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This chapter examines the history of scholarship on the ancient Jewish death penalty, focusing in particular on the last century of scholarship in the United States and Israel. It includes within its survey a variety of approaches and disciplines: jurisprudence, responsa, New Testament historiography, religious denominational writing, Jewish intellectual history, philosophy, Zionist reformism. It give this scholarship “thick description,” contextualizing it within the social forces that shaped it. It also offers some concluding reflections on what aspects of the scholarship might be most productive for further study.

This chapter traces the circulation of Ari Nohem in manuscript, from its composition through its first appearance in print. The different stages in the reception of Ari Nohem in manuscript offer an alternative history of Kabbalah in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that has largely been told through the histories of Sabbatianism and Hasidism. The manuscript transmission of Ari Nohem was typical rather than aberrant for texts written by early modern Jewish intellectuals on a variety of subjects: polemical writings on Christianity, esoteric kabbalistic treatises, and epistolary campaigns against the mystical messiah Sabbatai Zevi and his followers. The evidence of these manuscripts, combined with repeated citation of and allusion to Ari Nohem in letters, diaries, treatises, responsa, and compendia composed between 1639 and 1840, indicate that Jews and Christians continued to read Modena's text in nearly every generation between the death of the author and the printing of his book.

This chapter shows that virtually every German Jew born in the second and third quarters of the 19th century received an elementary German education and could read and write German. Advanced Talmudic education now took place only at rabbinical seminaries and a few Posen study houses. Jews were already overrepresented among students in secondary schools and in the universities, even if the majority of Jews still did not have such an advanced education. The days in which the German Jews could be seen as a mainly illiterate backward group unable to communicate in German were over. A new stereotype — f the overeducated Jewish intellectual — would replace the old stereotype of the uneducated Jew in Imperial Germany.

This chapter begins by tracing the assertions that link the predominance of Jews in critical discourses to Jewish marginality to a 1919 essay by Thorstein Veblen. Veblen does not argue that creativity and innovation thrive on the margins but, rather, that marginal groups like the Jews are better able than their European contemporaries to hold to a position of detachment and alienation from tradition and received wisdom, transforming their marginality into a critical perspective from which they are able to question, as it were, both themselves and the European social and economic systems. Recent critics of Veblen have pointed at his blindness toward the cultural and economic characteristics of Jewish communal life. In their critique, however, they take the disproportionate success of American Jews as their prime measure, supplanting Veblen's intellectual value with monetary value. From this perspective, Jews are no longer marginal but, on the contrary, central to the ever-expanding social order of capital.

This chapter describes the predicament of secular Jewish intellectuals—graduates for the most part of German-Jewish Normalschulen—who in the 1830s and 1840s imagined themselves to be participating in what they presumed to be a shared project in the construction of a “Bohemian” identity, which united German speakers and Czech speakers, Jews and Gentiles. It explains that their confrontation with anti-Jewish popular unrest in the 1840s, as well as with the unwillingness of a segment of the new Czech intelligentsia to entertain an alliance with Jews, led the bulk of upwardly mobile Bohemian Jews to “narrow” their vision of community by tying their fortunes to German liberalism—in effect crystalizing what had been a by-product of absolutist reform into both a political commitment and a cultural identity that would last well into the 1860s and beyond.

This introductory chapter outlines the entanglement of Jewish intellectuals and others as they confronted exile, migration, and, in some cases, statelessness. These intellectuals include Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Albert Hirschmann, Varian Fry, Judith Shklar, Carl J. Friedrich, and Isaiah Berlin. They faced these challenges because of their Jewish origins, regardless of whether they themselves identified as Jewish, whether they were believers, or whether they were practicing Jews or not. Meanwhile, the chapter considers that for German Jews, the experience of belonging and not belonging, of being rendered migrants and internal exiles in their own country, began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the granting of certain civil rights to Jews residing in German territories. Lastly, the chapter presents a brief layout of the succeeding chapters' content.

This chapter examines the movement among Czech-Jewish intellectuals to effect a religious reform that was inspired, to a large extent, by Czech philosophical currents. It notes that the most remarkable aspect of the Czech-Jewish religious reforms of the 1880s may have been their superficiality. It observes that the activists within the SČAŽ and Or-Tomid seem to have been content merely to tinker with the linguistic forms of public worship and ritual. It notes that once Judaism had acquired a “Czech face”, as it were, they considered their job to have been completed. It argues on the other hand, that the superficiality of early Czech-Jewish reform was born of optimism. It observes that Czech Jews saw nothing in the content of their religious culture that would stand in the way of their swift integration into modern Czech society.

This chapter provides a background on Jewish social and cultural history in the nineteenth century and describes the complex impact of the Dreyfus affair on French Jewry. It looks at the first generations of post-revolutionary Jewish intellectuals and communal leaders that had been primarily concerned with promoting Jewish integration and acculturation. It also recounts how the emergence of ethnic nationalism and the modern antisemitic movement forced French Jews to negotiate between a commitment to universalist Enlightenment principles and the racialized discourses of identity. The chapter investigates the explosion of the Dreyfus affair that openly questioned Franco-Judaism and confronted the complexity of Jewish identity in the modern world head-on. It looks at the antisemitism in France, the affair prompted more sympathetic attitude towards Jews in French leftist circles.

