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Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and other alternatives emerged and a long, circuitous search for identity began, it was no longer evident that the definition of Jewishness would be based on the beliefs and practices surrounding the study of the Torah. InThe Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century EuropeShmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in the process and by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings. On the one hand, a great majority of observant Jews still accepted the authority of the Talmud and the leadership of the rabbis; on the other, there was a gradually more conspicuous minority of \"Epicureans\" and \"freethinkers.\" As the ground shifted, each individual was marked according to his or her place on the path between faith and heresy, between devoutness and permissiveness or indifference. Building on his award-winningJewish Enlightenment, Feiner unfolds the story of critics of religion, mostly Ashkenazic Jews, who did not take active part in the secular intellectual revival known as the Haskalah. In open or concealed rebellion, Feiner's subjects lived primarily in the cities of western and central Europe-Altona-Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Breslau, and Prague. They participated as \"fashionable\" Jews adopting the habits and clothing of the surrounding Gentile society. Several also adopted the deist worldview of Enlightenment Europe, rejecting faith in revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the obligation to observe the commandments. Peering into the synagogue, observing individuals in the coffeehouse or strolling the boulevards, and peeking into the bedroom, Feiner recovers forgotten critics of religion from both the margins and the center of Jewish discourse. His is a pioneering work on the origins of one of the most significant transformations of modern Jewish history.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity.The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.

How did the Bible survive the Enlightenment? In this book, Jonathan Sheehan shows how Protestant translators and scholars in the eighteenth century transformed the Bible from a book justified by theology to one justified by culture. In doing so, the Bible was made into the cornerstone of Western heritage and invested with meaning, authority, and significance even for a secular age. The Enlightenment Bible offers a new history of the Bible in the century of its greatest crisis and, in turn, a new vision of this century and its effects on religion. Although the Enlightenment has long symbolized the corrosive effects of modernity on religion, Sheehan shows how the Bible survived, and even thrived in this cradle of ostensible secularization. Indeed, in eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, biblical scholarship and translation became more vigorous and culturally significant than at any time since the Reformation. From across the theological spectrum, European scholars--especially German and English--exerted tremendous energies to rejuvenate the Bible, reinterpret its meaning, and reinvest it with new authority. Poets, pedagogues, philosophers, literary critics, philologists, and historians together built a post-theological Bible, a monument for a new religious era. These literati forged the Bible into a cultural text, transforming the theological core of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the end, the Enlightenment gave the Bible the power to endure the corrosive effects of modernity, not as a theological text but as the foundation of Western culture.

What makes the new Hebrew literature “new” is its claim of the role of political authority and the mission to communicate both modern ideas and modern practical realities to the Jewish people. The choice to write in Hebrew, in this respect, was central for this new literary movement because the Hebrew language represented the last surviving vestige of the national sovereignty of the Jewish people.

This book is the first systematic comparison of the civic integration of Jews in the United States and France--specifically, from the two countries' revolutions through the American republic and the Napoleonic era (1775-1815). Frederic Jaher develops a vehicle for a broader and uniquely rich analysis of French and American nation-building and political culture. He returns grand theory to historical scholarship by examining the Jewish encounter with state formation and Jewish acquisition of civic equality from the perspective of the \"paradigm of liberal inclusiveness\" as formulated by Alexis de Tocqueville and Louis Hartz.

The central cultural problem of Europe today is not how different national cultures will be integrated into a European Union, but how secular society will interact with European Muslims. Europe has a substantial minority Muslim population, and many Christians sought as a result to insert Christian tradition into the European constitution.

[Daniel Boyarin] makes no pretense that his Unheroic Conduct is a work of disinterested, objective scholarship, a literary genre whose very existence he flatly denies.(1) His latest book can be better understood as an act of resistance, a part of a 'Jewish anticolonial project' aimed at 'changing ethos and culture' (xviii, xxi). He wants to persuade the Jews to reverse, at least in part, 'the Westernization process' of which they have for centuries been the victims. Since the beginning of their absorption into the Western world, he maintains, they have been adopting the deplorable orientation to life eschewed by most of their ancestors. The 'masculine' values that so many East European Jews once had the good sense to dismiss as goyim nakhes now shape the ideals of their descendants as well as other Jews. Boyarin wants contemporary Jews to relinquish these ideals and to return to a suitably modified version of 'Eydlkayt; or, the civility of the Ostjude' (51). If they would do so, he believes, it would be good not only for the Jews but for other people as well. By celebrating 'rabbinic Jewish maleness,' Boyarin seeks 'to retrieve it as an Archimedean lever to help move the world of the Western phallocentric culture' (11). The 'alternative Jewish form of maleness...known as Eydlkayt (literally, `nobility,' but in Yiddish `gentleness and delicacy'!)' was for a long time 'the central and dominant cultural ideal, not a marginalized alternative' for Ashkenazi Jews (23). But it is not an ideal that has gone unchallenged. 'For some three hundred years now,' writes Boyarin, 'Jews have been the target of the civilizing mission in Europe' (xvii). In response to this assault, there was a transformation of Eydlkayt, within the realm of' Yidishkayt, that is, Ashkenazi secular culture' into what Boyarin calls, along with Marc Kaminsky, an 'ethics of the household and a sphere of the domestic.' This ethics involves an idealization of the mentsh tantamount, in Boyarin's eyes, to 'a secular continuation of the rabbinic opposition to European romantic `masculinism\" (37). Boyarin's 'careful' examination of [Theodor Herzl]'s writings, which focuses mostly on his diaries, plays, and less significant Zionist writings, shows that the adored 'father of the Jewish state' was someone who had a deep loathing for his own people. Having internalized the charges of [Richard Wagner] and other contemporary antisemites, he perceived the Jews as corrupt, debased, passive, and weak. As Herzl saw things, they had to be totally transformed into people who resembled European Gentiles in every way possible. Only because he thought that it would be dishonorable and cowardly to effect such a transformation through conversion to Christianity and assimilation did he seize upon the idea of a 'Jewish' state. Even then, he continued to despise Judaism and to see everything that distinguishes Jews from Gentiles as a deformation. For Herzl, according to Boyarin, to 'find a way to preserve Jewish difference in a creative, vital manner was never in the program at all, not in the beginning nor at the end. The scheme was ever to find a way for Jews to assume their proper status as proud, manly, warlike people -- just like everybody else' (28-182). Herzl's proposed means of accomplishing this goal was to adopt a plan for establishing a Jewish state that was nothing other than 'a logical extension of the [late-eighteenth-century] liberal Dohm's' colonialist and militarist 'solution to the Jewish problem' (295). This was, in Boyarin's eyes, the wrong solution to copy. He hopes now to reverse the effects of this unfortunate choice through 'revalorizing and reeroticizing the sissy' (19).

Sorkin reviews The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe by Shmuel Feiner and translated by Chaya Naor.