Description:
1. This book considers the image of the Israelite in 18th century Germany. This was important at the time because new concepts of ethnicity, government, civil society, and nation were being articulated. Germans were looking to the Israelites as a basis for remodeling German culture.
2. The author is a post-doctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. He has published numerous articles on the history of ideas, German-Jewish relations, and the history of sexuality. He is an essayist and literary critic for El Haaretz, a major Israeli newpaper.
3. This manuscript is a strong fit with our new German Jewish Cultures series. This historical work is important scholarship into the ways German culture and how it used Jewish thought on the eve of modernity.
Review Quotes:
"Thanks to its erudition, the monograph could serve as an effective introduction to German history, biblical studies and modern nationalism, among other fields."--German History
"Ilany's book has much to offer to biblical scholars invested in understanding the development of their field, but also to scholars of 18th- and 19th-century Germany and to those interested in the relationship between the academy and the ideological process of nation building more broadly."--Reading Religion
"Recommended."--Choice
"Sound, well-informed, and original. No one seriously interested in the history of biblical criticism will be able to ignore this work."--Mark Somos, author of Secularism and the Leiden Circle
"lany's study is a significant, deeply erudite contribution to our understanding of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German culture and politics."--H-Judaic