New Perspectives on the Haskalah

by Feiner, Shmuel; Sorkin, David; Feiner, Shmuel

• ISBN13: 9781874774617
• ISBN10: 1874774617
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-06-01
• Publisher: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press

Summary

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. The essays address major and minor figures; ask whether there was such an entity as an 'early Haskalah', or a Haskalah movement in England, look at key issues such as the relationship of the Haskalah to Orthodoxy and hasidism, and also treat su

Table of Contents

Note on Transliteration	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
Shmuel Feiner
David Sorkin
The Early Haskalah	9	(18)
David Sorkin
Naphtali Herz Wessely and the Cultural Dislocations of an Eighteenth-Century Maskil	27	(21)
Edward Breuer
Enlightenment Values, Jewish Ethics: The Haskalah's Transformation of the Traditional Musar Genre	48	(16)
Harris Bor
Was there a `Haskalah' in England? Reconsidering an Old Question	64	(22)
David B. Ruderman
Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanow	86	(17)
Nancy Sinkoff
The Struggle of the Mitnagedim and Maskilim against Hasidism: Rabbi Jacob Emden and Judah Leib Mieses	103	(10)
Yehuda Friedlander
Magic and Miracle-Workers in the Literature of the Haskalah	113	(15)
Immanuel Etkes
Portrait of the Maskil as a Young Man	128	(16)
Shmuel Werses
Reality and its Refraction in Descriptions of Women in Haskalah Fiction	144	(22)
Tova Cohen
Enlightened Rabbis as Reformers in Russian Jewish Society	166	(18)
Joseph Salmon
Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah	184	(37)
Shmuel Feiner
Glossary	221	(3)
Notes on Contributors	224	(1)
Bibliography	225	(26)
Index	251