Jewish Politics In Spinozas Amsterdam

Author : Anne O. Albert
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1802070753
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Politics in Spinoza's Amsterdam written by Anne O. Albert and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book untangles a web of ideas about politics, religion, exile, and community that emerged at a key moment in Jewish history and left a lasting mark on Jewish ideas. In the shadow of their former member Baruch Spinoza’s notoriety, and amid the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam underwent a conceptual shift that led them to treat their self-governed diaspora community as a commonwealth. Preoccupied by the question of why and how Jews should rule themselves in the absence of a biblical or messianic sovereign state or king, they forged a creative synthesis of insights from early modern Christian politics and Jewish law and traditions to assess and argue over their formidable communal government. In so doing they shaped a proud new theopolitical self-understanding of their community as analogous to a Christian state. Through readings of rarely studied sermons, commentaries, polemics, administrative records, and architecture, Anne Albert shows that a concentrated period of public Jewish political discourse among the community’s leaders and thinkers led to the formation of a strong image of itself as a totalizing, state-like entity—an image that eventually came to define its portrayal by twentieth-century historians. Her study presents a new perspective on a Jewish population that has long fascinated readers, as well as new evidence of Jewish reactions to Spinoza and Sabbatianism, and analyses the first Jewish reckoning with modern western political concepts.

Author : Daniel B. Schwartz
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 069116214X
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The First Modern Jew written by Daniel B. Schwartz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals--German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists--have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish cultureand a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day.

Author : Rebecca Goldstein
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 030751417X
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Betraying Spinoza written by Rebecca Goldstein and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2009-01-16 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part of the Jewish Encounter series In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish community excommunicated Baruch Spinoza, and, at the age of twenty–three, he became the most famous heretic in Judaism. He was already germinating a secularist challenge to religion that would be as radical as it was original. He went on to produce one of the most ambitious systems in the history of Western philosophy, so ahead of its time that scientists today, from string theorists to neurobiologists, count themselves among Spinoza’s progeny. In Betraying Spinoza, Rebecca Goldstein sets out to rediscover the flesh-and-blood man often hidden beneath the veneer of rigorous rationality, and to crack the mystery of the breach between the philosopher and his Jewish past. Goldstein argues that the trauma of the Inquisition’ s persecution of its forced Jewish converts plays itself out in Spinoza’s philosophy. The excommunicated Spinoza, no less than his excommunicators, was responding to Europe’ s first experiment with racial anti-Semitism. Here is a Spinoza both hauntingly emblematic and deeply human, both heretic and hero—a surprisingly contemporary figure ripe for our own uncertain age. From the Hardcover edition.

Author : Heidi M. Ravven
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 0791488934
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy written by Heidi M. Ravven and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking new ground in the study of Spinoza's philosophy, the essays in this volume explore the extent to which Spinoza may be considered a Jewish thinker. The rich diversity of Spinoza scholarship today is represented here by a wide range of intellectual methods and scholarly perspectives—from Jewish philosophy and history, to Cartesian-analytic and Continental-Marxist streams of interpretation, to the disciplines of political science and intellectual history. Two questions underlie all the essays: How and in what measure is Spinoza's a Jewish philosophy, and what is its impact on the project of Jewish philosophy as a living enterprise now and for the future? The contributors' varied perspectives afford a highly nuanced vision of the multifaceted Judaic tradition itself, as refracted through the Spinozist lens. What draws them together is the quest for enduring insights that emerge from the philosophy of Spinoza.

Author : Steven Nadler
Publisher : Clarendon Press
ISBN 13 : 0191529974
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinoza's Heresy written by Steven Nadler and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2001-12-06 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of Spinoza's Heresy is a mystery: why was Baruch Spinoza so harshly excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of twenty-four? In this philosophical sequel to his acclaimed, award-winning biography of the seventeenth-century thinker, Steven Nadler argues that Spinoza's main offence was a denial of the immortality of the soul. But this only deepens the mystery. For there is no specific Jewish dogma regarding immortality: there is nothing that a Jew is required to believe about the soul and the afterlife. It was, however, for various religious, historical and political reasons, simply the wrong issue to pick on in Amsterdam in the 1650s. After considering the nature of the ban, or cherem, as a disciplinary tool in the Sephardic community, and a number of possible explanations for Spinoza's ban, Nadler turns to the variety of traditions in Jewish religious thought on the postmortem fate of a person's soul. This is followed by an examination of Spinoza's own views on the eternity of the mind and the role that that the denial of personal immortality plays in his overall philosophical project. Nadler argues that Spinoza's beliefs were not only an outgrowth of his own metaphysical principles, but also a culmination of an intellectualist trend in Jewish rationalism.

