Overview

This book gives voice to the experiences of secularization based on much new and illuminating research, making it possible to observe the current, vociferous discourse in the context of the deep and long-term historical processes. The book is laid out in four “Acts” that open windows through which one may view the various experiences of secularization. One hears many contradictory voices of hope and despair, enthusiasm and frustration, anger, rebellion, alienation, apprehension, and pain. In the various acts between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries, secularization as a historical process was expressed in many modes, on the spectrum between soft and radical, some of them very intimate, which were bound up with experiences of pain, panic, alienation, and betrayal. Secularization is a powerful force that gave rise to unprecedented global change in private lives, in society, in the nation, and in the state in the modern age. It also shaped Jewish religion as it is known today and gave rise to defensive and militant orthodoxy, to political and religious frameworks, to humanistic and liberal Judaism, and to other ways of creating a secular Jewish culture as an alternative to religion. In the various acts between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries, secularization as a historical process was expressed in many modes, on the spectrum between soft and radical, some of them very intimate, which were bound up with experiences of pain, panic, alienation, and betrayal.

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9781805960003

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Shmuel Feiner is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University. He is Chairman of The Historical Society of Israel, editor of Zion, A Quarterly for Research in Jewish History, and member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He has published books in Hebrew, English and German on the history of the Jewish Enlightenment in Central and Eastern Europe, the origins of Jewish secularization, and the Jewish Kulturkampf in the 19th Century.

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