Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism

Asher D. Biemann

ISBN 10: 0804760411 / ISBN 13: 9780804760416

Published by Stanford University Press, 2009

About this Item

2009. 1st Edition. Hardcover. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780804760416

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Inventing New Beginnings: On the Idea of Renaissance in Modern Judaism
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804760411
• ISBN 13: 9780804760416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Inventing New Beginnings is the first book-length study to examine the conceptual underpinnings of the "Jewish Renaissance," or "return" to Judaism, that captured much of German-speaking Jewry between 1890 and 1938. The book addresses two very fundamental, yet hitherto strangely understated, questions: What did the term "renaissance" actually mean to the intellectuals and ideologues of the "Jewish Renaissance," and how did this understanding relate to wider currents in European intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? It also addresses the larger question of how we can contemplate "renaissance" as a mode of thought that is conditioned by the consciousness and experience of modernity and that extends to our present time.

About the Author

Asher D. Biemann is Assistant Professor for Modern Jewish Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Virginia. He is the editor of The Martin Buber Reader (2002) and the author of a critical edition of Martin Buber's Sprachphilosophische Schriften (2003).