This volume offers an examination of varied forms of expressions of heresy in Jewish history, thought and literature. Contributions explore the formative role of the figure of the heretic and of heretic thought in the development of the Jewish traditions from antiquity to the 20th century. Chapters explore the role of heresy in the Hellenic period and Rabbinic literature; the significance of heresy to Kabbalah, and the critical and often formative importance the challenge of heresy plays for modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Freud, and Derrida, and literary figures such as Kafka, Tchernikhovsky, and I.B. Singer. Examining heresy as a boundary issue constitutive for the formation of Jewish tradition, this book contributes to a better understanding of the significance of the figure of the heretic for tradition more generally.

Over the last few decades, vibrant debates regarding post-secularism have found inspiration and provocation in the works of Sigmund Freud. A new interest in psychoanalysis's relation to society has emerged, allowing Freud’s account of the interdependence of religion, ethics, and violence to gain currency in recent debates on modernity. In that context, the pivotal role of Freud’s masterpiece, Moses and Monotheism, is widely recognized. Freud and Monotheism critically examines a range of discourses surrounding Freud and Moses, taking as its entry point Freud’s relations to Judaism, his conception of tradition and history, his theory of the mind, and his model of transgenerational inheritance. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, contributors from philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, and Egyptology come together to illuminate Freud’s book and the modern world with which it grapples.

A fine example of the best scholarship that lies at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and history. Dynamic Repetition proposes a new understanding of modern Jewish theories of messianism across the disciplines of history, theology, and philosophy. The book explores how ideals of repetition, return, and the cyclical occasioned a new messianic impulse across an important swath of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German Jewish thought. To grasp the complexities of Jewish messianism in modernity, the book focuses on diverse notions of "dynamic repetition" in the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud, and their interrelations with basic trajectories of twentieth-century philosophy and critical thought.

This volume offers an examination of varied forms of expressions of heresy in Jewish history, thought and literature. Contributions explore the formative role of the figure of the heretic and of heretic thought in the development of the Jewish traditions from antiquity to the 20th century. Chapters explore the role of heresy in the Hellenic period and Rabbinic literature; the significance of heresy to Kabbalah, and the critical and often formative importance the challenge of heresy plays for modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Freud, and Derrida, and literary figures such as Kafka, Tchernikhovsky, and I.B. Singer. Examining heresy as a boundary issue constitutive for the formation of Jewish tradition, this book contributes to a better understanding of the significance of the figure of the heretic for tradition more generally.

Over the last few decades, vibrant debates regarding post-secularism have found inspiration and provocation in the works of Sigmund Freud. A new interest in psychoanalysis's relation to society has emerged, allowing Freud's account of the interdependence of religion, ethics, and violence to gain currency in recent debates on modernity. In that context, the pivotal role of Freud's masterpiece, Moses and Monotheism, is widely recognized. Freud and Monotheism critically examines a range of discourses surrounding Freud and Moses, taking as its entry point Freud's relations to Judaism, his conception of tradition and history, his theory of the mind, and his model of transgenerational inheritance. Highlighting the broad impact of Moses and Monotheism across the humanities, contributors from philosophy, comparative literature, cultural studies, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, and Egyptology come together to illuminate Freud's book and the modern world with which it grapples.