This case study describes the work of the people responsible for creating festive lore and its system of ceremonies and festivities - an inseparable part of every culture. In the case of the new modern Hebrew culture of Eretz Israel (modern Jewish Palestine) - a society of immigrants that left behind most of their traditional folkways - the creation of festival lore was an organized process guided by a national ideology and aesthetic values. This effort in a secular national society served as an alternative to the traditional religious system, adapted the ceremonies and festivals to a new historical reality, and created a new festival cycle that would give expression to the values and symbols of the new Jewish society. Stoging and Stagers in Modern Jewish Palestine claims that the system of ceremonies and festivals, in general, and each separate ceremony and festival were staged according to the staging instructions written by a defined group of cultural activists. The book examines three main stages - the educational network, rural society (particularly the cooperative sector), and urban society (most notably Tel Aviv) - and looks at the stagers themselves, who were school-teachers, writers, artists, and cultural activists. Though cultural systems of festivals and ceremonies are often researched and described, scholarly literature rarely identifies their creators or studies in detail the manner in which these systems are created. This book sheds important light on the stagers of modern Jewish Palestine and also on the processes and mechanisms that created the performative lore in other cultures, in ancient as well as modern times.

This work, the first of its kind, describes all the aspects of the Bible revolution in Jewish history in the last two hundred years, as well as the emergence of the new biblical culture. It describes the circumstances and processes that turned Holy Scripture into the Book of Books and into the history of the biblical period and of the people - the Jewish people. It deals with the encounter of the Jews with modern biblical criticism and the archaeological research of the Ancient Near East and with contemporary archaeology. The middle section discusses the extensive involvement of educated Jews in the Bible-Babel polemic at the start of the twentieth century, which it treats as a typological event. The last section describes at length various aspects of the key status assigned to the Bible in the new Jewish culture in Europe, and particularly in modern Jewish Palestine, as a "guide to life" in education, culture and politics, as well as part of the attempt to create a new Jewish man, and as a source of inspiration for various creative arts.

In the nineteenth century, the largest Jewish community the modern world had known lived in hundreds of towns and shtetls in the territory between the Prussian border of Poland and the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea. The period had started with the partition of Poland and the absorption of its territories into the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires; it would end with the first large-scale outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence and the imposition in Russia of strong anti-Semitic legislation. In the years between, a traditional society accustomed to an autonomous way of life would be transformed into one much more open to its surrounding cultures, yet much more confident of its own nationalist identity. In The Jews of Eastern Europe, Israel Bartal traces this transformation and finds in it the roots of Jewish modernity.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century most European Jews lived in restricted settlements and urban ghettos, isolated from the surrounding dominant Christian cultures not only by law but also by language, custom, and dress. By the end of the century urban, upwardly mobile Jews had shaved their beards and abandoned Yiddish in favor of the languages of the countries in which they lived. They began to participate in secular culture and they embraced rationalism and non-Jewish education as supplements to traditional Talmudic studies. The full participation of Jews in modern Europe and America would be unthinkable without the intellectual and social revolution that was the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Unparalleled in scale and comprehensiveness, The Jewish Enlightenment reconstructs the intellectual and social revolution of the Haskalah as it gradually gathered momentum throughout the eighteenth century. Relying on a huge range of previously unexplored sources, Shmuel Feiner fully views the Haskalah as the Jewish version of the European Enlightenment and, as such, a movement that cannot be isolated from broader eighteenth-century European traditions. Critically, he views the Haskalah as a truly European phenomenon and not one simply centered in Germany. He also shows how the republic of letters in European Jewry provided an avenue of secularization for Jewish society and culture, sowing the seeds of Jewish liberalism and modern ideology and sparking the Orthodox counterreaction that culminated in a clash of cultures within the Jewish community. The Haskalah's confrontations with its opponents within Jewry constitute one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of the dramatic and traumatic encounter between the Jews and modernity. The Haskalah is one of the central topics in modern Jewish historiography. With its scope, erudition, and new analysis, The Jewish Enlightenment now provides the most comprehensive treatment of this major cultural movement.

Throughout the eighteenth century, an ever-sharper distinction emerged between Jews of the old order and those who were self-consciously of a new world. As aspirations for liberation clashed with adherence to tradition, as national, ethnic, cultural, and other alternatives emerged and a long, circuitous search for identity began, it was no longer evident that the definition of Jewishness would be based on the beliefs and practices surrounding the study of the Torah. In The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe Shmuel Feiner reconstructs this evolution by listening to the voices of those who participated in the process and by deciphering its cultural codes and meanings. On the one hand, a great majority of observant Jews still accepted the authority of the Talmud and the leadership of the rabbis; on the other, there was a gradually more conspicuous minority of "Epicureans" and "freethinkers." As the ground shifted, each individual was marked according to his or her place on the path between faith and heresy, between devoutness and permissiveness or indifference. Building on his award-winning Jewish Enlightenment, Feiner unfolds the story of critics of religion, mostly Ashkenazic Jews, who did not take active part in the secular intellectual revival known as the Haskalah. In open or concealed rebellion, Feiner's subjects lived primarily in the cities of western and central Europe-Altona-Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Breslau, and Prague. They participated as "fashionable" Jews adopting the habits and clothing of the surrounding Gentile society. Several also adopted the deist worldview of Enlightenment Europe, rejecting faith in revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the obligation to observe the commandments. Peering into the synagogue, observing individuals in the coffeehouse or strolling the boulevards, and peeking into the bedroom, Feiner recovers forgotten critics of religion from both the margins and the center of Jewish discourse. His is a pioneering work on the origins of one of the most significant transformations of modern Jewish history.

'Ambitious, elaborately structured and wide-ranging . . . Shavit's book will be the fundamental work on Jewish Hellenism for a long time to come.' Tessa Rajak, Times Literary Supplement 'The book is an encyclopedic, if not exhaustive treatment of this subject, which, in its various permutations, is the subject of modern Jewish thought . . . the prodigious scope of the book cannot but elicit astonishment and admiration. The range of subjects and fields of citation . . . give the book the feel of a magnum opus.' Elliott Rabin, AJS Review 'Shavit's rich and lively study raises fundamental questions and issues that have to be addressed if Jewish and especially Israeli society is to make any sense of its heritage in the coming decades.' Mordechai Beck, Jerusalem Post 'Truly a fascinating and challenging study in Jewish intellectual history. . . . The author has covered a spectrum of a dazzling array of writers and thinkers . . . in an extremely lively and readable style.' Louis H. Feldman, Shofar From the eighteenth century on, Jews seeking to acquire a modern identity began to take a new interest in classical antiquity and Hellenistic civilization as a key to the secular Jewish culture they sought to develop. It was of course not the 'real' classical Greece to which they aspired but rather its idealized image as perceived through contemporary eyes, but this image became an important element in the search for a new Jewish self-awareness. For the modernizing Jew, 'Greek' became a metaphor for the secular culture of modern Europe in its various forms. Yaacov Shavit's study also provides an illuminating test-case in the realm of historical consciousness and the history of ideas. Those interested in the growth of secular and national Judaism will find that this wide-ranging book makes a significant contribution to an understanding of its development. Through discussion of many centuries of Jewish literature, the reader is given fresh insight into Jewish culture and shown how its development in the modern period has been influenced by the response to other cultures. Those who are interested in classical antiquity and Hellenism will welcome this book as a unique opportunity to see the worlds of both as Jews have perceived them over many centuries.