Overview

Hans Baron, Karl Popper, Leo Strauss and Erich Auerbach were among the many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who fled Continental Europe with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Their scholarship, though not normally considered together, is studied here to demonstrate how, despite their different disciplines and distinctive modes of working, they responded polemically in the guise of traditional scholarship to their shared trauma. For each, the political calamity of European fascism was a profound intellectual crisis, requiring an intellectual response which Weinstein and Zakai now contextualize, ideologically and politically. They exemplify just how extensively, and sometimes how subtly, 1930s and 1940s scholarship was used not only to explain, but to fight the political evils that had infected modernity, victimizing so many. An original perspective on a popular area of research, this book draws upon a mass of secondary literature to provide an innovative and valuable contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history.

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9781107166462

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'Weinstein and Zakai's book makes a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of how German Jewish thinkers encountered historicism as a legacy of European thought that had to be opposed, or used with caution, because it seemed entangled in the crisis of Nazism.' Ben Wurgaft, The Journal of Modern History 'Weinstein and Zakai's book makes a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of how German Jewish thinkers encountered historicism as a legacy of European thought that had to be opposed, or used with caution, because it seemed entangled in the crisis of Nazism.' Ben Wurgaft, The Journal of Modern History

Author Information

David Weinstein is Emeritus Professor at Wake Forest University, North Carolina and Honorarprofessur für Ideenhistoriker at Carl V. Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany. His previous publications include Equal Freedom and Utility (Cambridge, 1998), The New Liberalism (with Avital Simhony, Cambridge, 2001) and Utilitarianism and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 2007). Avihu Zakai is Emeritus Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His previous publications include History and Apocalypse: Religion and Historical Consciousness in Early Modern History in Europe and America (2008), Jonathan Edwards's Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (2010), and Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology: An Apologia for the Western Judaeo-Christian Humanist Tradition in an Age of Peril, Tyranny, and Barbarism (2015).

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