Exploring the diversity of Jewish thought, the author examines prominent Jewish thinkers across various beliefs. Key issues addressed include the essence of Jewish identity in thought, the evolution of modern Jewish ideas, and the interaction between secular and traditional Jewish perspectives. The work also highlights the mutual insights that Orthodox and non-Orthodox thinkers can offer each other, fostering a deeper understanding of contemporary Jewish philosophy.
How Scholars in Germany, Israel, and America Transformed an Ancient Text
Focusing on the evolution of Jewish Bible study, this book highlights how translators and scholars shaped the Bible's role in Jewish life across Germany, Israel, and America. It explores how specific needs, such as religion, nationalism, and ethnicity, influenced their work amid non-Jewish contexts and internal traditions. The author challenges common perceptions by asserting that the modern era represents a golden age for Jewish biblical scholarship, revealing the complexities and richness of this cultural endeavor.
Tracing its history from Moses Mendelssohn to today, Alan Levenson explores the factors that shaped what is the modern Jewish Bible and its centrality in Jewish life today. The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible explains how Jewish translators, commentators, and scholars made the Bible a keystone of Jewish life in Germany, Israel and America. Levenson argues that German Jews created a religious Bible, Israeli Jews a national Bible, and American Jews an ethnic one. In each site, scholars wrestled with the demands of the non-Jewish environment and their own indigenous traditions, trying to balance fidelity and independence from the commentaries of the rabbinic and medieval world.
Philosemitism, defined by Alan T. Levenson as "any pro-Jewish or pro-Judaic utterance or act," emerged in Germany alongside antisemitism, highlighting a significant yet often overlooked aspect of German-Jewish relations. This work offers the first comprehensive assessment of non-Jewish support for Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness from the establishment of the German Reich in 1871 until the rise of the Nazis in 1932, when supporting Jews became criminalized. Levenson employs an interdisciplinary approach, examining fiction, private letters, and published defenses of Jews in early twentieth-century Germany. He reevaluates the role of missionary Protestants and advocates from the German peace movement. Through literary analysis of novels featuring positive Jewish characters and the reception of Herzlian Zionism, the book sheds light on this neglected facet of history. It reveals that, despite being a marginalized group, Jews garnered sympathy in Imperial and Weimar Germany, though this support was often limited by outdated societal values. Levenson's new afterword reviews the past decade of philosemitism studies, using Die Weltbühne, a prominent leftist journal, to substantiate the term's relevance. Alan T. Levenson is the Schusterman Professor for Jewish Intellectual and Religious History at the University of Oklahoma and has authored several notable works on Jewish thought and history.