New Perspectives on the Haskalah

by Shmuel Feiner, Shmuel Feiner (Editor), David Sorkin (Editor)

Overview

This volume, written by a range of scholars in history and literature, offers a new understanding of one of the central cultural and ideological movements among Jews in modern times. Disengaging the Haskalah from the questions of modernization or emancipation that have hitherto dominated the scholarship, the contributors have put the Haskalah under a microscope in order to restore detail and texture to the individuals, ideas, and activities that were its makers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, they replace simple dichotomies with nuanced distinctions, presenting the relationship between 'tradition' and Haskalah as a spectrum of closely linked cultural options rather than a fateful choice between old and new or good and evil. The essays address major and minor figures. They ask whether there was such an entity as an 'early Haskalah', or a Haskalah movement in England; look at key issues such as the relationship of the Haskalah to Orthodoxy and Hasidism; and also treat such neglected subjects as the position of women. New Perspectives on the Haskalah will interest all students of modern Jewish history, literature, and culture. Contributors Harris Bor, Edward Breuer (Loyola University, Chicago), Tova Cohen (Bar-Ilan University), Immanuel Etkes (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Shmuel Feiner (Bar-Ilan University), Yehuda Friedlander (Bar-Ilan University), David B. Ruderman (University of Pennsylvania), Joseph Salmon (Ben-Gurion University), Nancy Sinkoff (Rutgers University), David Sorkin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Shmuel Werses (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) Shmuel Feiner is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, and responsible for the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Prussia. He is the author of Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Consciousness, published in Hebrew in 1995 and in translation by the Littman Library (forthcoming), and of I. E. Kovner, Sefer Hamatsref: An Unknown Maskilic Critic of Jewish Society in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (1998).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904113263
Publisher:	The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press
Publication date:	01/09/2004
Series:	Littman Library of Jewish Civilization
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Shmuel Feiner is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar- Ilan University and chairman of the Jerusalem Leo Baeck Institute. He is the author of The Jewish Enlightenment (2004), Moses Mendelssohn, Sage of Modernity (2010), and The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2011).

David Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of History and Jack H. Skirball Director, Center for Jewish Studies, City University of New York Graduate Center. He was formerly Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987), Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996), and The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000), and is co-editor of Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870 (1998). He has received grants from the British Academy and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Previously a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and St Antony's College, Oxford, he has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen.

Table of Contents

	Note on Transliteration	ix
	Introduction	1
1.	The Early Haskalah	9
2.	Naphtali Herz Wessely and the Cultural Dislocations of an Eighteenth-Century Maskil	27
3.	Enlightenment Values, Jewish Ethics: The Haskalah's Transformation of the Traditional Musar Genre	48
4.	Was there a 'Haskalah' in England? Reconsidering an Old question	64
5.	Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanow	86
6.	The Struggle of the Mitnagedim and Maskilim against Hasidism: Rabbi Jacob Emden and Judah Leib Mieses	103
7.	Magic and Miracle-Workers in the Literature of the Haskalah	113
8.	Portrait of the Maskil as a Young Man	128
9.	Reality and its Refraction in Descriptions of Women in Haskalah Fiction	144
10.	Enlightened Rabbis as Reformers in Russian Jewish Society	166
11.	Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah	184
	Glossary	221
	Notes on Contributors	224
	Bibliography	225
	Index	251

Editorial Reviews

Contributors attempt to separate the Haskalah from questions of modernization and emancipation in this examination of one of the central cultural and ideological movements among Jews in modern times. They look at individuals, ideas, and activities of the Haskalah during the 18th and 19th centuries. Topics include the Haskalah in England, the Haskalah's transformation of the traditional genre, and descriptions of women in Haskalah fiction. Contributors are academics in Jewish history, theology, Hebrew literature, and Jewish studies. Feiner teaches modern Jewish history at Bar Ilan University. Sorkin is professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Distributed by ISBS. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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