Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century Jewish Philosophy
Emden Bonn Coswig, Anhalt Seesen Altona, Hamburg Frankfurt Mainz/Katzenelnbogen Germany - centers of Jewish scholarship London in modern United KingdomA new era began in the 18th century with the thought of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn has been described as the "'third Moses,' with whom begins a new era in Judaism," just as new eras began with Moses the prophet and with Moses Maimonides. Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the renaissance of European Jews, Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) is indebted. He has been referred to as the father of Reform Judaism, though Reform spokesmen have been "resistant to claim him as their spiritual father". Mendelssohn came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Germans and Jews. His most significant book was Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum (Jerusalem), first published in 1783.
Alongside Mendelssohn, other important Jewish philosophers of the eighteenth century included:
- Menachem Mendel Lefin, anti-Hasidic Haskalah philosopher
- Solomon Maimon, Enlightenment philosopher
- Isaac Satanow, a Haskalah philosopher
- Naphtali Ullman, Haskalah philosopher
Important Jewish philosophers of the nineteenth century included:
- Elijah Benamozegh, a Sephardic rabbi and philosopher
- Hermann Cohen, a neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher
- Moses Hess, a secular Jewish philosopher and one of the founders of socialism
- Samson Raphael Hirsch, leader of the Torah im Derech Eretz school of 19th century neo-Orthodoxy
- Samuel Hirsch, a leader of Reform Judaism
- Nachman Krochmal, Haskalah philosopher in Galicia
- Samuel David Luzzatto a Sephardic rabbi and philosopher
- Karl Marx, German economist and Jewish philosopher.
Read more about this topic: Jewish Philosophy
Famous quotes containing the words eighteenth, jewish and/or philosophy:
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass. Armenian refugees, Jewish refugees, refugees from Franco Spain. But a political leader or artistic figure is an exile. Thomas Mann yesterday, Theodorakis today. Exile is the noble and dignified term, while a refugee is more hapless.... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding—and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (20th century)