With excellent clarity and comprehensiveness, Schwartz presents the reader with the full range of Jewish responses to Spinoza ... providing exhaustive evidence that both Spinoza’s presence as figure and his thought are everywhere and inescapable in Jewish modernity. This is the first volume to bring together the full array of responses to Spinoza from the 17th century to the present. Furthermore, Schwartz’s decision to include well-chosen excerpts as well as explanatory introductory short essays that contextualize them within the appropriate Jewish cultural trends, movements and historical landscape, along with biographical portraits of the writers, makes these texts accessible and comprehensible ... thereby painting a picture of Jewish modernity as a whole ... clearly demonstrating that Spinoza remains a living presence for Jews and for Judaism and not just a historical footnote of only academic or antiquarian interest. ... He does so with judicious fairness and inclusiveness and comprehensiveness. It is this modern Jewish landscape that Schwartz presents so well and so clearly in the introduction.
Daniel B. Schwartz
Daniel B. Schwartz is a professor in history at George Washington University specializing in modern European and American Jewish intellectual, cultural, and urban history. He is the author of Ghetto: The History of a Word, which traces the various and contested meanings of the word “ghetto” from sixteenth-century Venice to the present. His other books include Spinoza’s Challenge to Jewish Thought: Writings on His Life, Philosophy, and Legacy and The First Modern Jew: Spinoza and the History of an Image, which was co-winner of the 2012 American Academy for Jewish Research’s Salo W. Baron Prize for best first book in Jewish studies and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in history.
