Nineteenth-century European thought, especially in Germany, was
increasingly dominated by a new historicist impulse to situate
every event, person, or text in its particular context. At odds
with the transcendent claims of philosophy and--more
significantly--theology, historicism came to be attacked by its
critics for reducing human experience to a series of disconnected
moments, each of which was the product of decidedly mundane, rather
than sacred, origins. By the late nineteenth century and into the
Weimar period, historicism was seen by many as a grinding force
that corroded social values and was emblematic of modern society's
gravest ills. Resisting History examines the backlash against
historicism, focusing on four major Jewish thinkers. David Myers
situates these thinkers in proximity to leading Protestant thinkers
of the time, but argues that German Jews and Christians shared a
complex cultural and discursive world best understood in terms of
exchange and adaptation rather than influence.
After examining the growing dominance of the new historicist
thinking in the nineteenth century, the book analyzes the critical
responses of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Leo Strauss, and
Isaac Breuer. For this fascinating and diverse quartet of thinkers,
historicism posed a stark challenge to the ongoing vitality of
Judaism in the modern world. And yet, as they set out to dilute or
eliminate its destructive tendencies, these thinkers often made
recourse to the very tools and methods of historicism. In doing so,
they demonstrated the utter inescapability of historicism in modern
culture, whether approached from a Christian or Jewish
perspective.
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