David Sorkin | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Wisconsin–Madison University of California, Berkeley |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Jewish History |
Institutions | Yale University |
Notable ideas | Port Jew,Subculture,Religious Enlightenment,Emancipation |
Website | history |
David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses professor of Jewish history at Yale University. [1] Sorkin specializes in the intersection of Jewish and European history, [2] [3] and has published several prominent books including Jewish Emancipation:A History Across Five Centuries.
Sorkin graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975 (Phi Beta Kappa). In 1977 he received a Masters degree in Comparative Literature,and in 1983 a PhD in History from the University of California,Berkeley. [4]
He has taught at Brown (1983-1986),Oxford (1986-1992),the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1992-2011),and the CUNY Graduate Center (2011-2014).
Sorkin has published several prominent works on Jewish history. [5] His first book,The Transformation of German Jewry,1780–1840 published in 1987,argued that emancipation did not lead to "assimilation" but rather to the formation of a "subculture" that combined German culture,and especially the ideal of Bildung,with Judaism [6] In 1996 he wrote Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, a concise study of Mendelssohn's Jewish thought in which,on the basis of the neglected Hebrew writings,he argued that Mendelssohn used radical ideas for conservative ends. The book has been translated into French,German,and Italian. [7]
In 2000 he wrote The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought:Orphans of Knowledge. The book,first delivered in 1997 as the Sherman Lectures in the Department of Religions and Theology at Manchester University (UK),argued that the Haskalah should be understood within the context of wider Central European religious and intellectual changes rather than as a singular Jewish phenomenon. [8] In The Religious Enlightenment:Protestants,Jews,and Catholics from London to Vienna (Jews,Christians,and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) published in 2008,Sorkin reconceived the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion,arguing that religious thinkers of all confessions used Enlightenment philosophy and science to rearticulate belief. [9] His most recent book is Jewish Emancipation:A History Across Five Centuries (2019),the first comprehensive study of the subject. It demonstrates that emancipation was and remains the principal event of modern Jewish history. It has been translated into Romanian and Chinese.
Sorkin has co-edited three volumes:Profiles in Diversity:Jews in a Changing Europe,1750–1870 (1998), [10] New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001), [11] and What History Tells:George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (2004). [12] He served as associate editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002),which won the National Jewish Book Award. [13] With Edward Breuer as co-editor and translator he published,Moses Mendelssohn's Hebrew Writings (Yale Judaic Studies,Yale University Press,2018).
Sorkin's books have had a notable impact. [14] [11] The American Historical Review described Sorkin's The Religious Enlightenment:Protestants,Jews,and Catholics from London to Vienna as a work that makes "very interesting discoveries about the parallel developments within different religions in the eighteenth century." Similarly, The New York Times described it as a "persuasive work" about how "Europe's major religions produced movements of religious reform compatible with the enlightenment." [15] Central European History reviewed it as a book of "very great importance,for early modernists and modern historians alike." [16]
Sorkin has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1994-5) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005–06). He is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
Orthodox Judaism is a collective term for the traditionalist branches of contemporary Judaism. Theologically, it is chiefly defined by regarding the Torah, both Written and Oral, as literally revealed by God on Mount Sinai and faithfully transmitted ever since.
Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings and ideas on Jews and the Jewish religion and identity were a central element in the development of the Haskalah, or 'Jewish Enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau, Principality of Anhalt, and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature. Through his writings on philosophy and religion he came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Christian and Jewish inhabitants of German-speaking Europe and beyond. His involvement in the Berlin textile industry formed the foundation of his family's wealth.
The Haskalah, often termed the Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with a certain influence on those in Western Europe and the Muslim world. It arose as a defined ideological worldview during the 1770s, and its last stage ended around 1881, with the rise of Jewish nationalism.
Jewish emancipation was the process in various nations in Europe of eliminating Jewish disabilities, e.g. Jewish quotas, to which European Jews were then subject, and the recognition of Jews as entitled to equality and citizenship rights. It included efforts within the community to integrate into their societies as citizens. It occurred gradually between the late 18th century and the early 20th century.
The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321 CE, and continued through the Early Middle Ages and High Middle Ages when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish community. The community survived under Charlemagne, but suffered during the Crusades. Accusations of well poisoning during the Black Death (1346–53) led to mass slaughter of German Jews, while others fled in large numbers to Poland. The Jewish communities of the cities of Mainz, Speyer and Worms became the center of Jewish life during medieval times. "This was a golden age as area bishops protected the Jews, resulting in increased trade and prosperity."
