Messianism Without Messiah: Messianism, Religion, and Secularization in Modern Jewish Thought

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Introduction. Rethinking Jews and Secularism 1
4. PART I. NARRATIONS
5. 1. ‘‘Our Rabbi Baruch’’: Spinoza and Radical Jewish Enlightenment 25
6. Reading Mendelssohn in Late Ottoman Palestine: An Islamic Theory of Jewish Secularism 48
7. Tradition and the Hidden: Hannah Arendt’s Secularization of Jewish Mysticism 65
8. PART II. TRANSFORMATIONS
9. Messianism Without Messiah: Messianism, Religion, and Secularization in Modern Jewish Thought 79
10. In the Name of the Devil: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘‘Agesilaus Santander’’ 98
11. The Secular and Its Dissonances in Modern Jewish Literature 115
12. Civil Society, Secularization, and Modernity Among Jews in Turn-of-the-Century Eastern Europe 142
13. Secular French Nationhood and Its Discontents: Jews as Muslims and Religion as Race in Occupied France 168
14. PART III. ADAPTATIONS
15. Galician Haskalah and the Discourse of Schwa¨rmerei 189
16. Secularism and Neo-Orthodoxy: Conflicting Strategies in Modern Orthodox Fiction 208
17. Secularism and Nationalism: The Modern Halakhic Discourse on the Identity and Boundaries of the Jewish Community 232
18. Between Supersessionism and Atavism: Toward a Neo-Secular View of Religion 261
19. Secularism, the Christian Ambivalence Toward the Jews, and the Notion of Exile 276
20. ‘‘Eleven Calendars’’: Beyond Secular Time 299
21. Notes 315
22. List of Contributors 395
23. Index 399
24. Acknowledgments 411