Judaism and Enlightenment
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Judaism and Enlightenment
（Ideas in context / edited by Quentin Skinner (general editor) ... [et al.], 66）
Cambridge University Press, 2003
- : hbk
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 262-306) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This study investigates the philosophical and political significance of Judaism in the intellectual life of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. Adam Sutcliffe shows how the widespread and enthusiastic fascination with Judaism prevalent around 1650 was largely eclipsed a century later by attitudes of dismissal and disdain. He argues that Judaism was uniquely difficult for Enlightenment thinkers to account for, and that their intense responses, both negative and positive, to Jewish topics are central to an understanding of the underlying ambiguities of the Enlightenment itself. Judaism and the Jews were a limit case, a destabilising challenge, and a constant test for Enlightenment rationalism. Erudite and highly broad-ranging in its sources, and yet extremely accessible in its argument, Judaism and Enlightenment is a major contribution to the history of European ideas, of interest to scholars of Jewish history and to those working on the Enlightenment, toleration and the emergence of modernity itself.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: disentangling Judaism and Enlightenment
- Part I. The Crumbling of Old Certainties: Judaism, the Bible and the Meaning of History: 1. The crisis and decline of Christian Hebraism
- 2. Hebraic politics: Respublica Mosaiaca
- 3. Meaning and method: Jewish history, world history
- 4. The limits of erudition: Jacques Basnage and Pierre Bayle
- Part II. Judaism and the Formation of Enlightenment Radicalism: 5. Religious dissent and debate in Sephardi Amsterdam
- 6. Judaism in Spinoza and his circle
- 7. Spinoza: Messiah of the Enlightenment?
- 8. Enlightenment and Kabbalah
- 9. Judaism, reason and the critique of religion
- Part III. Judaism, Nationhood and the Politics of Enlightenment: 10. Utopianism, Republicanism, Cosmopolitanism
- 11. Judaism and the invention of toleration
- 12. The ambiguities of Enlightenment: Voltaire and the Jews
- Conclusion: reason versus myth?
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