Download or read book Discourse on the State of the Jews written by Simone Luzzatto and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1638, a small book of no more than 92 pages in octavo was published “appresso Gioanne Calleoni” under the title “Discourse on the State of the Jews and in particular those dwelling in the illustrious city of Venice.” It was dedicated to the Doge of Venice and his counsellors, who are labelled “lovers of Truth.” The author of the book was a certain Simone (Simḥa) Luzzatto, a native of Venice, where he lived and died, serving as rabbi for over fifty years during the course of the seventeenth century. Luzzatto’s political thesis is simple and, at the same time, temerarious, if not revolutionary: Venice can put an end to its political decline, he argues, by offering the Jews a monopoly on overseas commercial activity. This plan is highly recommendable because the Jews are “wellsuited for trade,” much more so than others (such as “foreigners,” for example). The rabbi opens his argument by recalling that trade and usury are the only occupations permitted to Jews. Within the confines of their historical situation, the Venetian Jews became particularly skilled at trade with partners from the Eastern Mediterranean countries. Luzzatto’s argument is that this talent could be put at the service of the Venetian government in order to maintain – or, more accurately, recover – its political importance as an intermediary between East and West. He was the first to define the role of the Jews on the basis of their economic and social functions, disregarding the classic categorisation of Judaism’s alleged privileged religious status in world history. Nonetheless, going beyond the socio-economic arguments of the book, it is essential to point out Luzzatto’s resort to sceptical strategies in order to plead in defence of the Venetian Jews. It is precisely his philosophical and political scepticism that makes Luzzatto’s texts so unique. This edition aims to grant access to his works and thought to English-speaking readers and scholars. By approaching his texts from this point of view, the editors hope to open a new path in research into Jewish culture and philosophy that will enable other scholars to develop new directions and new perspectives, stressing the interpenetration between Jews and the surrounding Christian and secular cultures.
Download or read book Discourse on the State of the Jews written by Luzzatto Simone and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Rhetorical Conversation written by Jordan D. Finkin and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Describes the role of traditional Jewish texts in the development of modern Yiddish literature, as well as the closely related development of modern Hebrew literature"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Secularization Desecularization and Toleration written by Vyacheslav Karpov and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the modern myth that tolerance grows as societies become less religious. The myth inseparably links the progress of toleration to the secularization of modern society. This volume scrutinizes this grand narrative theoretically and empirically, and proposes alternative accounts of the varied relationships between diverse interpretations of religion and secularity and multiple secularizations, desecularizations, and forms of toleration. The authors show how both secular and religious orthodoxies inform toleration and persecution, and how secularizations and desecularizations engender repressive or pluralistic regimes. Ultimately, the book offers an agency-focused perspective which links the variation in toleration and persecution to the actors of secularization and desecularization and their cultural programs.
Download or read book At Wit s End written by Louis Kaplan and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE A scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the twentieth century. At Wit’s End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust. The first in-depth study to explore the Jewish joke as a crucial rhetorical figure in larger cultural debates in Germany, author Louis Kaplan presents an engrossing and lucid work of scholarship that examines how “der jüdische Witz” (referring to both Jewish wit and jokes) was utilized differently in a number of texts, from the Weimar Republic to the rise of National Socialism, and how it was re-introduced into the public sphere after the Holocaust with the controversial publication of Salcia Landmann’s collection of Jewish jokes in the reparations era (Wiedergutmachung). Kaplan reviews the claims made about the Jewish joke and its provocative laughter by notable writers from a variety of ideological perspectives, demonstrating how their reflections on this complex cultural trope enable a better understanding of German–Jewish intercultural relations and their eventual breakdown in the Third Reich. He also illustrates how selfcritical and self-ironic Jewish Witz maintained a fraught and ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism. In reviewing this critical and traumatic moment in modern German–Jewish history through the deadly discourse on the Jewish joke, At Wit’s End includes chapters on the virulent Austrian anti-Semitic racial theorist Arthur Trebitsch, the Nazi racial propagandist Siegfried Kadner, the German Marxist cultural historian Eduard Fuchs, the Jewish diasporic historian Erich Kahler, and the Jewish cabaret impresario Kurt Robitschek, among others. Shedding new light on anti-Semitism and on the Jewish question leading up to the Holocaust, At Wit’s End provides readers with a unique perspective by which to gain important insights about this crucial historical period that reverberates into the present day, when potentially offensive humor coupled with a toxic political climate and xenophobia can have deadly consequences.
Download or read book Masters of Discourse written by Israel Shamir and published by Booksurge Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welcome to the new world order, where mass media, a fully integrated public-opinion-forming machine of mind control had rendered the Left and Right obsolete and subservient to Zionism. Who are the people who own and operate this machine? Are they actually the Jewish Lobby? No, says Shamir. The formidable Jewish Lobby is just the visible tip of the iceberg, while below there are miles and miles of solid ice: media lords, chief editors, their favourite university pundits – in short, the Masters of Discourse. In this third volume of his writing, Israel Shamir travels around the world to find the reason for their captive hold over our thinking.
