2012-2013 Academic Catalog

May 05, 2024

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

HIST 270 - Jewish Responses to Modernity: The Enlightenment and Its Critics

Type of Course: Seminar

Examines the ways in which Jewish thinkers, writers, historians and rabbinic leaders dealt with the tensions attendant on the crisis of modernity that came in the wake of their own confrontation with the social and intellectual values of the Enlightenment and its Jewish variant, the Haskalah, beginning in the late eighteenth century. The struggle with the implications of Enlightenment not only produced the nineteenth century split between the proponents of religious reform and the adherents of orthodoxy, but contributed to the urgency of Jewish politics in the twentieth century, and continues to inform our own on-going debates about the content of secular Jewish culture, the meaning of Jewish ethnicity and the ethical responsibilities of Jewish men and women in the modern world.