How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern by Leora Batnitzky

By Leora Batnitzky

Is Judaism a faith, a tradition, a nationality--or a mix of all of those? In How Judaism turned a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this query greater than the other has pushed smooth Jewish idea because the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid advent tells the tale of ways Judaism got here to be outlined as a faith within the glossy period--and why Jewish thinkers have fought in addition to championed this idea.

Ever because the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers have debated even if and the way Judaism--largely a faith of perform and public adherence to law--can healthy right into a glossy, Protestant notion of faith as someone and personal subject of trust or religion. Batnitzky makes the radical argument that it's this conflict among the fashionable type of faith and Judaism that's chargeable for a lot of the inventive pressure in smooth Jewish notion. Tracing how the belief of Jewish faith has been defended and resisted from the eighteenth century to this day, the publication discusses a number of the significant Jewish thinkers of the previous 3 centuries, together with Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Zvi Yehuda Kook, Theodor Herzl, and Mordecai Kaplan. even as, it tells the tale of recent orthodoxy, the German-Jewish renaissance, Jewish faith after the Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish person, the delivery of Jewish nationalism, and Jewish faith in America.

More than an creation, How Judaism turned a Religion provides a compelling new point of view at the heritage of recent Jewish thought.

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