Download or read book Sovereign Jews written by Yaacov Yadgar and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-03-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a novel exploration of the relationship between religion and the state in Israel. The question of Jewish sovereignty shapes Jewish identity in Israel, the status of non-Jews, and relations between Israeli and Diaspora Jews, yet its consequences remain enigmatic. In Sovereign Jews, Yaacov Yadgar highlights the shortcomings of mainstream discourse and offers a novel explanation of Zionist ideology and the Israeli polity. Yadgar argues that secularism’s presumed binary pitting religion against politics is illusory. He shows that the key to understanding this alleged dichotomy is Israel’s interest in maintaining its sovereignty as the nation-state of Jews. This creates a need to mark a majority of the population as Jews and to distinguish them from non-Jews. Coupled with the failure to formulate a viable alternative national identity (either “Hebrew” or “Israeli”), it leads the ostensibly secular state to apply a narrow interpretation of Jewish religion as a political tool for maintaining a Jewish majority. Yaacov Yadgar is Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at the University of Oxford and the author of Secularism and Religion in Jewish-Israeli Politics: Traditionists and Modernity.
Download or read book English Origins Jewish Discourse and the Nineteenth century British Novel written by Heidi Kaufman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the embedding of Jewish history and culture in depictions of English racial and national identity in nineteenth-century novels.
Download or read book Racial Zionism A Source Book of Essential Texts from Noah to Herzl and Beyond written by Christopher Bjerknes and published by . This book was released on 2020-12 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several prominent Zionists warned that the Jewish People were disappearing due to assimilation and antisemitism. They believed that the best means to preserve the "Jewish race" was to found a new Jewish State. This source book republishes the following foundational texts of these racial Zionists: Mordecai Manuel Noah, Discourse, "Delivered at the Consecration of the Synagogue of [K.k. She'erit Yisra'el] in the City of New-york, on Friday, the 10th of Nisan, 5578, Corresponding with the 17th of April, 1818", C. S. Van Winkle, New York, (1818); "Discourse on the Evidences of the American Indians Being the Descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel", James Van Norden, New York, (1837); "Discourse on the Restoration of the Jews: Delivered at the Tabernacle, Oct. 28 and Dec. 2, 1844", Harper & Brothers, New York, (1845). Moses Hess, "Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism", Bloch Publishing Company, New York, (1918). Leo Pinsker, "Auto-Emancipation", The Maccabaean Publishing Company, New York, (1906). Theodor Herzl, "A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question", The Maccabæan Publishing Co., New York, (1904). Israel Zangwill, "The Problem of the Jewish Race", The Judaen Publishing Company, New York, (1914). Ignatz Zollschan, "Jewish Questions: Three Lectures", Bloch Publishing Company, New York, (1914). Louis Dembitz Brandeis, "The Jewish Problem: How to Solve It", Zionist Essays Pub. Committee, New York, (1915). Rabbi Max Reichler, "Jewish Eugenics: A Paper Read Before the New York Board of Jewish Ministers", Bloch Publishing Company, New York, (1916). Arthur Balfour as quoted in: "Mr. Balfour on Zionism. The Case for a National Home." London Times, (12 February 1919), page 9.
Download or read book The Talmud s Theological Language Game written by Eugene B. Borowitz and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes the structure and logic of aggadic discourse in the Talmud.
Download or read book Grasping Land written by Eyal Ben-Ari and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores various processes associated with constructing what has variously been called "The Holy Land," "Eretz Israel," "Zion," Palestine," or "Israel." The contributors focus on ways the landscapes of Israel figure in creating and recreating the identity, presence, and history of groups living there. The book critiques the assumptions lying at the base of various spatial practices related to Zionism. It does this through both a theoretical examination and a focus on hitherto little explored phenomena such as pilgrimages of Israelis to their (or their relatives') native lands abroad, the establishment of Jewish saints' tombs in Israel, the design of Kibbutz museums, country hikes, and conceptions of territory in mixed (Jewish-Arab) communities.
Download or read book Colonialism and the Jews written by Ethan B. Katz and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-30 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lively essays collected here explore colonial history, culture, and thought as it intersects with Jewish studies. Connecting the Jewish experience with colonialism to mobility and exchange, diaspora, internationalism, racial discrimination, and Zionism, the volume presents the work of Jewish historians who recognize the challenge that colonialism brings to their work and sheds light on the diverse topics that reflect the myriad ways that Jews engaged with empire in modern times. Taken together, these essays reveal the interpretive power of the "Imperial Turn" and present a rethinking of the history of Jews in colonial societies in light of postcolonial critiques and destabilized categories of analysis. A provocative discussion forum about Zionism as colonialism is also included.
Download or read book The Arab Jews written by Yehouda A. Shenhav and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the social history of the Arab JewsJews living in Arab countriesagainst the backdrop of Zionist nationalism. By using the term "Arab Jews" (rather than "Mizrahim," which literally means "Orientals") the book challenges the binary opposition between Arabs and Jews in Zionist discourse, a dichotomy that renders the linking of Arabs and Jews in this way inconceivable. It also situates the study of the relationships between Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews in the context of early colonial encounters between the Arab Jews and the European Zionist emissariesprior to the establishment of the state of Israel and outside Palestine. It argues that these relationships were reproduced upon the arrival of the Arab Jews to Israel. The book also provides a new prism for understanding the intricate relationships between the Arab Jews and the Palestinian refugees of 1948, a link that is usually obscured or omitted by studies that are informed by Zionist historiography. Finally, the book uses the history of the Arab Jews to transcend the assumptions necessitated by the Zionist perspective, and to open the door for a perspective that sheds new light on the basic assumptions upon which Zionism was founded.
