Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Author: Nils Roemer
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2005-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0299211738

German Jews were fully assimilated and secularized in the nineteenth century—or so it is commonly assumed. In Jewish Scholarship and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Nils Roemer challenges this assumption, finding that religious sentiments, concepts, and rhetoric found expression through a newly emerging theological historicism at the center of modern German Jewish culture. Modern German Jewish identity developed during the struggle for emancipation, debates about religious and cultural renewal, and battles against anti-Semitism. A key component of this identity was historical memory, which Jewish scholars had begun to infuse with theological perspectives beginning in the 1850s. After German reunification in the early 1870s, Jewish intellectuals reevaluated their enthusiastic embrace of liberalism and secularism. Without abandoning the ideal of tolerance, they asserted a right to cultural religious difference for themselves--an ideal they held to even more tightly in the face of growing anti-Semitism. This newly re-theologized Jewish history, Roemer argues, helped German Jews fend off anti-Semitic attacks by strengthening their own sense of their culture and tradition.

Studies on Steinschneider

Studies on Steinschneider
Author: Reimund Leicht
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 635
Release: 2011-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004183248

The present volume is devoted to the study of the life and work of Moritz (Moshe) Steinschneider (1816-1907). It shows that far from being a “mere bibliographer,” Steinschneider pursued a precise scientific agenda. This is a noteworthy contribution to our understanding of the project of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship

Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship
Author: Anne O. Albert
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 081229825X

The birth of modern Jewish studies can be traced to the nineteenth-century emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a movement to promote a scholarly approach to the study of Judaism and Jewish culture. Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship offers a collection of essays examining how Wissenschaft extended beyond its original German intellectual contexts and was transformed into a diverse, global field. From the early expansion of the new scholarly approaches into Jewish publications across Europe to their translation and reinterpretation in the twentieth century, the studies included here collectively trace a path through largely neglected subject matter, newly recognized as deserving attention. Beginning with an introduction that surveys the field's German origins, fortunes, and contexts, the volume goes on to document dimensions of the growth of Wissenschaft des Judentums elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world. Some of the contributions turn to literary and semantic issues, while others reveal the penetration of Jewish studies into new national contexts that include Hungary, Italy, and even India. Individual essays explore how the United States, along with Israel, emerged as a main center for Jewish historical scholarship and how critical Jewish scholarship began to accommodate Zionist ideology originating in Eastern Europe and eventually Marxist ideology, primarily in the Soviet Union. Finally, the focus of the volume moves on to the land of Israel, focusing on the reception of Orientalism and Jewish scholarly contacts with Yemenite and native Muslim intellectuals. Taken together, the contributors to the volume offer new material and fresh approaches that rethink the relationship of Jewish studies to the larger enterprise of critical scholarship while highlighting its relevance to the history of humanistic inquiry worldwide.

Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature

Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature
Author: Jonathan M. Hess
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804786194

Recent scholarship has brought to light the existence of a dynamic world of specifically Jewish forms of literature in the nineteenth century—fiction by Jews, about Jews, and often designed largely for Jews. This volume makes this material accessible to English speakers for the first time, offering a selection of Jewish fiction from France, Great Britain, and the German-speaking world. The stories are remarkably varied, ranging from historical fiction to sentimental romance, to social satire, but they all engage with key dilemmas including assimilation, national allegiance, and the position of women. Offering unique insights into the hopes and fears of Jews experiencing the dramatic impact of modernity, the literature collected in this book will provide compelling reading for all those interested in modern Jewish history and culture, whether general readers, students, or scholars.

The Modernity of Others

The Modernity of Others
Author: Ari Joskowicz
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2013-11-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804788405

The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions
Author: Jonathan Skolnik
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2014-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0804790590

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.

Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship

Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship
Author: Anne O. Albert
Publisher: Jewish Culture and Contexts
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2022
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780812253641

The birth of modern Jewish studies can be traced to the nineteenth-century emergence of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, a movement to promote a scholarly approach to the study of Judaism and Jewish culture. Frontiers of Jewish Scholarship offers a collection of essays examining how Wissenschaft extended beyond its original German intellectual contexts and was transformed into a diverse, global field. From the early expansion of the new scholarly approaches into Jewish publications across Europe to their translation and reinterpretation in the twentieth century, the studies included here collectively trace a path through largely neglected subject matter, newly recognized as deserving attention. Beginning with an introduction that surveys the field's German origins, fortunes, and contexts, the volume goes on to document dimensions of the growth of Wissenschaft des Judentums elsewhere in Europe and throughout the world. Some of the contributions turn to literary and semantic issues, while others reveal the penetration of Jewish studies into new national contexts that include Hungary, Italy, and even India. Individual essays explore how the United States, along with Israel, emerged as a main center for Jewish historical scholarship and how critical Jewish scholarship began to accommodate Zionist ideology originating in Eastern Europe and eventually Marxist ideology, primarily in the Soviet Union. Finally, the focus of the volume moves on to the land of Israel, focusing on the reception of Orientalism and Jewish scholarly contacts with Yemenite and native Muslim intellectuals. Taken together, the contributors to the volume offer new material and fresh approaches that rethink the relationship of Jewish studies to the larger enterprise of critical scholarship while highlighting its relevance to the history of humanistic inquiry worldwide.

Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness

Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness
Author: Christian Wiese
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 680
Release: 2007-05-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9047420047

The volume, composed by excellent scholars from different academic disciplines, is a comprehensive handbook devoted to the complex relationship between modern Judaism and historical thinking in Europe, the United States, and Israel from the Enlightenment to the present. Apart from analyzing the emergence of a new scholarly historical paradigm during this period, the contributions interpret the interaction and the tensions between Jewish historiography and other disciplines such as literature, theology, sociology, and philosophy, describe the way historical consciousness was popularized and used for ideological purposes and explore the impact of different – religious or secular – identities on the historical representation of the Jewish past. A final part envisions new theoretical and methodological concepts within the field, including cultural studies and gender studies.

"We Will Never Yield"

Author: David A. Meola
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253065240

How did German Jews present their claims for equality to everyday Germans in the first half of the nineteenth century? We Will Never Yield offers the first English-language study of the role of the German press in the fight for Jewish agency and participation during the 1840s. David Meola explores how the German press became a key venue for public debates over Jewish emancipation; religious, educational, and occupational reforms; and the role of Jews in German civil society, even against a background of escalating violence against the Jews in Germany. We Will Never Yield sheds light on the struggle for equality by German Jews in the 1840s and demonstrates the value of this type of archival source of Jewish voices that has been previously underappreciated by historians of Jewish history.