By
– August 30, 2011
For more than a millennium the continent of Europe was the home of the Jewish people both physically and emotionally. Its advances were our advances, its rise to world leadership helped raise us as well, and its depredations were played out on our skins. This intensely felt dichotomy of the Jews’ experience in Europe forms the basis for this solid volume by Reinharz and Shavit.
Ostensibly an intellectual review of European and Jewish thought from the Enlightenment to the present day, the book explores the major conceptual frameworks upon which the Jewish view of Europe and the European view of the Jew were formed. An intensive collection of contemporary thinkers are presented to elucidate the theoretical dialectics of the rise of Europe and its decline, the place of Jew as the Ur-Modern European as well as pariah, America as philistine and light unto the nations, and finally, the rise of the new anti-Semitism and apprehension over Europe’s future Islamification.
The book is useful and enlightening. It’s fascinating to see Herzl extolling Europe’s role in civilizing his fellow “semi-Asiatics,” or to source the varied streams of Zionism in the foothills of fin-de-siècle thought. At the same time, it’s hard not to divine the authors’ desire to overlook contemporary American and Israeli views of Europe as vacillating, unsure of itself, and ultimately unwilling to stand up for its own culture. “Because it was so glorious,” Reinharz and Shavit seem to say, “let’s not curse it so much.” Yet, however ambivalent a reader may be upon completion of the book, he or she will be grateful for the effort.
Ostensibly an intellectual review of European and Jewish thought from the Enlightenment to the present day, the book explores the major conceptual frameworks upon which the Jewish view of Europe and the European view of the Jew were formed. An intensive collection of contemporary thinkers are presented to elucidate the theoretical dialectics of the rise of Europe and its decline, the place of Jew as the Ur-Modern European as well as pariah, America as philistine and light unto the nations, and finally, the rise of the new anti-Semitism and apprehension over Europe’s future Islamification.
The book is useful and enlightening. It’s fascinating to see Herzl extolling Europe’s role in civilizing his fellow “semi-Asiatics,” or to source the varied streams of Zionism in the foothills of fin-de-siècle thought. At the same time, it’s hard not to divine the authors’ desire to overlook contemporary American and Israeli views of Europe as vacillating, unsure of itself, and ultimately unwilling to stand up for its own culture. “Because it was so glorious,” Reinharz and Shavit seem to say, “let’s not curse it so much.” Yet, however ambivalent a reader may be upon completion of the book, he or she will be grateful for the effort.
Jeff Bogursky reads a lot, writes a little and talks quite a bit. He is a media executive and expert in digital media.