Author : Susan James
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0199698120
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics written by Susan James and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susan James explores the revolutionary political thought of one of the most radical and creative of modern philosophers, Baruch Spinoza. His Theologico-Political Treatise of 1670 defends religious pluralism, political republicanism, and intellectual freedom. James shows how this work played a crucial role in the development of modern society.

Author : Ann Oravetz Albert
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Post-Sabbatian Politics written by Ann Oravetz Albert and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines the political thought of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, arguing that a distinct period of intense political self-reflection can be identified during the two decades beginning in 1665. In their sermons, polemics, moral tracts, pamphlets, and administrative records, the members of Spinoza's former Jewish community displayed a new emphasis on the exilic community as an object of pride and analysis, creatively adapted political ideas from the non-Jewish world to describe their own governance, and deeply queried the relationship between lay and rabbinic authority. The primary context offered for this shift is the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement that raged through European Jewish communities in 1665--6. This movement's promise of an imminent end to the exile, and its subsequent failure, prompted a new engagement with the meaning of the semi-autonomous Jewish community, its institutions, and its political-religious nature. The post-Sabbatian Sephardim in Amsterdam characterized the community as a true polity that was governed according to their own law and possessed political glory to rival the promised messianic kingship. Although this political re-evaluation took place in the wake of the Sabbatian movement, this is not the only relevant context. It is also related to Spinoza's discussion of similar questions about law and particularity in his Theological-Political Treatise, and to general trends in early modern European and Jewish history. For example, their depiction of the community as a Jewish "republic" was in part a reaction to the erosion of communal autonomy, as well as to the contemporaneous Christian interest in political Hebraism. Their discussions of the lay leadership's "reason of state" are another example, portraying their governance as the skillful harmonization of the demands of religion with those of politics, and mimicking Spanish treatments of the same issue.

Author : Steven B. Smith
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300076653
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity written by Steven B. Smith and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677)--often recognized as the first modern Jewish thinker--was also a founder of modern liberal political philosophy. This book is the first to connect systematically these two aspects of Spinoza's legacy. Steven B. Smith shows that Spinoza was a politically engaged theorist who both advocated and embodied a new conception of the emancipated individual, a thinker who decisively influenced such diverse movements as the Enlightenment, liberalism, and political Zionism. Focusing on Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, Smith argues that Spinoza was the first thinker of note to make the civil status of Jews and Judaism (what later became known as the Jewish Question) an essential ingredient of modern political thought. Before Marx or Freud, Smith notes, Spinoza recast Judaism to include the liberal values of autonomy and emancipation from tradition. Smith examines the circumstances of Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his skeptical assault on the authority of Scripture, his transformation of Mosaic prophecy into a progressive philosophy of history, his use of the language of natural right and the social contract to defend democratic political institutions, and his comprehensive comparison of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth and the modern commercial republic. According to Smith, Spinoza's Treatise represents a classic defense of religious toleration and intellectual freedom, showing them to be necessary foundations for political stability and liberal regimes. In this study Smith examines Spinoza's solution to the Jewish Question and asks whether a Judaism, so conceived, can long survive.

Author : Jonathan Israel
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139463616
Total Pages : 451 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise written by Jonathan Israel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-05-03 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (1670) is one of the most important philosophical works of the early modern period. In it Spinoza discusses at length the historical circumstances of the composition and transmission of the Bible, demonstrating the fallibility of both its authors and its interpreters. He argues that free enquiry is not only consistent with the security and prosperity of a state but actually essential to them, and that such freedom flourishes best in a democratic and republican state in which individuals are left free while religious organizations are subordinated to the secular power. His Treatise has profoundly influenced the subsequent history of political thought, Enlightenment 'clandestine' or radical philosophy, Bible hermeneutics, and textual criticism more generally. It is presented here in a translation of great clarity and accuracy by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel, with a substantial historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Israel.

Author : Saul Levi Mortera
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789462980105
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Arguments Against the Christian Religion in Amsterdam written by Saul Levi Mortera and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on manuscript EH/LM48D38 (Fuks 206) of the Ets Haim Library, Amsterdam.