Prolegomenon to the Study of Jewish Cultural History
Prolegomenon to the Study of Jewish Cultural History
This chapter analyses the Jewish spirit. It approaches the cultural history of a traditional society, as Jewish society was everywhere until the onset of modernity, by examining the history of the interaction of a society and its members with their collective history. Nationalist-inspired scholarship produced a Jewish political history. The Jewish historiography created in the decades after the Shoah and the establishment of Israel has turned in significant measure to social history. The postmodern age that has been so occupied with the deconstruction of symbols and meanings that were previously self-evident would seem to have prepared the ground for a new synthesis of cultural meaning. The chapter thus returns to the study of the spirit; not what it produced, but what it was.
Keywords: Jewish cultural history, Jewish spirit, cultural history, traditional society, Jewish society, modernity, cultural meaning
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