Jacob Katz The Jews And Freemasonry Pdf
All kinds of people have complained about history, and probably none more justifiably than the Jews. It has been said that a happy people is one without history; but what happens when happiness is offered to an unhappy people at the price of its history?
The ensuing panic and confusion are major themes of Jewish history since the Emancipation, whose “social background” is the subject of a new book, Out of the Ghetto, by the Hebrew University sociologist and historian, Jacob Katz.One of the most damaging blows to the Jews' self-image since they came out of the ghetto was precisely the gibe that, in current history, Jews had no real meaning: they were irrelevant. Such a view of the Jews, a commonplace of Christian civilization beginning at least with Paul's dismissal of the Old Law, was picked up by post-Christian ideologues from Voltaire to Toynbee, who merely peddled the old goods in new wrappers.
What was new, what remains new, is Jewish sensitivity to this charge of irrelevancy.The classic pre-modern Jewish attitude took special pride in the generally accepted fact that Jews were not subject to the stars of history like ordinary peoples; for Jews lived out of time, in eternity, under the direct providence of the Almighty. If God's tender care for them during the long Exile consisted in imposing a succession of penances that made them, in the coinage of suffering, the most history-laden of peoples, this too was only another sign of their election.So long as Jews lived by the pious conception of galut, accepting Exile, they drew strength and conviction, not panic and confusion, from their equivocal relation to history. Like all others who live in the world but are not of the world, they were powerless as well as long-suffering. In the time-stream of history they were a small vacuum, a tiny sinkhole that absorbed all the shocks of the main current but no longer gave it independent impulsion. Yet in the eyes of traditional Jews it was the turbulence of the Gentiles, and not their own devoted Jewish quietism, that seemed profoundly irrelevant.What makes a modern Jew is his awakening to the horror of the historical vacuum; or, to put it another way, his infection with the sense of it. All modern Jewish history is a spasm of phobic contortions to escape from the vacuum. Whether through assimilation or through Zionism, the Jewish modernist seeks freedom, or liberation, by regaining the main current of history.
Differences over how this should be done, rather than over whether it should be done, divide the several schools of modern Jewish policy. Foxit phantom pdf 6.2 patch. It is the mark of a rigidly defensive traditionalism—or of a self-consciously pious neo-Orthodoxy like Franz Rosenzweig's—to reject the whole project in principle.This, under another aspect, is also the main underlying problem of modern Jewish historiography.
Leopold Zunz, who sorrowfully conceded in the 19th century that Jewish history was dead, passionately defended the study of it as a humanistic discipline; and thereby he also justifed his Jewish identity. Heinrich Graetz, who had a sturdier sense of ethnic pride, wrote a Jewish history which was alive enough to be resented by German historians as an offense against Gentiles. Yet it, too, failed to meet basic objections raised against the claim of Jewish history to be a valid enterprise; and the core problem of modern Jewish historiography has been that of overcoming the deficiencies of Graetz.One such deficiency, deplored by Salo Baron, is Graetz's “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history. But if Graetz's volumes are so largely a chronicle of Jewish suffering, the real problem is not that his account is untrue or unbalanced, but precisely that it is so importantly correct. The 19th-century German historical school overdid things by making the state the sole organ of authentic history, but they saw the main point: true history is the history men make in action; what they merely suffer is fundamentally someone else's history.
The current cultivation of social history, eminently represented by Baron among Jewish scholars, has real historical relevance only if it concerns itself (as Jacob Katz does) with those social conditions that significantly affect the actions and decisions by which history is truly made.It is no accident that events are only now finally laying to rest the persistent doubt as to whether Jewish history really exists, whether what parades under the name is any more than a parochial, filiopietistic, self-absorbed, and self-indulgent folklore.
Author by: Paul CalderwoodLanguage: enPublisher by: RoutledgeFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 70Total Download: 653File Size: 49,8 MbDescription: By the end of the twentieth century, Freemasonry had acquired an unsavoury reputation as a secretive network of wealthy men looking out for each others’ interests. The popular view is of an organisation that, if not actually corrupt, is certainly viewed with deep mistrust by the press and wider society. Yet, as this book makes clear, this view contrasts sharply with the situation at the beginning of the century when the public’s perception of Freemasonry in Britain was much more benevolent, with numerous establishment figures (including monarchs, government ministers, archbishops and civic worthies) enthusiastically recommending Freemasonry as the key to model citizenship. Focusing particularly on the role of the press, this book investigates the transformation of the image of Freemasonry in Britain from respectability to suspicion. It describes how the media projected a positive message of the organisation for almost forty years, based on a mass of news emanating from the organisation itself, before a change in public regard occurred during the later twentieth-century. This change in the public mood, the book argues, was due primarily to Masonic withdrawal from the public sphere and a disengagement with the press. Through an examination of the subject of Freemasonry and the British press, a number of related social trends are addressed, including the decline of deference, the erosion of privacy, greater competition in the media, the emergence of more aggressive and investigative journalism, the consequences of media isolation and the rise of professional Public Relations.
