Inventing new beginnings
Subtitle: on the idea of Renaissance in modern Judaism
By: Asher D. Biemann.
Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 428
ISBN-13: 9780804760416
Subjects: Jews -- Germany -- History -- 1800-1933 -- Historiography; Jews -- Germany -- History -- 1933-1945 -- Historiography; Jews -- Germany -- Intellectual life -- 19th century; Jews -- Germany -- Intellectual life -- 20th century; Jews -- Cultural assimilation -- Germany
Description: "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? The study 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 still to our present time."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Thinking in Renaissance or A grammar of beginnings; title: Beginnings : thresholds of continuity; title: Beginning again : the palingenesis of memory; title: Turning : transformations into the open; title: Writing in resurrection or The semantics of restoration; title: The imperishability of being : writing Jewish history in resurrection; title: The retrieval of ambivalence : Jewish Renaissance and the (re-)turn(-ing) to/of tradition; title: The unfinishedness of return : Renaissance and the re-aestheticization of Judaism.