Download or read book The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Enlightenment to the Second Empire written by Jeffrey A. Grossman and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2000 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the uses of Yiddish language in German literary and cultural texts 1781 until the late nineteenth century. This book explores the uses of Yiddish language in German literary and cultural texts from the onset of Jewish civil emancipation in the Germanies in 1781 until the late 19th century. Showing the various functions Yiddish assumedat this time, the study crosses traditional boundaries between literary and non-literary texts. It focuses on responses to Yiddish in genres of literature ranging from drama to language handbooks, from cultural criticism to the realist novel in order to address broader issues of literary representation and Jewish-German relations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Professor Grossman shows how the emergence of attitudes toward Jews and Yiddish is directly related to linguistic theories and cultural ideologies that bear a complex relationship to the changing social and political institutions of the time. Amidst the rise of national ideologies and modern anti-Semitism, the increasing consolidation of institutions, and the drive to cultural homogeneity in the 18th- and 19th-century German context, Yiddish functioned as an anarchic element that, in the view of its opponents, "threatened" to dissolve German nationalculture. Grossman locates the response to Yiddish in the context of historical events (the Hep Hep Riots of 1819, the Revolution of 1848) and institutional changes (Jewish legal emancipation, the promotion of Bildung as an educational and cultural ideal). In its methodology and its focus, this study seeks to show how the conflicted responses to the Yiddish language point to the problems that connected and frequently divided Jews and Germans as they soughtto re-invent themselves for a new and unsettling context.
Download or read book Race Color Identity written by Efraim Sicher and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advances in genetics are renewing controversies over inherited characteristics, and the discourse around science and technological innovations has taken on racial overtones, such as attributing inherited physiological traits to certain ethnic groups or using DNA testing to determine biological links with ethnic ancestry. This book contributes to the discussion by opening up previously locked concepts of the relation between the terms color, race, and "Jews", and by engaging with globalism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and diaspora. The contributors--leading scholars in anthropology, sociology, history, literature, and cultural studies--discuss how it is not merely a question of whether Jews are acknowledged to be interracial, but how to address academic and social discourses that continue to place Jews and others in a race/color category.
Download or read book Defining Israel written by Simon Rabinovitch and published by Hebrew Union College Press. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Israel: The Jewish State, Democracy, and the Law is the first book in any language devoted to the controversial passage of Israel's nation-state law. Israel has no constitution, and though it calls itself the Jewish state there is no agreement among Israelis on how that fact should be reflected in the government's laws or by its courts. Since the 1990s a number of civil society groups and legislators have drafted constitutions and proposed Basic Laws with constitutional standing that would clarify what it means for Israel to be a "Jewish and democratic state." Are these bills liberal or chauvinist? Are they a defense of the Knesset or an attack on the independence of the courts? Is their intention democratic or anti-democratic? The fight over the nation-state law-whether to have one and what should be in it-toppled the 19th Knesset's governing coalition and, even after its passage on July 29, 2018, remains a point of contention among Israel's lawmakers and increasingly the Israeli public. Defining Israel brings together influential scholars, journalists, and politicians, observers and participants, opponents and proponents, Jews and Arabs, all debating the merits and meaning of Israel's nation-state law. Together with translations of each draft law, the final law, and other key documents, the essays and sources in Defining Israel are essential to understand the ongoing debate over what it means for Israel to be a Jewish and democratic state.
Download or read book The State of the Jews written by Edward Alexander and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The State of the Jews examines the current predicament of the Jewish people and the land of Israel, both of which still stand at the storm center of history, because Jews can never take the right to live as a natural right.The volume comprises celebrations and attacks. Edward Alexander celebrates writers like Abba Kovner, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, and Hillel Halkin, who recognized in the foundation of Israel shortly after the destruction of European Jewry one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame. He attacks Israel's external enemies—busy planners of boycotts, brazen advocates of politicide, professorial apologists for suicide bombing—and also its internal enemies. These are anti-Zionist Jews, devotees of lost causes willfully blind to the fact that Israel's creation was an event of biblical magnitude. Indifference to Jewish survival during World War II was the admitted moral failure of earlier American-Jewish intellectuals, but today's progressives and New Diasporists call indifference virtue, and mistake cowardice for courage.Because the new anti-Semitism, tightening the noose around Israel's throat, emanates mainly from liberals, Alexander analyzes both antisemitic and philosemitic strains in three prominent Victorian liberals: Thomas Arnold, his son Matthew, and John Stuart Mill. The main body of Alexander's book is divided generically into history, politics, and literature. At a deeper level, its chapters are integrated by the book's pervasive concern: the interconnectedness between the state of Israel and the spiritual state of contemporary Jewry.
