Product Description: At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived...read more

Manual that shows how graphing calculator for calculus works.

Product Description: Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and other alternatives emerged and a long, circuitous search for identity began, it was no longer evident that the definition of Jewishness would be based on the beliefs and practices surrounding the study of the Torah...read more

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 have 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. They 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 such neglected subjects as the position of women. New Perspectives on the Haskalah will interest all students of modern Jewish history, literature, and culture. Contributors Harris Bor, Edward Breuer (Loyola University, Chicago), Tova Cohen (Bar-Ilan University), Immanuel Etkes (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), Shmuel Feiner (Bar-Ilan University), Yehuda Friedlander (Bar-Ilan University), David B. Ruderman (University of Pennsylvania), Joseph Salmon (Ben-Gurion University), Nancy Sinkoff (Rutgers University), David Sorkin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Shmuel Werses (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) 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 (forthcoming), and of I. E. Kovner, Sefer Hamatsref: An Unknown Maskilic Critic of Jewish Society in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (1998).

Shmuel Feiner's innovative book recreates the historical consciousness that fired the Haskalah - the Jewish Enlightenment movement. The proponents of this movement advocated that Jews should capture the spirit of the future and take their place in wider society, but as Jews - without denying their collective identity and without denying their past. Claiming historical legitimacy for their ideology and their vision of the future, they formulated an ethos of modernity that they projected on to the universal and the Jewish past alike. What was the image of the past that they shaped? What tactics underpinned their use of history? How did their historical awareness change and develop - from the inception of the Haskalah in Germany at the time of Mendelssohn and Wessely, through the centres of Haskalah in Austria, Galicia, and Russia, to the emergence of modern nationalism among their followers in eastern Europe in the last third of the nineteenth century? These are some of the questions raised in this fascinating exploration of an ideological approach to history which throws a searching new light on the Jewish Enlightenment movement and the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness more generally.