Explore the vast range of titles available.

Defines how Jewish intellectuals of the Enlightenment influenced later European revolutionary movementsIn the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world's most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and other philosophers living in a rigid, hierarchical society colored by a deeply hostile theology first developed a modern revolutionary consciousness.Leading intellectual historian Jonathan Israel shows how the radical ideas in the early Marx's writings were influenced by this legacy, which, he argues, must be understood as part of the Radical Enlightenment. He traces the rise of a Jewish revolutionary tendency demanding social equality and universal human rights throughout the Western world. Israel considers how these writers understood Jewish marginalization and ghettoization and the edifice of superstition, prejudice, and ignorance that sustained them. He investigates how the quest for Jewish emancipation led these thinkers to formulate sweeping theories of social and legal reform that paved the way for revolutionary actions that helped change the world from 1789 onward-but hardly as they intended.

This article examines the impact of 19th-century Jewish emancipation on architecture through the example of the Yüksek Kaldırım Ashkenazi Synagogue in Istanbul. The emancipation process enhanced the public visibility of Jews, and synagogue architecture emerged as a medium reflecting this new search for identity. The adoption of Orientalist architectural trends—which became widespread in 19th-century Europe—as an expression of Jewish identity led to the incorporation of Eastern styles, particularly those influenced by Islamic and Andalusian esthetics, in synagogue design. Within this framework, the article analyzes the architectural design of the Yüksek Kaldırım Ashkenazi Synagogue, commissioned by an Ashkenazi congregation that had migrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and explores the intellectual and historical context behind its Orientalist style. Identity representation is assessed through architectural elements such as arch forms, ornamentation, and structural arrangements inspired by Islamic architecture. The architect, construction process, and the social position of the Ashkenazi community within the Ottoman Empire are also examined through historical documentation. In conclusion, the synagogue constructed in Istanbul is interpreted as a reflection of the Orientalist architectural approach embraced by Jewish communities in Europe, as manifested within the Ottoman context, drawing attention to the relationship between identity, belonging, and architectural representation.

This article examines the impact of 19th-century Jewish emancipation on architecture through the example of the Yüksek Kaldırım Ashkenazi Synagogue in Istanbul. The emancipation process enhanced the public visibility of Jews, and synagogue architecture emerged as a medium reflecting this new search for identity. The adoption of Orientalist architectural trends—which became widespread in 19th-century Europe—as an expression of Jewish identity led to the incorporation of Eastern styles, particularly those influenced by Islamic and Andalusian esthetics, in synagogue design. Within this framework, the article analyzes the architectural design of the Yüksek Kaldırım Ashkenazi Synagogue, commissioned by an Ashkenazi congregation that had migrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and explores the intellectual and historical context behind its Orientalist style. Identity representation is assessed through architectural elements such as arch forms, ornamentation, and structural arrangements inspired by Islamic architecture. The architect, construction process, and the social position of the Ashkenazi community within the Ottoman Empire are also examined through historical documentation. In conclusion, the synagogue constructed in Istanbul is interpreted as a reflection of the Orientalist architectural approach embraced by Jewish communities in Europe, as manifested within the Ottoman context, drawing attention to the relationship between identity, belonging, and architectural representation.

This study explores the extent to which Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem engages with Protestant sources in its portrayal of rabbinic tradition, which will allow further light to be shed on the pivotal role of rabbinic Judaism and its representations within the emotionally charged polemics surrounding Jewish emancipation in eighteenth-century Prussia. This examination demonstrates that Mendelssohn’s idealized perception of rabbinic thought is deeply embedded in anti-rabbinic Protestant works, whose framework aids him in shaping his own unique outlook. By analyzing Mendelssohn’s deployment of the notion of contradiction, this article shows how his argumentative strategies in Jerusalem efficaciously counter well-known Protestant patterns of critique against rabbinic Judaism. By focusing on his idiosyncratic quotations and insinuations, it recovers the Christian works that he draws on and appropriates for his apologetic objectives and establishes that he uses Johann A. Eisenmenger for his depiction of the nature of rabbinic discursive practices while speaking out against “many a pedant” for their assertion that the rabbis disregarded the principle of noncontradiction. This article argues that Mendelssohn is alluding to eighteenth-century Protestant theologians who unreservedly follow Eisenmenger’s anti-rabbinic perspective and elaborates on how Mendelssohn entirely reframes this view as a conceptual strength of Judaism’s dialogical essence, thus rendering it compatible with the Enlightenment-based Weltanschauung.

Jews and the Militaryis the first comprehensive and comparative look at Jews' involvement in the military and their attitudes toward war from the 1600s until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Derek Penslar shows that although Jews have often been described as people who shun the army, in fact they have frequently been willing, even eager, to do military service, and only a minuscule minority have been pacifists. Penslar demonstrates that Israel's military ethos did not emerge from a vacuum and that long before the state's establishment, Jews had a vested interest in military affairs. Spanning Europe, North America, and the Middle East, Penslar discusses the myths and realities of Jewish draft dodging, how Jews reacted to facing their coreligionists in battle, the careers of Jewish officers and their reception in the Jewish community, the effects of World War I on Jewish veterans, and Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Penslar culminates with a study of Israel's War of Independence as a Jewish world war, which drew on the military expertise and financial support of a mobilized, global Jewish community. He considers how military service was a central issue in debates about Jewish emancipation and a primary indicator of the position of Jews in any given society. Deconstructing old stereotypes,Jews and the Militaryradically transforms our understanding of Jews' historic relationship to war and military power.

