Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture, PDF eBook

The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture PDF

Edited by Leonard Levin

Part of the Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History series

PDF

Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Description

The vast majority of intellectual, religious, and national developments in modern Judaism revolve around the central idea of "Jewish culture." This book is the first synoptic view of these developments that organizes and relates them from this vantage point.

The first Jewish modernization movements perceived culture as the defining trait of the outside alien social environment to which Jewry had to adapt.

To be "cultured" was to be modern-European, as opposed to medieval-ghetto-Jewish.

In short order, however, the Jewish religious legacy was redefined retrospectively as a historical "culture," with fateful consequences for the conception of Judaism as a humanly- and not only divinely-mandated regime.

The conception of Judaism-as-culture took two main forms: an integrative, vernacular Jewish culture that developed in tandem with the integration of Jews into the various nations of western-central Europe and America, and a national Hebrew culture which, though open to the inputs of modern European society, sought to develop a revitalized Jewish national identity that ultimately found expression in the revival of the Jewish homeland and the State of Israel.

Information

Other Formats

Information

Also in the Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History series  |  View all