Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History

The postmodernist experience is associated with a strong interest in the concepts of saints and religious genius. In this volume, Dov Schwartz considers the questions related to these ideas through his close analysis of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hakohen Kook. This figure is revered by Zionists as a founding father of the Zionist movement. Religious Zionists see him, additionally, as an unquestioned spiritual and altruistic authority with extraordinary halakhic, philosophical, and Kabbalistic intuitions. While Rabbi Kook has often been studied through historical and philosophical disciplines, this book addresses the degree to which his writings can prove to be beneficial to the postmodern discourse. It examines Rabbi Kook’s ideas in the religious Zionist context, analyzing the concept of the perfect man in Rabbi Kook's philosophy in light of the postmodern discourse on saints.

From the very moment Alfred Dreyfus was placed under arrest for treason and espionage, his entire world was turned upside down, and for the next five years he lived in what he called a phantasmagoria. To keep himself sane, Dreyfus wrote letters to and received letters from his wife Lucie and exercised his intellect through reading the few books and magazines his censors allowed him, writing essays on these and other texts he had read in the past, and working out problems in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He practiced his English and created strange drawings his prison wardens called architectural or kabbalistic signs. In this volume, Norman Simms explores how Dreyfus kept himself from exploding into madness by reading his essays carefully, placing them in the context of his century, and extrapolating from them the hidden recesses of the Jewish Alsatian background he shared with the Dreyfus family and Lucie Hadamard.

The past decade has witnessed renewed interest in the faith-reason debate. But all too often the debate is treated in generic terms, without paying attention either to differences between religious traditions or to the historical development of these traditions. Judaism, with its emphasis on religious law, yields insights into the political ramifications of the problem that differ greatly from Christian approaches. In Faith, Reason, Politics, Michah Gottlieb explores Jewish approaches to the faith-reason debate through detailed analyses of Jewish thinkers from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, including Judah Halevi, Maimonides, Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Samson Raphael Hirsch, and Leo Strauss. This book will appeal to scholars and students interested in the problem of faith versus reason and in the relationship between religion and politics.

This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie. Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual, and Jewish man is revealed than was previously suspected. He and Lucie, through their family connections and mutual loyalty, were interested in and supported the artistic, scientific, philosophical and historical movements that formed their Parisian milieu. But as an Alsatian Jew, Alfred was also critical of many aspects of technological and ideological developments, making his mentality one of skepticism as well as idealism. Norman Simms addresses the way Dreyfus perceived the world, challenged many of its assumptions and contextualized it in the style of a rabbinical midrash, a process that created what Alfred called a “phantasmagoria” of the Affair that bears his name, and also interprets the man, his milieu and his mentality in the style of a midrash, a creative, transformative reading.

Ever since the first encounter between Judaism and the western world in the second century BCE, Jewish thinkers like Maimonides, Gersonides, R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto, and Rabbi A. I. Kook have grappled with issues of Jewish faith and modernity. The works they published, which comprise Jewish classical philosophy, were products of the highest intellectual caliber, and no question of faith, no matter how embarrassing or heretical, was overlooked. In this book Raphael Shuchat presents the reader with some of the main and timeless issues of Jewish philosophy over the ages and updates them to twenty-first century thinking, making each issue relevant for the modern reader. This book offers a fresh intellectual outlook on the Jewish faith, and contains a timely message for all religionists and thinkers in the twenty-first century. It will be of great use to both students and laymen.

Winner of the 2012 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in Holocaust Literature. A survivor of concentration camps and the Death March, Eli Pfefferkorn looks back on his Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences to compare patterns of human behavior in extremis with those of ordinary life. What he finds is that the concentration camp Muselmann, who has lost his hunger for life and is thus shunned by his fellow inmates on the soup line, bears an eerie resemblance to an office employee who has fallen from grace and whose coworkers avoid spending time with him at the water cooler. Though the circumstances are unfathomably far apart, the human response to their situations is triggered by self-preservation rather than by calculated evil. By juxtaposing these two separate worlds, Pfefferkorn demonstrates that ultimately the human condition has not changed significantly since Cain slew Abel and the Athenians sentenced Socrates.