Enlightenment in the Colony opens up the history of the \"Jewish question\" for the first time to a broader discussion--one of the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modern times, and in particular the crisis of Muslim identity in modern India. Aamir Mufti identifies the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India as a colonial variation of what he calls \"the exemplary crisis of minority\"--Jewishness in Europe. He shows how the emergence of this conflict in the late nineteenth century represented an early instance of the reinscription of the \"Jewish question\" in a non-Western society undergoing modernization under colonial rule. In so doing, he charts one particular route by which this European phenomenon linked to nation-states takes on a global significance.

This essay examines the concept of shelilat hagalut (negation of exile/Diaspora) and argues that in many ways, the political and structural changes entailed in the granting of citizenship to Jews in modern Western nation-states can be viewed as already constituting a negation of galut well before the emergence of Zionism. Through comparison to traditional rabbinic conceptions of Jewish communal-national status, we will see that the modern insistence upon national identification with a geographically bounded nation-state constituted a direct undermining of previous theopolitical conceptions of Israel as a geographically unbounded \"nation in exile.\" In light of this reframing, the usage in contemporary discourse of \"center\" and \"Diaspora\" is shown largely to constitute a false binary that generates unproductive and interminable dispute between \"diasporists\" and classical Zionist \"centralists.\" By contrast, clarifying the ways in which ideologies of European emancipation and of Zionism have both been complicit in negating galut can aid in producing better understandings of the relation between past and present Jewish culture and conceptuality, and in enabling more fruitful intellectual efforts to engage presently unresolved conflicts in the spheres of Jewish politics, culture, and identity.

The miracle narrative of the first oratorio by C. P. E. Bach – the escape of the people of Israel from the thirst death by Moses – comes from the Book of Exodus . In the course of the second part of the work, however, the figure of Moses is unexpectedly taken over by the Redeemer. The place turns out to be a paraphrase of Genesis 3:15. In the context of the German Enlightenment the biblical story can be interpreted as a reference to the assimilation process of the Jewish community. The composed libretto includes an interpolation, which speaks about the real advent of the Messiah, thus placing the work among the representatives of the messianic-cult of the Enlightenment. The interpolated text section focuses on the religion above religions as imagined by the latitudinarianism of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment and testifies to the Masonic spirit in it. The text of the final chorus re-interprets the church dedication (the original function of Bach’s oratorio) as the dedication of the invisible Church: the soul.

In an era of heightened concern about injustice in relations of identity and difference, political theorists often prescribe equal recognition as a remedy for the ills of subordination. Drawing on the philosophy of Hegel, they envision a system of reciprocal knowledge and esteem, in which the affirming glance of others lets everyone be who they really are. This book challenges the equation of recognition with justice. Patchen Markell mines neglected strands of the concept's genealogy and reconstructs an unorthodox interpretation of Hegel, who, in the unexpected company of Sophocles, Aristotle, Arendt, and others, reveals why recognition's promised satisfactions are bound to disappoint, and even to stifle. Written with exceptional clarity, the book develops an alternative account of the nature and sources of identity-based injustice in which the pursuit of recognition is part of the problem rather than the solution. And it articulates an alternative conception of justice rooted not in the recognition of identity of the other but in the acknowledgment of our own finitude in the face of a future thick with surprise. Moving deftly among contemporary political philosophers (including Taylor and Kymlicka), the close interpretation of ancient and modern texts (Hegel'sPhenomenology, Aristotle'sPoetics, and more), and the exploration of rich case studies drawn from literature (Antigone), history (Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Prussia), and modern politics (official multiculturalism), Bound by Recognition is at once a sustained treatment of the problem of recognition and a sequence of virtuoso studies.

The construction of the Great Synagogue in Stockholm during the 1860s initiated Jewish communal debates on the position and public presence of Jews in the Swedish pre-emancipatory society. An investigation into the construction process not only reveals various Jewish opinions on the sacred building, but also the pivotal role of Swedish-Christian actors in shaping the synagogue’s location, architecture, and the way it was presented in the public narrative. The Jewish community’s conceptualization and the Swedish society’s reception of the new synagogue turned it into a space on the ‘frontier.’ Conceptually situated in-between the Jewish community and the Swedish-Christian society, it encouraged cross-border interactions and became a physical product of the Jewish and Swedish-Christian entangled relationship. Non-Jewish architect Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander, historical figures prominent in the Swedish national narrative, and local and national newspapers were incorporated by the Jewish lay leadership into the creative process, and they influenced and circulated the community’s self-understanding as both Swedish citizens and Jews of a modern religion. The construction process and final product strategically communicated Jewish belonging to the Swedish nation during the last decade of social and legal inequality, thus adding to the contemporary political debate on Jewish emancipation.