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The
Jews in European History
Seven Lectures
Edited by Wolfgang Beck |
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These
lectures by internationally renowned historians from Germany, Israel, and
the United States were originally presented to large audiences at the Ludwig-Maximilian
University in Munich. Published soon thereafter, they have enjoyed remarkable
popularity in Germany and now appear together for the first time in English.
The topics of the lectures are varied. Eberhard Jäckel
deals primarily with the problems the Holocaust poses for the historian.
Amos Funkenstein traces the close interdependence between Christianity and
Judaism — confrontational cultures since the Middle Ages — and
the odd dialectic of mutual attraction and rejection that has historically
informed that relationship. David Sorkin discusses the deeply ambivalent
relationship between the men of the Enlightenment and the Jews, so facilely
covered up by Jewish devotees of the Enlightenment in subsequent decades.
Michael A. Meyer focuses on the internal difficulties of modernizing |
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the
Jewish religion along with Christianity's skepticism and even rejection
— or at the very least incomprehension — of those efforts. Shulamit
Volkov presents her view of a fundamental unity that can, from today’s vantage
point, be assumed to underlie the remarkably divergent trends in pre-First
World War German Jewry. Jehuda Reinharz recounts the multifaceted efforts
towards redirecting and strengthening Jewish identity under the aegis of
Zionism. And Saul Friedländer shows that other approaches than those
hitherto considered necessary are required with regard to an event only
inadequately termed "Holocaust," "Shoah,"
or "Auschwitz." |
