Perspectives in Jewish Intellectual Life - Böcker

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 the sociologists as well as the school of sociological thoughts came to confront the event has never been entirely told. However, the focus is on the “alleged delay of Sociology” in the comprehension of the Jewish genocide. Did this delay really exist? To this and other arising questions, this book tries to answer: the delay could be an half truth. The volume offers original insights on the nature of American Sociology with implications for the post-Holocaust Sociology development.

Salomon Munk (1803-1867) belonged to a group of German-Jewish scholars who pioneered the systematic study of Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and Islamic philosophy in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, as part of a movement that came to be known as the Science of Judaism. The Science of Judaism applied the tools of modern science (in particular philology) to the study of Judaism, seeking to shed light on its manifold aspects and historical contexts—an undertaking which eventually led to the birth of Jewish studies as an academic discipline. Munk’s ground-breaking studies of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic sources were to play a central role in this process, exerting a major influence on nineteenth century German and French Oriental studies as well as on modern philosophical historiography, and paving the way for the scientific study of the relationship between medieval Jewish, Islamic, and Christian thought. This book is an attempt to restore this extraordinary representative of German Jewry to the pantheon of the Science of Judaism, and in the process, to illustrate the fascinating origins of the academic field of Jewish and Islamic Studies.