The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
World War ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
New Science ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

In this work, a sequel to my A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion in the long nineteenth century—from the Enlightenment to the First World War. More precisely, I seek to understand the new status of Judaism and Islam in the formative period of the new discipline. In order to do that, I focus on the concept of Semitic monotheism, a concept developed by Ernest Renan around the mid-nineteenth century, on the basis of the postulated (and highly problematic) contradistinction between Aryan and Semitic families of peoples, cultures, and religions. This contradistinction grew from the Western discovery of Sanskrit and its relationship with European languages, at the time of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Together with the rise of scholarly Orientalism, this discovery offered new perspectives on the East, as a consequence of which the Near East was demoted, as it were, from its traditional status as the locus of the biblical revelations. The book essentially studies a central issue in the modern study of religion. Doing so, however, it emphasizes that the new dualistic taxonomy of religions had major consequences and sheds new light on the roots of European attitudes to Jews and Muslims in the twentieth century and up to the present day.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Traditional Model ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
New Science ◽  
The Enlightenment

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....

Parallel lives or interconnected histories? Anagarika Dharmapala and Muhammad Barkatullah's ‘world religioning’ in Japan

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Samee Siddiqui
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
First World War ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Parallel Lives ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
First World

Abstract This article compares the ideas, connections, and projects of two South Asian figures who are generally studied separately: the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Barkatullah (1864–1927) and the Sinhalese Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1934). In doing so, I argue that we can understand these two figures in a new light, by recognizing their mutual connections as well as the structural similarities in their thought. By focusing on their encounters and work in Japan, this article demonstrates how Japan—particularly after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—had become a significant site for inter-Asian conversations about world religions. Importantly, exploring the projects of Barkatullah and Dharmapala makes visible the fact that, from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War, religion played a central role—alongside nationalism, race, and empire—in conversations about the possible futures of the international order.

scholarly journals Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century (1794-1914): A Quantitative Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Ștefan Baghiu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second Line ◽  
World War ◽  
American Novel ◽  
East European ◽  
The First World War ◽  
French Novel ◽  
First World

This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five other groups of novels translated during the period (the atomizing agents: the East European, the Spanish, the Austrian, the Nordic, and the Asian novel).

Żydzi

1999 ◽  
pp. 339-340
Author(s):  
Jerzy Tomaszewski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Important Group ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Polish Society ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This chapter considers a series of books, A to Polska właśnie (This is Indeed Poland). These books introduce their readers to various issues of interest to anyone studying Polish society. The chapter focuses on the volume Żydzi (The Jews), in particular, as it is the first to discuss an important group among Poland's population. The volume covers the period up to the second half of the eighteenth century, political and social problems from the second half of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth, Jewish culture and religion in the nineteenth century, the period from the First World War until 1939, the Holocaust, and Jews in Poland after the Second World War. The chapter contends that this book should be regarded not as just one more study about Polish Jews, but as making a singular contribution to the promotion of knowledge about Jewish traditions, culture, and history in Poland.

Introduction

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Separate Identity ◽  
First World

This introductory chapter describes the unique aspects of the yeshivas of nineteenth-century Lithuania. These yeshivas represented a major attempt on the part of traditional Jewry to cope with the challenges of modernity. The Jews of nineteenth-century Lithuania thus defined had several distinguishing characteristics. In religious terms, most were traditional, in the sense that they had withstood the innovations of hasidism; in fact, the strength of the opposition to that movement in Lithuania was such that they came collectively to be known as mitnagedim (opponents) — that is, opponents of hasidism. Economically, they were mostly poorer than Jews in other major areas of Jewish settlement, such as Poland or Bukovina, and lived in more crowded conditions. Until 1764, they benefited from self-government under the Va'ad Medinat Lita (Council of the Land of Lithuania). By the beginning of the eighteenth century this body had ceased to function, but the distinction between the Jews of Lithuania and those of the neighbouring regions continued to exist — not least because the Lithuanian Jews spoke a distinctive dialect of Yiddish. These and other factors ensured that they continued to maintain a separate identity among the Jews of eastern Europe until the First World War.

Sacrifice Compared

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Guy G. Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Gifted Students ◽  
First World War ◽  
Political Context ◽  
World War ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Dreyfus Affair ◽  
First World

Although most major social anthropologists came from Britain, the new sensitivity to ritual among students of religion, it appears, was felt more powerfully in France than elsewhere. This chapter considers the conditions in which a new intellectual sensitivity to sacrifice appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the immense implications of this sensitivity on new approaches to religion. Although reflection on sacrifice dates back to antiquity, it is only with the emergence of the science of religion as an academic discipline after the mid-nineteenth century that it became grounded in theoretical approaches to religion. We will see how Durkheim’s most gifted students dealt with sacrifice, and call attention to the broader political context, from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War.

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