Jacob Katz The Jews And Freemasonry Pdf Online
The book also illuminates the organisation’s collisions with nationalism, communism, and state welfare provision. As such, the study is illuminating not only for students of Freemasonry, but those with an interest in the wider social history of modern Britain.
Author by: C. DavisonLanguage: enPublisher by: SpringerFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 99Total Download: 205File Size: 52,5 MbDescription: Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature examines the Gothic's engagement with the Jewish Question and British national identity over the course of a century.
Beginning with an exploration of Jewish demonology from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Davison interprets the changing significance of the trans-national Wandering Jew in classic Gothic fiction who later migrates into Victorian realism. What emerges is the elucidation of an anti-Semitic 'spectropoetics' that convey how the spectres of Jewish difference and Jewish assimilation haunt British literature. Author by: Jonathan D. SarnaLanguage: enPublisher by: MacmillanFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 44Total Download: 225File Size: 53,8 MbDescription: One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln's death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. Lincoln and the Jews: A History provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images, many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection, that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before.
Lincoln's lifetime coincided with the emergence of Jews on the national scene in the United States. When he was born, in 1809, scarcely 3,000 Jews lived in the entire country. By the time of his assassination in 1865, large-scale immigration, principally from central Europe, had brought that number up to more than 150,000. Many Americans, including members of Lincoln's cabinet and many of his top generals during the Civil War, were alarmed by this development and treated Jews as second-class citizens and religious outsiders. Lincoln, this book shows, exhibited precisely the opposite tendency. He also expressed a uniquely deep knowledge of the Old Testament, employing its language and concepts in some of his most important writings. He befriended Jews from a young age, promoted Jewish equality, appointed numerous Jews to public office, had Jewish advisors and supporters starting already from the early 1850s, as well as later during his two presidential campaigns, and in response to Jewish sensitivities, even changed the way he thought and spoke about America.
Through his actions and his rhetoric—replacing 'Christian nation,' for example, with 'this nation under God'—he embraced Jews as insiders. In this groundbreaking work, the product of meticulous research, historian Jonathan D.
Sarna and collector Benjamin Shapell reveal how Lincoln's remarkable relationship with American Jews impacted both his path to the presidency and his policy decisions as president. The volume uncovers a new and previously unknown feature of Abraham Lincoln's life, one that broadened him, and, as a result, broadened America. Author by: Saul FriedlanderLanguage: enPublisher by: Hachette UKFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 60Total Download: 241File Size: 55,8 MbDescription: A magisterial history of the Jews in Nazi Germany and the regime's policies towards them in the years prior to World War II and the Holocaust. Written by arguably the world's leading scholar on the subject. Himself a survivor, Friedlander has been a leading figure in Holocaust studies for decades and this book represents a definitive summing up of his research and that of hundreds of other historians.
NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION is perhaps the richest examination of the subject yet written, and, crucially, one that never loses sight of the experiences of individuals in its discussion of Nazi politics and the terrible statistics and technological and administrative sophistication of the Final Solution. Author by: Carys MoseleyLanguage: enPublisher by: Wipf and Stock PublishersFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 98Total Download: 743File Size: 45,9 MbDescription: This book argues that problems with recognizing the State of Israel lie at the heart of approaches to nationhood and unease over nationalism in modern Protestant theology, as well as modern social theory. Three interrelated themes are explored. The first is the connection between a theologian's attitude to recognizing Israel and their approach to the providential place of nations in the divine economy. Following from this, the argument is made that theologians' handling of both modern and ancient Israel is mirrored profoundly in the question of recognition and ethical treatment of the nations to which they belong, along with neighboring nations. The third theme is how social theory, represented by certain key figures, has handled the same issues.
Four major theologians are discussed: Reinhold Niebuhr, Rowan Williams, John Milbank, and Karl Barth. Alongside them are placed social theorists and scholars of religion and nationalism, including Mark Juergensmeyer, Philip Jenkins, Anthony Smith, and Adrian Hastings. In the process, debates over the relationship between theology and social theory are reconfigured in concrete terms around the challenge of recognition of the State of Israel as well as stateless nations. Author by: Steven FineLanguage: enPublisher by: Harvard University PressFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 48Total Download: 876File Size: 44,5 MbDescription: Steven Fine explores the cultural and intellectual history of the Western world’s oldest continuously used religious symbol.
Jacob Katz The Jews And Freemasonry Pdf Free
This meticulously researched yet deeply personal history explains how the seven-branched menorah illuminates the great changes and continuities in Jewish culture, from biblical times to modern Israel.