready-made religious category. But Carlisle shows how it wrestles with the question of religion in strikingly original ways, responding both critically and constructively to the diverse, broadly Christian context in which Spinoza lived and worked. Philosophy itself, as Spinoza practiced it, became a spiritual endeavor that expressed his devotion to a truthful, virtuous way of life. Offering startling new insights into Spinoza’s famously enigmatic ideas about eternal life and the intellectual love of God, Carlisle uncovers a Spinozist religion that integrates self-knowledge, desire, practice, and embodied ethical life to reach toward our “highest happiness”—to rest in God. Seen through Carlisle’s eyes, the Ethics prompts us to rethink not only Spinoza but also religion itself.

Looking for Spinoza

Looking for Spinoza PDF Author: Antonio R. Damasio
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156028714
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
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Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile

Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile PDF Author: Eugene Sheppard
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1611687691
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Born in rural Hesse, Germany, Leo Strauss (1899-1973) became an active Zionist and philosopher during the tumultuous and fractious Weimar Republic. As Eugene R. Sheppard demonstrates in this groundbreaking and engaging book, Strauss gravitated towards such thinkers as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt as he sought to identify and overcome fundamental philosophical, political, and theological crises. The rise of Nazism impelled Strauss as a young Jewish ŽmigrŽ, first in Europe and then in America, to grapple with--and accommodate his thought to--the pressing challenges of exile. In confronting his own state of exile, Strauss enlisted premodern Jewish thinkers such as Moses Maimonides and Baruch Spinoza who earlier addressed the problem of reconciling their competing loyalties as philosophers and Jews. This is the first study to frame Strauss's political philosophy around his critique of liberalism and the problem of exile. Sheppard follows Strauss from Europe to the United States, a journey of a conservative Weimar Jew struggling with modern liberalism and the existential and political contours of exile. Strauss sought to resolve the conflicts of a Jew unwilling to surrender loyalty to his ancestral community and equally unwilling to adhere to the strictures of orthodox observance. Strauss saw truth and wisdom as transcending particular religious and national communities, as well as the modern enlightened humanism in which he himself had been nurtured. In his efforts to navigate between the Jewish and the philosophical, the ancient and the modern, Berlin and New York, Strauss developed a distinctively programmatic way of reading and writing "between the lines." Sheppard recaptures the complexity and intrigue of this project which has been ignored by those who both reject and claim Strauss's legacy.

Spinoza's Ethics

Spinoza's Ethics PDF Author: Beth Lord
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748634517
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Everything you need to know about Spinoza's Ethics in one volume.The Ethics presents a complete metaphysical, epistemological and ethical world-view that is immensely inspiring. However, it is also an extremely difficult text to read. This book takes readers through the text, stopping at the most perplexing passages to explain key terms, unfold arguments, offer concrete examples and raise questions for further thought. It is designed to be read alongside the Ethics, enabling students to think critically about Spinoza's views and build an understanding of his complex system.