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In the lives of ordinary people are the truths of history. Such truths abound in the diaries of Jacob Epp, a Russian Mennonite school-teacher, lay minister, farmer, and village secretary in southern Ukraine. This abridged translation of his diaries offers a remarkably vivid picture of Mennonite community life in Imperial Russia during a period of troubled change. Epp’s writings reveal a skilled and honest diarist of deep feelings, and tell a human story that no conventional historical account could hope to equal. The diaries overflow with the details of his workaday world. Family, village, church, and community routines are broken by trips to market, visits to other Mennonite settlements, and a memorable steamer voyage to boomtown Odessa on the Black Sea. He chronicles his long-time involvement in an unusual Imperial experiment in which Mennonites were “model farmers” in Jewish villages. Harvey L. Dyck places the diaries in their historical, ethnocultural, social, religious, economic, and political settings. Based on archival research, interviews, travels, and consultations with other scholars, his detailed and perceptive introduction and analysis trace Jacob Epp’s life and present a sketch and interpretation of his larger family, community, and Imperial world. With striking clarity the diaries and introduction together re-create a time and way of life marked by controversy and flux. They reflect significant facets of the experience of ethno-religious minorities in Imperial Russia and of the development of the southern Ukrainian frontier. Above all, they fill significant missing pages of the great community-centred story of Russian Mennonite life. This book is richly illustrated with maps, black-and-white photographs, and watercolour paintings by Cornelius Hildebrand, Jacob Epp’s former village school pupil and later brother-in-law.

The span of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg's life (1884-1966) illuminates the religious and intellectual dilemmas that traditional Jewry has faced over the past century. Rabbi Weinberg became a central ideologue of modern Orthodoxy because of his positive attitude to secular studies and Zionism and his willingness to respond to social change in interpreting the halakhah, despite his traditional training in a Lithuanian yeshiva. But Weinberg was an unusual man: even at a time when he was defending the traditional yeshiva against all attempts at reform, he always maintained an interest in the wider world. He left Lithuania for Germany at the beginning of the First World War, attended the University of Giessen, and increasingly identified with the Berlin school of German Orthodoxy. Although initially an apologist for the Nazi regime, he was soon recognized as German Orthodoxy's most eminent halakhic authority in its efforts to maintain religious tradition in the face of Nazi persecution. His approach, then and in his later halakhic writings, including the famous Seridei esh, derived from the conviction that the attempt to shore up Orthodoxy by increased religious stringency would only reduce its popular appeal. - Using a great deal of unpublished material, including private correspondence, Marc Shapiro discusses many aspects of Weinberg's life. In doing so he elucidates many institutional and intellectual phenomena of the Jewish world, a number of which have so far received little scholarly attention: the yeshivas of Lithuania; the state of the Lithuanian rabbinate; themusarmovement; the Jews of eastern Europe in Weimar Germany; the Torah im Derekh Eretz movement and its variants; Orthodox Jewish attitudes towards Wissenschaft des Judentums; and the special problems of Orthodox Jews in Nazi Germany. Throughout, he shows the complex nature of Weinberg's character and the inner struggles of a man being pulled in different directions. Compellingly and authoritatively written, his fascinating conclusions are quite different from those presented in earlier historical treatments of the period.

In his poetry collections, Jacob D. Salzer beckons readers to unplug from the sea of digital distractions to soak in the beauty and wonder of life through the art of haiku and tanka. BookLife chatted with Salzer about the power of the art form, his creative process, and how he’s reaching like-minded readers.

Cette contribution vise à répertorier les traces d’une influence de la mystique dans le corpus fichtéen et à définir un cadre interprétatif pour expliquer le recours par Fichte à un langage mystique dans L’Initiation à la vie bienheureuse . Un examen attentif des diverses sources laisse apparaître que la tradition mystique et Jacob Böhme en particulier, portés par un puissant souffle poétique, peuvent remplir à l’égard de la philosophie un rôle propédeutique par leur capacité à élever le public au suprasensible, mais doivent également y borner leurs prétentions. Fichte dénonce en effet sur un plan philosophique leur caractère dogmatique et ne leur accorde de valeur qu’éclairés par la critique. This contribution aims to investigate the traces of an influence of mysticism in the Fichtean corpus and to define an interpretative framework to explain Fichte’s use of mystical language in The Way Towards the Blessed Life. A careful examination of the various sources reveals that the mystical tradition, and Jacob Böhme in particular, carried by a powerful poetic voice, can play a propaedeutic role with regard to philosophy thanks to their ability to raise the public to the suprasensible, but must also limit their claims in this respect. Fichte does indeed denounce on a philosophical level their dogmatic character and gives them value only when enlightened by criticism.

