 | New Perspectives on the Haskalah Subjects: Haskalah -- Congresses; Jews -- Europe -- Intellectual life -- 18th century -- Congresses; Jews -- Europe -- Intellectual life -- 19th century -- Congresses; This volume, written by a range of scholars in history and literature, offers a new understanding of one of the central cultural and ideological movements among Jews in modern times. Disengaging the Haskalah from the questions of modernization or emancipation that have hitherto dominated the scholarship, the contributors put the Haskalah under a microscope in order to restore detail and texture to the individuals, ideas, and activities that were its makers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, they replace simple dichotomies with nuanced distinctions, presenting the relationship between 'tradition' and Haskalah as a spectrum of closely linked cultural options rather than a fateful choice between old and new or good and evil. Shmuel Feiner is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University, and responsible for the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Prussia. He is the author of Haskalah and History: The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Consciousness, published in Hebrew in 1995 and in translation by the Littman Library (2001), and of I. E. Kovner, Sefer Hamatsref: An Unknown Maskilic Critic of Jewish Society in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (1998), as well as of various articles on the Haskalah in Germany and eastern Europe. David Sorkin is Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987), Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996), and The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000), and is co-editor of Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870 (1998). He has received grants from the British Academy and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Previously a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and St Antony's College, Oxford, he has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institut fur Geschichte, Gottingen. |
