The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 / Edition 1

by David Sorkin

Overview

David Sorkin here argues that emancipation and the encounter with German culture and society led not to assimilation but to the creation of a subculture that was the source of German Jewry's preeminent contribution to Jewish and German culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814328286
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	08/01/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

David Sorkin is Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the co-editor of Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 17501870 (Wayne State University Press, 1998), and author of Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (University of California Press, 1996).

Table of Contents

	Introduction	3
I	The Ideology of Emancipation
1.	Emancipation and Regeneration	13
2.	The Origins of the Haskala	41
3.	The Politics of the Haskala	63
4.	The Ideology and the Public Sphere	79
II	The Subculture
5.	The New Bourgeoisie	107
6.	Ideologues and Institutions	124
7.	Secular Culture	140
8.	Religious Tradition	156
	Conclusion	173
	Notes	179
	Bibliography	225
	Index	247

Editorial Reviews

This book is surely one of the most challenging, thought-provoking and indeed brilliant among recent studies in modern Jewish history. In an original and profound manner, David Sorkin has reconceptualized the critical period during which German Jews in significant numbers first integrated into non-Jewish society. He has provided a distinctly new way of understanding that process. His work both deserves and requires serious consideration and evaluation.

Studies in Contemporary Jewry

[Sorkin] has a subtlety of insight and a novelty of approach which makes what he has to say new and compelling.

Times Higher Education Supplement

"Represents an important and original analysis of a complex and significant transition in modern Jewish history."—American Historical Review

"Outlines with keen insight and perception the tangled relationship between Jews and those German-speaking lands which later—much later—were to constitute the German Empire...Dazzlingly brilliant...[I]t may reorient German as well as Jewish historical thinking."—Judaism

"Much of the ground covered in David Sorkin's splendid book is old, but he has a subtlety of insight and a novelty of approach which makes what he has to say new and compelling."—Times Higher Education Supplement

"Sorkin has clearly offered one of the most imaginative and innovative portraits of the Jewish experience in Germany."—Theory and Society

"Ambitious and...subtle in its approach."—Journal of Modern History

"Sorkin's well-written, thoroughly researched monograph on the period of emancipation explores an important theme in German-Jewish history: how this minority, gradually absorbing elements of the majority culture, transformed itself into a unique, dynamic, but ultimately threatened subculture."—CHOICE

"Both a model exercise in intellectual history and a significant contribution to Oxford's Studies in Jewish History."—The Historian

"The idea of a 'subculture', however disparate its components, is extremely valuable and takes the historiography of German Jewry away from the debate on symbiosis, assimilation, etc. to an altogether higher historical level that does justice to the actual experience of German Jewry. This is Sorkin's unquestionable achievement."—Journal of Jewish Studies

"Thought-provoking...It deserves careful study."—Jewish Chronicle

"This book is surely one of the most challenging, thought-provoking and indeed brilliant among recent studies in modern Jewish history"—Studies in Contemporary Jewry: An Annual VIII

From the Publisher