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Has Jewish modernity exhausted itself? Flourishing between the age
of Enlightenment and the Second World War, the intellectual,
literary, scientific and artistic legacy of Jewish modernity
continues to dazzle us, however, in this provocative new book,
esteemed historian Enzo Traverso argues powerfully that this
cultural epoch has come to an end. Previously a beacon for critical
thinking in the Western world, the mainstream of Jewish thought
has, since the end of the war, undergone a conservative turn. With
great sensitivity and nuance, Traverso traces this development to
the virtual destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis, and the
establishment of the United States and Israel as the new poles of
Jewish communal life. This is a compelling narrative, hinged upon a
highly original discussion of Hannah Arendt's writings on
Jewishness and politics. With provocative chapters on the
relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia, the ascendance
of Zionism, and the new 'civil religion of the Holocaust', The End
of Jewish Modernity is both an elegy to a lost tradition and an
intellectual history of the present.
Today, history is increasingly written in the first person. A
growing number of historical works include an autobiographical
dimension, as if writing about the past required exploring the
inner life of the author. Neither traditional history nor
autobiography, this hybrid genre calls the norms of the historical
profession into question. In search of new and creative paths, it
transgresses a cardinal rule of the discipline: third-person
narration, long considered necessary to the objective analysis of
the past. Singular Pasts offers a critical account of the emergence
of authorial subjectivity in historical writing, scrutinizing both
its achievements and its shortcomings. Enzo Traverso considers a
group of contemporary historians, including Ivan Jablonka, Sergio
Luzzatto, and Mark Mazower, who reveal their emotional ties to
their subjects and give their writing a literary flavor. He
identifies a parallel trend in literature, in which authors such as
W. G. Sebald, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Daniel Mendelsohn
write their works as investigations based on archival sources.
Traverso argues that first-person history mirrors contemporary ways
of thinking: such writing is presentist and apolitical, perceiving
and representing the past through an individual lens. Probing the
limits of subjective historiography, he emphasizes that it is
collective action that produces social change: "we" instead of "I."
In an epilogue, Traverso considers the first-person writing of
Saidiya Hartman as a counterexample. A wide-ranging and
illuminating critique of a key trend in humanistic inquiry,
Singular Pasts reconsiders the notion of historical truth in a
neoliberal age.
Today, history is increasingly written in the first person. A
growing number of historical works include an autobiographical
dimension, as if writing about the past required exploring the
inner life of the author. Neither traditional history nor
autobiography, this hybrid genre calls the norms of the historical
profession into question. In search of new and creative paths, it
transgresses a cardinal rule of the discipline: third-person
narration, long considered necessary to the objective analysis of
the past. Singular Pasts offers a critical account of the emergence
of authorial subjectivity in historical writing, scrutinizing both
its achievements and its shortcomings. Enzo Traverso considers a
group of contemporary historians, including Ivan Jablonka, Sergio
Luzzatto, and Mark Mazower, who reveal their emotional ties to
their subjects and give their writing a literary flavor. He
identifies a parallel trend in literature, in which authors such as
W. G. Sebald, Patrick Modiano, Javier Cercas, and Daniel Mendelsohn
write their works as investigations based on archival sources.
Traverso argues that first-person history mirrors contemporary ways
of thinking: such writing is presentist and apolitical, perceiving
and representing the past through an individual lens. Probing the
limits of subjective historiography, he emphasizes that it is
collective action that produces social change: "we" instead of "I."
In an epilogue, Traverso considers the first-person writing of
Saidiya Hartman as a counterexample. A wide-ranging and
illuminating critique of a key trend in humanistic inquiry,
Singular Pasts reconsiders the notion of historical truth in a
neoliberal age.
For figures ranging from Karl Marx to the luminaries of the
Frankfurt School, the 'Jewish Question' - a set of problems related
to emancipation and anti-Semitism, cultural assimilation and
Zionism - raised significant controversies within Marxist theory.
Renowned scholar Enzo Traverso carefully reconstructs this
intellectual debate that runs over more than a century, discussing
both its generative aspects and its blind alleys. In The Jewish
Question: History of a Marxist Debate, Traverso explores the causes
and the forms of the encounter that took place, from the middle of
the nineteenth century to the Holocaust, between the intelligentsia
of a cosmopolitan minority and the most radical ideological current
of Western modernity. This is the second edition, completely
rewritten and updated, of a book already translated into many
languages (originally published in French, then translated into
English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish).
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also
the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses.
For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this
trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their
political struggle and how they have thought about their past
since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing
Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent
of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay
of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the
political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast
and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such
thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and
others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the
varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling
of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of
surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human
costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing
utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition
are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of
historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic
of revolutionary thought.
This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and
twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of
"dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history," Alexandra
Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body,
Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's
demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects
theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who
elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary
intellectuals-from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the
Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to Jose Carlos Mariategui,
C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South-as
outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement
between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history
of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and
representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and
iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new
intellectual history of the revolutionary past.
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also
the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses.
For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this
trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their
political struggle and how they have thought about their past
since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing
Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent
of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay
of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the
political in history and in theoretical critique. Drawing on a vast
and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such
thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and
others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the
varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling
of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of
surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human
costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing
utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition
are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of
historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic
of revolutionary thought.
