New Perspectives on the Haskalah

Shmuel Feiner is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar- Ilan University and chairman of the Jerusalem Leo Baeck Institute. He is the author of The Jewish Enlightenment (2004), Moses Mendelssohn, Sage of Modernity (2010), and The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2011). David Sorkin is Distinguished Professor of History and Jack H. Skirball Director, Center for Jewish Studies, City University of New York Graduate Center. He was formerly Frances and Laurence Weinstein Professor of Jewish Studies and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840 (1987), Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996), and The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought (2000), and is co-editor of Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750-1870 (1998). He has received grants from the British Academy and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Previously a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and St Antony’s College, Oxford, he has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen.

'Offers many new perspectives on the movement. It includes unique and original studies ... The authors are acknowledged experts in their fields ... a valuable addition to any library collection dealing with modern Judaism and is an important update to any collection dealing with European Jewish culture and religion.' - Shaul Stampfer, Religious Studies Review

• Note on transliteration Introduction - SHMUEL FEINER and DAVID SORKIN 1 The Early Haskalah - DAVID SORKIN2 Naphtali Herz Wessely and the Cultural Dislocations of an Eighteenth-Century Maskil - EDWARD BREUER 3 Enlightenment Values, Jewish Ethics: The Haskalah's Transformation of the Traditional Musar Genre - HARRIS BOR 4 Was there a 'Haskalah' in England? Reconsidering an Old Question - DAVID B. RUDERMAN 5 Strategy and Ruse in the Haskalah of Mendel Lefin of Satanow - NANCY SINKOFF 6 The Struggle of the Mitnagedim and Maskilim against Hasidism: Rabbi Jacob Emden and Judah Leib Mieses - YEHUDA FRIEDLANDER 7 Magic and Miracle-Workers in the Literature of the Haskalah - IMMANUEL ETKES 8 Portrait of the Maskil as a Young Man - SHMUEL WERSES 9 Reality and its Refraction in Descriptions of Women in Haskalah Fiction - TOVA COHEN 10 Enlightened Rabbis as Reformers in Russian Jewish Society - JOSEPH SALMON11 Towards a Historical Definition of the Haskalah - SHMUEL FEINER Glossary Notes on contributors Bibliography Index