This chapter discusses how ‘maskilic history’, developing in the circle of German maskilim during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, broke with ‘traditional Jewish history’. Just as the European Enlightenment had constructed a new picture of the past and proposed a kind of ‘philosophical history’, the Haskalah, functioning within the framework of its critical goals and demands for a reformed society, also created a new image of the past that presented a clear alternative to the traditional version. The new legitimization of historical study, the new division of history into periods, the belief in the historical turning-point and the shaping of ‘a modern age’, stemming from awareness of modernity, together with progressive programmes and realistic explanations, all characterized maskilic awareness of the past. They also made it possible to identify maskilic history as a specific historical phenomenon and an element of the consciousness of those Jewish intellectual circles that made pragmatic and didactic use of history. Maskilic history presented exemplary types, elevated historical heroes, and proposed moral explanations of events, all aimed at realizing the maskilic aspiration of creating a new, ideal Jew who would also be a universal man and a citizen of his country.

This chapter examines Jacques Derrida as a Jewish intellectual, locating in his work expressions of his identity as an intellectual and as a Jew. It applies insights from Derrida's philosophy of literature to his relationship with Emmanuel Levinas, probing the similarities and differences in their experience of these identities. Derrida's ambivalence toward Jewish community, in particular that aspect that imposes obligations and makes claims, was not separate from his awareness of familial overtones in his relationship with Levinas. Although Derrida discussed his Jewishness in various ways and contexts, it was through Levinas that he did and did not identify with the category of Jewish intellectual. In recounting a pair of anecdotes reported by Derrida, in which he revealed private comments made to him by Levinas, the chapter then exposes in the closeness of their relationship the operation of secrecy and betrayal, and the role of irony in constructing and subverting intimacy.

This chapter focuses on how ‘Greek wisdom’ is treated in Jewish culture. It shows that the term ‘Greek wisdom’ had a long history, and the maskilim (men of letters and thinkers) turned to it to seek support and legitimization for their views in the Jewish intellectual tradition. The term ‘wisdom’ was the main — perhaps even the only positive signal with which the Jews marked part of the Greek-Hellenistic culture, and the one with the longest and most consecutive history; it was generally identified with Greek wisdom. It meant the heritage and legacy of classical antiquity and Hellenism in philosophy, sciences, and the arts; it also symbolized a lost Jewish heritage and the proper relationship between the Jewish world and the world of the Gentiles. Moreover, wisdom became a multipurpose and multivalent concept that in the intellectual utopia of the maskilim was intended to serve as a bridge and intermediary between the Jewish intellectual tradition and the outside world.

This introductory chapter examines the closely interrelated ways in which Hannah Arendt herself engaged and imagined Jerusalem — actually and metaphorically — in order to understand the history and nature of Arendt's reception in Jerusalem to date. This is done by placing Arendt within the relevant historical context. Like the figures she vividly brought to life — Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Hermann Broch, and many others — Hannah Arendt, her achievements and biases, her creativity and inner conflicts, must be seen as part of the quite extraordinary history of post-emancipation German–Jewish intellectuals and their wider engagement with the imperatives of German culture and its later great breakdown.

This concluding chapter explains that by listening to female voices rather than focusing exclusively on male historical sources, it has been possible to show that the enlightened Jewish women discussed in this book were neither simple bystanders in the enlightened world of their time nor mere mediators who facilitated the cultural activity of men. The ample evidence presented clearly positions these women as both agents of culture and creators of culture: as intellectuals in their own right. These Jewish women turned their own critical eyes on the social, cultural, and at times political reality around them, and drew on basic principles of the Enlightenment to support their claim to the right to participate, as women, in the advancement of public reason. In this spirit, they applied gender criticism to the dominant discourse, calling into question the social and cultural norms that constrained women's lives, scrutinizing even the patriarchal institution of marriage, in extreme cases to the point of undermining its foundations. Ultimately, the Enlightenment was not only an influence on the cultural world of these women, it is revealed as a vital element in understanding their thought and actions. The chapter then presents a comparison between this group of women and the maskilim, and also with nineteenth-century maskilot and Jewish female intellectuals.

This chapter examines the Russian literary critic Victor Shklovsky and poet Osip Mandelshtam to discuss the relationship between theory and Jews, exploring their autobiographical narratives to articulate what can be called the off-modern turn. That turn is a zigzag movement that defies the demands of systematic thinking and that does not follow any of the popular “isms” of Jewish intellectual engagement of the day: idealism, Marxism, nationalism, or messianism. Indeed, both Shklovsky and Mandelshtam look for artistic, political, and existential practices that defy theoretical conceptions along with their hierarchies and logics, for modes of art and thinking that undercut prescribed rules. Such practices bear the promise of freedom, of seeing the world anew, of a new beginning.