Fire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two world wars
as a single historical sequence: the age of the European Civil War
(1914-1945). Its overture was played out in the trenches of the
Great War; its coda on a ruined continent. It opened with
conventional declarations of war and finished with "unconditional
surrender." Proclamations of national unity led to eventual
devastation, with entire countries torn to pieces. During these
three decades of deepening conflicts, a classical interstate
conflict morphed into a global civil war, abandoning rules of
engagement and fought by irreducible enemies rather than legitimate
adversaries, each seeking the annihilation of its opponents. It was
a time of both unchained passions and industrial, rationalized
massacre. Utilizing multiple sources, Enzo Traverso depicts the
dialectic of this era of wars, revolutions and genocides. Rejecting
commonplace notions of "totalitarian evil," he rediscovers the
feelings and reinterprets the ideas of an age of intellectual and
political commitment when Europe shaped world history with its own
collapse.
Has Jewish modernity exhausted itself? Flourishing between the age
of Enlightenment and the Second World War, the intellectual,
literary, scientific and artistic legacy of Jewish modernity
continues to dazzle us, however, in this provocative new book,
esteemed historian Enzo Traverso argues powerfully that this
cultural epoch has come to an end. Previously a beacon for critical
thinking in the Western world, the mainstream of Jewish thought
has, since the end of the war, undergone a conservative turn. With
great sensitivity and nuance, Traverso traces this development to
the virtual destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis, and the
establishment of the United States and Israel as the new poles of
Jewish communal life. This is a compelling narrative, hinged upon a
highly original discussion of Hannah Arendt's writings on
Jewishness and politics. With provocative chapters on the
relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia, the ascendance
of Zionism, and the new 'civil religion of the Holocaust', The End
of Jewish Modernity is both an elegy to a lost tradition and an
intellectual history of the present.
In History and Revolution, a group of respected historians
confronts the conservative, revisionist trends in historical
enquiry that have been dominant in the last twenty years. Ranging
from an exploration of the English, French, and Russian revolutions
and their treatment by revisionist historiography, to the debates
and themes arising from attempts to downplay revolution's role in
history, History and Revolution also engages with several prominent
revisionist historians, including Orlando Figes, Conrad Russell and
Simon Schama. This important book shows the inability of
revisionism to explain why millions are moved to act in defence of
political causes, and why specific political currents emerge, and
is a significant reassertion of the concept of revolution in human
development.
"The Jews and Germany" debunks a modern myth: that once upon a time
there was a Judeo-German symbiosis, in which two cultures met and
brought out the best in each other. Enzo Traverso argues that to
the contrary, the attainments of Jews in the German-speaking world
were due to the Jews aspiring to be German, with little help from
and often against the open hostility of Germans. As the Holocaust
proved in murder and theft, German Jews could never be German
enough. Now the works of German Jews are being published and
reprinted in Germany. It is a matter of enormous difference whether
the German rediscovery of German Jews is another annexation of
Jewish property or an act of rebuilding a link between traditions.
Traverso shows how tenuous the link was in the first place. He
resumes the queries of German Jews who asked throughout the
twentieth century what it meant to be both Jewish and German.
Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Max Horkheimer,
Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz
Kafka, and many more thinkers of genius found the problems
unavoidable and full of paradoxes. In returning to them Traverso
not only demolishes a sugary myth but also reasserts the
responsibility of history to recover memory, even if bitter and
full of pain. Enzo Traverso was born in Italy in 1957. He currently
works at the Bibliotheque de documentation internationale
contemporaine in Nanterre, where he is in charge of the German
section of documentary research. He is also the author of "The
Marxists and the Jewish Question: History of a Debate, 1843-1943."
In the half-century since the appearance of Hannah Arendt's seminal
work The Origins of Totalitarianism, innumerable historians have
detailed the history of the Nazi years. Now, in a brilliant
synthesis of this work, Enzo Traverso situates the extermination
camps as the final, terrible moment in European modernity's
industrialization of killing and dehumanization of death. Traverso
upends the conventional presentation of the Holocaust as an
inexplicable anomaly, navigating an excess of antecedents both
technical and cultural. Deftly tracing a complex lineage--the
guillotine and machine gun, the prison and assembly line, as well
as widespread ideologies of racial supremacy and colonial
expansion--Traverso reveals that the ideas that coalesced at
Auschwitz came from Europe's mainstream and not its margins.
The relationship of Marxism to the "Jewish Question" is far more
complex than many have assumed. Despite the Jewish backgrounds of
several Marxists (including Marx himself), many showed a sense of
indifference toward a sense of "Jewishness." Yet an increasingly
virulent anti-Semitism - affecting sections of the working class
and culminating in the Holocaust and in the growing strength of
Zionism - became a problem that numerous Marxist thinkers were
compelled to consider. In addition to examining the works of Marx,
Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, Ber Borokhov, Abram Leon, and figures
associated with the Frankfurt School, Traverso also investigates
the actual policies in the socialist and communist movements and
sensitively explores the unique history of the Jewish workers'
movement in various countries.
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