Synopses & Reviews
Commonly translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Olga Litvak argues that the idea of a Jewish modernity, championed by adherents of this movement, did not originate in Western Europe’s age of reason. Litvak contends that the Haskalah spearheaded a Jewish religious revival, better understood against the background of Eastern European Romanticism.
Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Most importantly, she challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism.
In Litvak’s ambitious interpretation, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals emerge as the authors of a Jewish Romantic revolution. Fueled by contradictory longings both for community and for personal freedom, the poets and scholars associated with the Haskalah questioned the moral costs of civic equality and the achievement of middle-class status. In the nineteenth century, their conservative approach to culture as the cure for the spiritual ills of the modern individual provided a powerful argument for the development of Jewish nationalism. Today, their ideas are equally resonant in contemporary debates about the ramifications of secularization for the future of Judaism.
Review
"Olga Litvak marshals stunning erudition in a nigh-magical fashion as she revises the reigning conception of the Haskalah as a Jewish version of the European Enlightenment."
Review
andquot;
Space and Place in Jewish Studies is a valuable introduction to the roles that locations, real and imagined, have played in Jewish historical experiences, literary and artistic works, and scholarship.andquot;
Synopsis
Conventionally translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of major works in Hebrew and Yiddish literature, this book presents a compelling case for rethinking the most important concepts that currently inform the study of modern Jewish experience and expression, including emancipation, nationalism, and secularization, and challenges the prevailing idea that the Haskalah was the mainspring of Jewish liberalism.
Synopsis
Commonly translated as the "Jewish Enlightenment," the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Olga Litvak argues that the idea of a Jewish modernity, championed by adherents of this movement, did not originate in Western Europe's age of reason. Litvak contends that the Haskalah spearheaded a Jewish religious revival, better understood against the background of Eastern European Romanticism.
Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Most importantly, she challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism.
In Litvak's ambitious interpretation, nineteenth-century Eastern European intellectuals emerge as the authors of a Jewish Romantic revolution. Fueled by contradictory longings both for community and for personal freedom, the poets and scholars associated with the Haskalah questioned the moral costs of civic equality and the achievement of middle-class status. In the nineteenth century, their conservative approach to culture as the cure for the spiritual ills of the modern individual provided a powerful argument for the development of Jewish nationalism. Today, their ideas are equally resonant in contemporary debates about the ramifications of secularization for the future of Judaism.
Synopsis
Conventionally translated as the “Jewish Enlightenment,” the Haskalah propelled Jews into modern life. Based on imaginative and historically grounded readings of primary sources, Olga Litvak presents a compelling case for rethinking the relationship between the Haskalah and the experience of political and social emancipation. Litvak challenges the prevailing view that the Haskalah provided the philosophical mainspring for Jewish liberalism.
Synopsis
Scholars in the humanities have become increasingly interested in questions of how space is produced and perceivedandmdash;and they have found that this consideration of human geography greatly enriches our understanding of cultural history. This andldquo;spatial turnandrdquo; equally has the potential to revolutionize Jewish Studies, complicating familiar notions of Jews as andldquo;people of the Book,andrdquo; displaced persons with only a common religious tradition and history to unite them.
Space and Place in Jewish Studies embraces these exciting critical developments by investigating what andldquo;spaceandrdquo; has meant within Jewish culture and traditionandmdash;and how notions of andldquo;Jewish space,andrdquo; diaspora, and home continue to resonate within contemporary discourse, bringing space to the foreground as a practical and analytical category. Barbara Mann takes us on a journey from medieval Levantine trade routes to the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of contemporary New York, introducing readers to the variety of ways in which Jews have historically formed communities and created a sense of place for themselves. Combining cutting-edge theory with rabbinics, anthropology, and literary analysis, Mann offers a fresh take on the Jewish experience.
About the Author
BARBARA E. MANN is an associate professor of Hebrew literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She is the author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv, and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space and co-editor in-chief of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Part I: Terms of Debate
1. Wrong Time, Wrong Place
2. Beyond the Enlightenment
Part II: State of the Question
3. Haskalah and History
4. Haskalah and Modern Jewish Thought
Part III: In a New Key
5. Exile
6. New Creation
7. Faith
8. Paradise
9. Fall
10. The End of Enlightenment
Notes
Index