Radical Thinkers Set 14 - Böcker

Isaac Deutscher is widely recognized as one of the foremost political biographers of the twentieth century, and his full-scale studies of Trotsky and Stalin, translated into many world languages, have played a major role in elucidating the character and fate of the Russian Revolution. He died on 19 August 1967, at the height of his powers. From his papers his widow, Tamara Deutscher, selected and edited a group of essays and articles with a special unity of theme: the place of the Jew in the modern world. In these essays Deutscher speaks of the emotional heritage of the European Jew with calmness and clear-sightedness; as a historian he writes without anger but with com­passion; as a non-Jewish Jew he writes without religious belief, but with generous breadth of understanding. As a philosopher he writes first of some of the great Jews of Europe: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Freud. He explores the Jewish imagination through the painter Chagall. He writes of the Jews under Stalin and of the `remnants of a race' after Hitler; of the Zionist ideal, of the establishment of the State of Israel, of the war of June 1967, and of the perils ahead.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the "tikkoun": redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of "elective affinity" to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács.