The Angel of Jewish History: The Image of the Jewish Past in the Twentieth Century

The Angel of Jewish History casts a philosophical gaze upon the relationship between the traditional Jewish past and the present through the metaphysical worldviews of five formative Jewish studies scholars: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Amos Funkenstein, Gershom Scholem, Baruch Kurzweil, and Nathan Rotenstreich. Their hermeneutic worldviews and writings deal with the nature and formation of modern Judaism, the Wissenschaft des Judentums, historicism, the image of the Jewish past and tradition, secularization, and God’s status in present-day Jewish reality. In this volume, these issues are explored against the background of the tense discourse between the perception of modern Jewish reality as a break from the past and tradition and the argument for continuity despite the changes and developments of modernity.