This study examines the capacity of traditional Judaism to renew itself in response to the challenge of modernity. Concentrating as it does on the major Jewish Orthodox movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book focuses especially on the Religious Kibbutz Federation in Israel, whose pioneering settlements attained a sophisticated synthesis of modern and traditional Jewish culture at the community level. Professor Fishman provides the first sociological study of the formation of modern Orthodox Judaism, as well as the first scholarly study of the religious kibbutz.

This book takes as its point of departure the historical fact that it was Orthodox pioneers of German origin, in contrast to their Eastern European counterparts, who successfully developed religious kibbutz life. Employing sociological concepts and methods, the author goes on to examine the correlations between two evolutionary phases in kibbutz development and two modes of Judaism: the rational Halkhic and the emotive Hassidic modes. In doing this, he exlores the relationship between two diverse dispositions towards divinity - the transcendent and the immanent - and two diverse modes of the self and their related communities.
This innovative and insightful work will be of essential interest to scholars of the sociology of religion, Jewish studies, modern Jewish history and Israel's national history, and will also interest those more broadly engaged with theology and religious studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203217373

Examining the relationship between Judaism as a religious culture and kibbutz life, this is a ground-breaking work in the research of Judaism.
The book takes as its point of departure the historical fact that it was Orthodox pioneers of German origin, in contrast to their Eastern European counterparts, who successfully developed religious kibbutz life. Employing sociological concepts and methods, the author examines the correlations between two evolutionary phases in kibbutz development and two modes of Judaism: the rational Halakhic and the emotive Hassidic modes. In doing this, he explores the relationship between two diverse dispositions towards the divinity - the transcendent and the immanent - and two diverse modes of the self and their related communities.
This innovative and insightful work will be of essential interest to scholars of the sociology of religion, Jewish studies, modern Jewish history and Israel's national history, and will also interest those more broadly engaged with theology and religious studies.

This work in the field of intellectual history explores religious ideas which emerged in Jewish thought under the influence of secular ideologies, and in response to the social and cultural realities created by Jewish Emancipation, Zionism and socialism. By concentrating on the major Jewish Orthodox movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Professor Fishman examines the innovative mechanisms of traditional Judaism that were activated by these movements, as they strove to accommodate new realities. The study focuses specifically on the Religious Kibbutz Federation in Israel, which (in the process of building its self-contained pioneering settlements) developed a religious sub-culture that incorporated the central values of Jewish nationalism and socialism. Professor Fishman shows that - by creating the most far-reaching synthesis of modern, and traditional Jewish, culture at the community level - the settlements of the RKF may be regarded as a test case for the measure of the capacity of Judaism to adapt to modern life.