Jewish Eighteenth Century

Shmuel Feiner is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University and Chairman of the Historical Society of Israel. He is author of Haskalah and History; The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness; The Jewish Enlightenment; Moses Mendelssohn, Sage of Modernity; and The Origins of Jewish Secularization. Jeffrey M. Green is a professional writer and translator who lives and works in Jerusalem. He is author of Thinking through Translation and Largest Island in the Sea.

• PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Happy Times? The First Century in the Modern AgeI. 17001. Pictures from Married Life: Glikl the daughter of Leib between Hamburg and Metz2. "Rise up and Succeed": Absolutism and Court Jews in Baroque Culture3. Jews in the News: The Angry Masses, a Holy Society, and "Judaism Unmasked"4. Between Enlightened Thought and an Imaginary UniverseII. 1701–17255. "Everyone Wants to be Happy: Dangers and Amusements6. "Our Miserable Brethren": Jews in Time of War7. Melancholy, Career, and Travels: Five Life Stories8. Christians versus Jews: Bitter and Violent Relations9. From London to Jerusalem: Confrontations and Disputes10. The Challenge of Sabbateanism: The Storm over the "Hypocritical Serpent"11. Competition over the Picture of the World: Witches and Human KnowledgeIII. 1725-175012. To Silence the "Fellow from Padua": Moses Haim Luzzatto and the Great Awakening13. Criticism and Ambition: From Gulliver to the Baal Shem Tov and Jew Süss14. Contradictory Tendencies: Hostility, Violence, and "True Happiness"15. "An Indelible Stain": War and Expulsion16. A Vision of the Future: Ascent of the Soul, a Path for the Just, and a Teacher of the Perplexed17. Toward Mid-Century: The Awakening of ShameIndex

"Shmuel Feiner gives us a capacious and methodologically innovative volume on the "modernity" of the Jewish eighteenth century by juxtaposing myriad events across disparate regions recounted through a captivating panoply of personalities."—David Sorkin, Lucy G. Moses professor of Jewish history at Yale University"Shmuel Feiner has synthesized the work of the best modern scholars of a half-century of European Jewish history and combined it with his own, original research, to tell the story of a period little known to non-specialists. The result is a narrative that is as authoritative as it is entrancing."—Allan Arkush, Jewish Review of Books"Extraordinarily erudite and compulsively readable, this book transforms everything we thought we knew about the Jewish eighteenth century. A remarkable achievement."—Yair Mintzker, Princeton University