Neologs are one of the two large communal organizations among Hungarian Jewry. Socially, the liberal and modernist Neologs had been more inclined toward integration into Hungarian society since the Era of Emancipation in the 19th century. This was their main feature, and they were largely the representative body of urban, assimilated middle- and upper-class Jews. Religiously, the Neolog rabbinate was influenced primarily by Zecharias Frankel's Positive-Historical School, from which Conservative Judaism evolved as well, although the formal rabbinical leadership had little sway over the largely assimilationist communal establishment and congregants. Their rift with the traditionalist and conservative Orthodox Jews was institutionalized following the 1868–1869 Hungarian Jewish Congress, and they became a de facto separate denomination. The Neologs remained organizationally independent in those territories ceded under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, and are still the largest group among Hungary's Jews.
Christian Wilhelm von Dohm was a German historian and political writer. His work, On the Civil Improvement of the Jews, went on to influenced the process of Jewish emancipation.
Jewish political movements refer to the organized efforts of Jews to build their own political parties or otherwise represent their interest in politics outside the Jewish community. From the time of the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans to the foundation of Israel, the Jewish people had no sovereign territory and were largely denied equal rights in the lands in which they lived. Thus, until the emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century, almost all Jewish political struggles were internal, and dealt primarily with either religious issues or local community concerns.
David Friedländer was a German banker, writer and communal leader.
Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism is a book written by Moses Mendelssohn, which was first published in 1783 – the same year when the Prussian officer Christian Wilhelm von Dohm published the second part of his Mémoire Concerning the amelioration of the civil status of the Jews. Moses Mendelssohn was one of the key figures of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and his philosophical treatise, dealing with social contract and political theory, can be regarded as his most important contribution to Haskalah. The book which was written in Prussia on the eve of the French Revolution, consisted of two parts and each one was paginated separately. The first part discusses "religious power" and the freedom of conscience in the context of the political theory, and the second part discusses Mendelssohn's personal conception of Judaism concerning the new secular role of any religion within an enlightened state. In his publication Moses Mendelssohn combined a defense of the Jewish population against public accusations with contemporary criticism of the present conditions of the Prussian Monarchy.
The history of the Jews in Europe spans a period of over two thousand years. Jews, a Semitic people descending from the Judeans of Judea in the Southern Levant, began migrating to Europe just before the rise of the Roman Empire. Although Alexandrian Jews had already migrated to Rome, and with few Gentiles undergone Judaization in few occasions. A notable early event in the history of the Jews in the Roman Empire was the 63 BCE siege of Jerusalem, where Pompey had interfered in the Hasmonean civil war.
Dorothea Friederike von Schlegel was a German novelist and translator.
Jewish assimilation refers either to the gradual cultural assimilation and social integration of Jews in their surrounding culture or to an ideological program in the age of emancipation promoting conformity as a potential solution to historic Jewish marginalization.
The Port Jew concept was formulated by Lois Dubin and David Sorkin in the late 1990s as a social type that describes Jews who were involved in the seafaring and maritime economy of Europe, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Helen Fry suggests that they could be considered to have been "the earliest modern Jews."
Jonathan M. Hess was an American philologist and literary scholar, who served as chair of the Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Department and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Michael Albert Meyer is a German-born American historian of modern Jewish history. He taught for over 50 years at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is currently the Adolph S. Ochs Emeritus Professor of Jewish History at that institution. He was one of the founders of the Association for Jewish Studies, and served as its president from 1978–80. He also served as International President of the Leo Baeck Institute from 1992–2013. He has published many books and articles, most notably on the history of German Jews, the origins and history of the Reform movement in Judaism, and Jewish people and faith confronting modernity. He is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner.
Mordecai Aaron Günzburg, also known by the acronym Remag (רמא״ג) and the pen name Yonah ben Amitai, was a Lithuanian Jewish writer, translator, and educator. He was a leading member of the Haskalah in Vilnius, and is regarded as the "Father of Hebrew Prose."
Tzvi Hirsch (Hartog) Sommerhausen was a German-born Dutch Jewish writer, poet, and translator. He was a central figure of the Haskalah in Holland.
Modern Jewish historiography is the development of the Jewish historical narrative into the modern era. While Jewish oral history and the collection of commentaries in the Midrash and Talmud are ancient, with the rise of the printing press and movable type in the early modern period, Jewish histories and early editions of the Torah/Tanakh were published which dealt with the history of the Jewish religion, and increasingly, national histories of the Jews, Jewish peoplehood and identity. This was a move from a manuscript or scribal culture to a printing culture. Jewish historians wrote accounts of their collective experiences, but also increasingly used history for political, cultural, and scientific or philosophical exploration. Writers drew upon a corpus of culturally inherited text in seeking to construct a logical narrative to critique or advance the state of the art. Modern Jewish historiography intertwines with intellectual movements such as the European Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment but drew upon earlier works in the Late Middle Ages and into diverse sources in antiquity.
Moses Benjamin Wulff (1661–1729) was a Court Jew to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, where he dealt in political administration and diplomatic affairs of the German region.