À l’automne 1970, la parution quasi simultanée des ouvrages de Jacques Monod et de François Jacob renouvelle la réflexion sur le fait biologique dans l’espace culturel et scientifique français. Dans ce texte, nous décrivons les préoccupations qui ont été à l’origine de l’écriture du Hasard et la nécessité et de La Logique du vivant . Nous soulignons les prémices de leur conception et leur élaboration progressive dans la carrière des deux biologistes en considérant notamment leurs enseignements au Collège de France. Porteurs d’une vision du monde informée par la biologie moléculaire, ces ouvrages sont les témoins des bouleversements théoriques qu’ont connus les sciences de la vie au milieu du siècle dernier. In the fall of 1970, the almost simultaneous publications by Jacques Monod and François Jacob renewed the reflection on biology in France in both the cultural and the scientific spheres. In this text, we present the preoccupations that were at the origin of Chance and necessity and The Logic of life . We emphasize the basis of their conception and their progressive elaboration in the careers of the two biologists, with a special focus on their teaching at the Collège de France. Informed by molecular biology, these works testify to the theoretical upheavals that the life sciences underwent in the middle of the twentieth century.

Dans Le Hasard et la nécessité , et dans La Logique du vivant , parus tous deux en 1970, Jacques Monod et François Jacob donnèrent une portée emblématique aux notions cybernétiques. Cette revendication s’avérait pourtant très ambiguë, dans le contexte d’une consolidation disciplinaire considérant que la collaboration avec des modélisateurs (mathématiciens ou ingénieurs) était étrangère à la biologie moléculaire. Cet article propose de mieux cerner la place de la cybernétique dans ces ouvrages de 1970, sur le plan théorique (les concepts) mais aussi sur le plan pratique (l’interdisciplinarité). L’analyse suit l’ordre logique et chronologique de la circulation des idées : la première partie précise sommairement les idées biologiques de Norbert Wiener, et montre qu’elles ne sont pas toutes cybernétiques (spécialement la question de l’hérédité). La deuxième partie réinterroge le statut du lexique cybernétique chez Monod et Jacob à la lumière de leur refus de collaborer avec des modélisateurs. Après ces deux cadrages successifs, la troisième partie aborde la place de la cybernétique dans les ouvrages de 1970, en y examinant notamment les notions d’information, de programme, et de téléonomie. De Wiener à Monod et Jacob, il apparaît que l’hérédité, pensée comme réplication d’un programme sujette à du « bruit » mutatif, restait conforme au néodarwinisme et au « dogme central » de la biologie moléculaire en contrôlant tous les mécanismes cybernétiques de l’organisme sans contenir elle-même un tel mécanisme ; ainsi, la biologie de Monod et Jacob, vue d’aujourd’hui, ne fut que très modérément cybernétique, sa continuité avec la pensée biologique de Wiener ne passant pas entièrement par l’idée cybernétique d’inversion de l’entropie au moyen de la rétroaction. In Chance and necessity and The Logic of life (both published in 1970), Jacques Monod and François Jacob attributed a central role to cybernetics. This approach was nevertheless ambiguous, as their vision of molecular biology did not include interdisciplinary collaboration with systems scientists. This paradoxical attitude, neglected by historians, calls for a better assessment of the conceptual and practical continuities and discontinuities between cybernetics and molecular biology. This paper contributes to such an assessment by revisiting the cybernetic themes in these books. It follows the logical and chronological order of the circulation of these ideas by contextualizing these themes within two successive frameworks : the first part of the paper deals with the biological thinking of Norbert Wiener, and shows that it is not entirely cybernetic (especially regarding heredity). Part 2 questions the status of the cybernetic vocabulary used by Monod and Jacob in light of their rejection of interdisciplinary collaboration with systems scientists for developing models of complex networks. The final part examines the place of cybernetics in the two books through the concepts of information, program, and teleonomy. From Wiener to Monod and Jacob, the thinking of heredity as the replication of a genetic program featuring mutational noise remained in the line of neo-Darwinism and the « central dogma » of molecular biology : the program would control feedback mechanisms in the body, without including its own feedback mechanism to adapt and learn from experience. Thus, in retrospect, Monod and Jacob’s biology was moderately cybernetic, and its continuity with Wiener’s biological thinking was not based solely on the cybernetic idea of opposing entropy through feedback mechanisms.

L’un des traits les plus remarquables de l’histoire naturelle au xviii e  siècle est l’émergence, puis le triomphe du linnéisme. Cependant, cette approche ne fut pas acceptée sans difficulté et fit l’objet dans les années 1740 de critiques plus ou moins radicales, la plus célèbre étant celle de Buffon. Le présent article s’intéresse plus particulièrement à un auteur prussien, Jacob Theodor Klein, qui mit lui aussi en cause la classification linnéenne des animaux et proposa une distribution alternative plus simple, mieux adaptée, selon lui, à la pratique des naturalistes, spécialement à celle des collectionneurs. Ses idées trouvèrent un certain écho en Europe, notamment en France où plusieurs de ses ouvrages furent traduits, probablement à l’instigation de Réaumur. One of the most remarkable features of natural history in the eighteenth century was the emergence and triumph of Linnaeism. This approach, however, was not accepted without difficulty and was more or less radically criticized in the 1740s, most famously by Buffon. This paper focuses on a Prussian scientist, Jacob Theodor Klein, who also challenged the Linnaean classification of animals, and proposed an alternative distribution, which, according to him, was easier to use and so was better suited to the practice of naturalists, especially collectors. His views attracted a certain amount of attention in Europe, not least in France, where many works of Klein were translated, probably at the behest of Réaumur.