This groundbreaking book focuses on Alfred Dreyfus the man, with emphasis placed on his own writings, including his recently published prison workbooks and his letters to his wife Lucie. Through close reading of these documents, a much more sensitive, intellectual, and Jewish man is revealed than was previously suspected. He and Lucie, through their family connections and mutual loyalty, were interested in and supported the artistic, scientific, philosophical and historical movements that formed their Parisian milieu. But as an Alsatian Jew, Alfred was also critical of many aspects of technological and ideological developments, making his mentality one of skepticism as well as idealism. Norman Simms addresses the way Dreyfus perceived the world, challenged many of its assumptions and contextualized it in the style of a rabbinical midrash, a process that created what Alfred called a “phantasmagoria” of the Affair that bears his name, and also interprets the man, his milieu and his mentality in the style of a midrash, a creative, transformative reading.

Democratizing Judaism is a two-part examination of the Reconstructionist philosophy of Mordecai M. Kaplan. Part I is largely devoted to a defense of Kaplan against several serious critics. It also provides new insight into Kaplan’s theology through reference to hitherto unknown passages in his diaries. Part II provides a critical analysis of the contemporary Reconstructionist movement and explores how a Kaplan disciple treats problems of democracy in Israel and issues of ethical theological concern.

Following what may be conventionally called the Jewish ethno-cultural model and tracing its performance throughout history, Alexander Militarev’s book is the first scholarly attempt to apply a synthetic, comprehensive approach to the Jewish phenomenon—an alternative to the metaphysical and religious ones—and to evaluate it in a comparative context. In highlighting the unique and disproportionately great Jewish contributions, and the recent Russian Jewish contribution in particular, to human civilization, it poses as its main question: “Why the Jews?” Militarev dedicates his book to the analysis of the Jewish phenomenon, its manifold reasons and consequences. Laying bare the “kitchen” of scholarly research, Militarev embarks on a scholarly adventure akin to a film-noir who-dunnit, complete with intrigue, the need for stringent self-control, inexorable doubts, and the thrill of the chase after the enigma’s solution.

Concealed for two centuries and known only to a select individual in each generation, the Scroll of Secrets is the hidden Messianic vision of R. Nachman of Breslav. Despite its being written in an encoded language, with acronyms and abbreviations, after a clarification and cautious reconstruction of what can be decoded, the author has prepared a volume that presents the reader with an exalted Messianic vision. The book marks a turning point in our understanding of R. Nachman’s spiritual world and initiates a renewed discussion of an intriguing Hasidism that excites scholars and broad circles within the Jewish and Israeli publics. The reader is presented with a sublime and enticing vision of the eschatological End of Days that contains song and prayer, Torah, melodies, longings, and love and compassion for every man.

Judaism in a Post-Halakhic Age tackles the following questions: 1. What is Halakhah, and what role has it played in the creative survival of the Jewish people for two millennia? 2. Why is Halakhah no longer capable of functioning as it has until now? 3. What sort of polity and religious culture can be recommended to replace the Halakhic tradition in an era of freedom, democracy, scientific research, and religious pluralism? The author, however, out of his great respect for Halakhic culture, asks what it can still contribute to Jewish civilization and the advance of a united humanity.

Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, poet, philosopher, and mathematician, was one of the outstanding personalities produced by medieval Jewry. His chief claim to fame, however, is his commentary on the Bible. The latter is printed in all major editions of the Hebrew Scriptures and influenced other luminaries such as Maimonides, Rabbi David Kimchi, Nahmanides, Ralbag, Abravanel, and all serious students of the Hebrew Bible, for whom his works are essential. Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the first two Books of Psalms is now available in English for the first time, accompanied by a thorough annotation. Students of Scripture at all levels will find this a valuable tool for their studies of Scripture and Jewish thought.

Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, poet, philosopher, and mathematician, was one of the outstanding personalities produced by medieval Jewry. His chief claim to fame, however, is his commentary on the Bible. The latter is printed in all major editions of the Hebrew Scriptures and influenced other luminaries such as Maimonides, Rabbi David Kimchi, Nahmanides, Ralbag, Abravanel, and all serious students of the Hebrew Bible, for whom his works are essential. Ibn Ezra’s commentary on the first two Books of Psalms is now available in English for the first time, accompanied by a thorough annotation. Students of Scripture at all levels will find this a valuable tool for their studies of Scripture and Jewish thought.

Like Spinoza in his Theological-Political Treatise, Schweid helps us grasp the potential for seeing radically new messages in this oldest of books, the Bible. The American Founding Fathers realized that the Bible offers strong support for the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Socially, it offers a message of egalitarianism, especially in the provisions of the Jubilee. It is hardly an accident that two modern political movements found mottos ready at hand from the 25th chapter of Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (engraved on the Liberty Bell), and “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity” (motto of the Jewish National Fund). Schweid helps us to appreciate the broader message of the narrative of creation and settlement of the land in its ecumenical and planetary dimensions. The world is God’s creation, and its resources are to be deployed as necessary for the sustenance and need-fulfillment of all peoples and all creatures equally—a message very much relevant to the ecological crisis facing us all at the present time.

The fundamental book of Eliezer Schweid is a modern interpretation of the Bible as narrative and law which can reopen the dialogue of contemporary Jews with the Bible, from which a dynamic Jewish culture can continue to draw its inspiration. The approach draws at the same time from the philosophical modernism of Hermann Cohen, the dialogical philosophy of Buber, the religious phenomenology of Heschel, and the insights of contemporary Biblical scholars, including literary analysts of the Bible. Schweid helps us to appreciate the broader message of the narrative of creation and settlement of the land in its ecumenical and planetary dimensions. The world is God’s creation, and its resources are to be deployed as necessary for the sustenance and need-fulfillment of all peoples and all creatures equally—a message very much relevant to the ecological crisis facing us all at the present time.

At a time when Jewish communities have become increasingly anxious about weakening Jewish identity, one response strategy is to engage with the concept of Jewish peoplehood as a social phenomenon, in its varied contexts and processes. This volume represents the first in-depth effort to address the concept of Jewish peoplehood since the initial attempts of early-20th-century Jewish intellectuals Mordechai Kaplan and Salo Baron. Indeed, its substance goes far beyond the range of a contemporary academic anthology, constituting instead a dynamic think tank on the concept of Jewish peoplehood by bringing together intellectuals from France, Israel, the UK, and the United States. The collection offers both intellectual and practical frameworks for grappling with the policy outcomes of different understandings of the peoplehood concept, and contributors to this volume include noted figures from diverse walks of life: academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, a rabbi, a literary figure, and communal leaders.

The vast majority of intellectual, religious, and national developments in modern Judaism revolve around the central idea of "Jewish culture." This book is the first synoptic view of these developments that organizes and relates them from this vantage point. The first Jewish modernization movements perceived culture as the defining trait of the outside alien social environment to which Jewry had to adapt. To be "cultured" was to be modern-European, as opposed to medieval-ghetto-Jewish. In short order, however, the Jewish religious legacy was redefined retrospectively as a historical "culture," with fateful consequences for the conception of Judaism as a humanly- and not only divinely-mandated regime. The conception of Judaism-as-culture took two main forms: an integrative, vernacular Jewish culture that developed in tandem with the integration of Jews into the various nations of western-central Europe and America, and a national Hebrew culture which, though open to the inputs of modern European society, sought to develop a revitalized Jewish national identity that ultimately found expression in the revival of the Jewish homeland and the State of Israel.

This classic work by early-20th-century Jewish humanist and scholar Isaac Heinemann surveys the crucial phases of Jewish thought concerning correct conduct as codified in the commandments. Heinemann provides his own systematic insights about the intellectual, emotional, pedagogical, and pragmatic reasoning advanced by the major Jewish thinkers. This volume covers Jewish thinkers from the Bible, rabbis and Hellenistic philosophers through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including Saadiah, Halevi, Maimonides, Albo, and many others. Heinemann addresses such questions as: "What were the Biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern rationales offered for the commandments in the course of Jewish thought?"