Jacob & Esau: Jewish European History Between Nation and Empire - Hardcover

Hacohen, Malachi Haim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1316510379 ISBN 13: 9781316510377

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2019

Synopsis

Jacob and Esau is a profound new account of two millennia of Jewish European history that, for the first time, integrates the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with that of traditional Jews and Jewish culture. Malachi Haim Hacohen uses the biblical story of the rival twins, Jacob and Esau, and its subsequent retelling by Christians and Jews throughout the ages as a lens through which to illuminate changing Jewish-Christian relations and the opening and closing of opportunities for Jewish life in Europe. Jacob and Esau tells a new history of a people accustomed for over two-and-a-half millennia to forming relationships, real and imagined, with successive empires but eagerly adapting, in modernity, to the nation-state, and experimenting with both assimilation and Jewish nationalism. In rewriting this history via Jacob and Esau, the book charts two divergent but intersecting Jewish histories that together represent the plurality of Jewish European cultures.

About this title

Book Description

European histories have traditionally marginalised the Jews, while Jewish history has told an exclusively Jewish story. Malachi Haim Hacohen sets out to redress this through an ambitious and panoramic alternative Jewish European history that re-integrates the cosmopolitan narrative of the Jewish diaspora with traditional Jews and Jewish culture.

About the Author

Malachi Haim Hacohen is Professor and Bass Fellow at Duke University, North Carolina. He serves as the Director of the Religions and Public Life Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics. His book Karl Popper - The Formative Years, 1902-1945 (Cambridge, 2000) won the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize of the American Historical Association and Austria's Victor Adler State Prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1316510379
• ISBN 13: 9781316510377
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 752