Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture

by Brann, Ross; Sutcliffe, Adam; University of Pennsylvania Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

• ISBN13: 9780812237429
• ISBN10: 0812237420
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-12-24
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

In a penetrating exploration of the various ways memories and representations of the Jewish past have been reconfigured in new historical circumstances,Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culturefocuses on two key eras of encounter between Jews and non-Jews: the golden age of Sephardic culture in Islamic al-Andalus, on the one hand, and on the other, the period of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, which it inspired. The writings assembled here engage with key issues to understand how in both epochs the cultural orientation of Jewish society was profoundly reassessed and transformed by new influences filtering in from outside. Adopting a comparative historical approach,Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Cultureoffers a view of moments of heightened interaction between Jews and their host cultures. The elevation of the ideal of rationalism provoked significant shifts in the aesthetic values and patterns of cultural memory in Sephardic al-Andalus; this same ideal once again posed insistent challenges in the era of the Enlightenment, to which Jewish intellectuals widely responded by evoking, but also refashioning, the historical precedent of the Andalusian Golden Age. Looking to contexts ranging from premodern Spain and Italy to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, and America, the eleven contributors to this volume--drawn equally from literary and historical studies--explore the ways the political and intellectual aspirations of successive historical presents have repeatedly reshaped the forms and narratives of Jewish cultural memory.

Author Biography

Ross Brann is M. R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies at Cornell University and is author of Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-century Islamic Spain. Adam Sutcliffe teaches Jewish history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Judaism and Enlightenment.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
David B. Ruderman
Introduction: Al-Andalus, Enlightenment, and the Renewal of the Jewish Past	1	(20)
Adam Sutcliffe
Ross Brann
PART I PHILOSOPHY, POETRY, AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN PREMODERN AL-ANDALUS AND ITALY
Aesthetic Models in Conflict: Classicist Versus Ornamental in Jewish Poetics	21	(10)
Joseph Yahalom
The Uses of Exile in Poetic Discourse: Some Examples from Medieval Hebrew Literature	31	(19)
Esperanza Alfonso
Their Rose in Our Garden: Romance Elements in Hebrew Italian Poetry	50	(9)
Dvora Bregman
The Crisis of Medieval Knowledge in the Work of the Fifteenth-Century Poet and Philosopher Moses da Rieti	59	(12)
Alessandro Guetta
PART II RENEWING TEXTS, CHANGING HORIZONS: THE JEWISH ENGLIGHTENMENT'S APPROPRIATION OF ANDALUSI IDEALS
Judah Halevi's Kuzari in the Haskalah: The Reinterpretation and Reimagining of a Medieval Work	71	(22)
Adam Shear
The Aesthetic Difference: Moses Mendelssohn's Kohelet Musar and the Inception of the Berlin Haskalah	93	(28)
Jonathan Karp
Varieties of Haskalah: Sabato Morais's Program of Sephardi Rabbinic Humanism in Victorian America	121	(28)
Arthur Kiron
PART III REFASHIONINGS OF THE JEWISH PAST IN THE ERA OF HASKALAH
Solomon Maimon and His Jewish Philosophical Predecessors: The Evidence of His Autobiography	149	(18)
Allan Arkush
Quarreling over Spinoza: Moses Mendelssohn and the Fashioning of Jewish Philosophical Heroism	167	(22)
Adam Sutcliffe
Strategic Friendships: Jewish Intellectuals, the Abbe Gregoire, and the French Revolution	189	(24)
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
Heine and Haggadah: History, Narration, and Tradition in the Age of Wissenschaft des Judentums	213	(14)
Jonathan Skolnik
List of Contributors	227	(2)
Index	229