Perspectives in Jewish Intellectual Life – serie

This book outlines some aspects of Jewish intellectual life in the nineteenth and twentieth century, presenting a narrative of the relationship between Jewish scholars and their cultural environment. It investigates the language of conformity and dissent and interprets it as an imaginative grammar, comprising an arsenal of images, concepts, and interpretations. There is a special focus on German roots, for Germany played a major role as an intellectual laboratory in the areas of the (new) branches of academic life. This book consists of four parts: i) Searching for a Scientific Language; ii) “And the Jews”: Political and Cultural History of a Conjunction; iii) Creative Languages: The Interstitial Spaces of Monotheism; iv) Disjunction: The Jewish Dissenter. A bibliography as well as detailed indexes of authors, scholars and subjects are included.

Filled with new elements that challenge common scholarly theses, this book acquaints the reader with the “Jewish problem” of sociology and provides what this academic discipline urgently needs: a one-volume history of the Sociology of the Holocaust. The story of why and how sociologists as well as the schools of sociological thought came to confront the Holocaust has never been entirely told. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust sociology development.

Dialectic of Separation analyzes the complex relationship between Judaism and philosophy in the thought of the nineteenth-century German–Jewish orientalist and philosopher Salomon Munk. Drawing on both published and on unpublished sources, appearing here for the first time, it offers the first-ever comprehensive reconstruction of Salomon Munk’s life and work. Munk, who emigrated from his native Glogau to Paris to pursue his studies, was to exert a major influence on the development of Islamic and Jewish studies in both France and Germany, giving a vital impetus to the debate over the nature of Jewish philosophy at a time when medieval Jewish philosophers (such as Maimonides) and their Arabic and Islamic sources were completely neglected in philosophical historiography.