The Angel of History

by Moses, Stephane; Harshav, Barbara

• ISBN13: 9780804741163
• ISBN10: 0804741166
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-11
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

InThe Angel of History, Moses looks at three Jewish philosophersFranz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholemwho formulated a new vision of history in 1920s Germany by moving away from the spirit of assimilation and the Enlightenment belief in humanity's inevitable progress. Instead, they imagined history as discontinuous, made of moments that form no totality but whose ruptures are both more significantand more promisingthan any apparent homogeneity. Their direct experience of the twentieth century's great upheavals led these three thinkers to abandon the old models of causality that had previously accounted for human experience, and their cultural and religious background allowed them to turn to the Jewish experience of history. Jewish messianism always had to confront the experience of catastrophe, deception, and failure. Moses shows how this tradition informed a genuine Jewish conception of history in which redemption mayor may notoccur at any moment, giving a new chance for hope by locating utopia in the heart of the present.

Author Biography

The late philosopher and writer Stéphane Mosès emigrated to Israel in 1969, where he became the first head of the German department at the Hebrew University and founded the Franz Rosenzweig Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History. He also played a considerable role in the reconstruction of French Judaism after the Shoah.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Franz Rosenzweig: The Other Side of the West
Dissimilation	p. 17
Hegel Taken Literally	p. 35
Utopia and Redemption	p. 49
Walter Benjamin: The Three Models of History
Metaphors of Origin: Ideas, Names, Stars	p. 65
The Aesthetic Model	p. 84
The Angel of History	p. 101
Gershom Scholem: The Secret History
The Paradoxes of Messianism	p. 129
Kafka, Freud, and the Crisis of Tradition	p. 145
Language and Secularization	p. 168
Notes	p. 183
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