Jewish Nietzscheanism

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 396-409
Author(s):  
Robert C. Holub

Abstract Jewish Nietzscheans have traditionally shied away from any detailed examination of Nietzsche’s comments on contemporary Jewry or the Jewish religion. Scholars who have examined Jewish Nietzscheans have therefore sought to connect Nietzsche with some dimension of Jewish thought through similarities in views between Nietzsche and the Jewish intellectuals who were purportedly influenced by him. The two books under consideration in this essay strain to find solid connections between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the writings of eminent Jewish writers. Daniel Rynhold and Michael Harris examine how selected Nietzschean concepts can also be found in the work of the noted Jewish thinker Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. David Ohana, by contrast, examines a variety of Jewish writers who at some point exhibited an enthusiasm for Nietzsche, ranging from Hebrew scholars and translators to German-Jewish intellectuals. Both books suffer from many of the shortcomings of general Nietzschean influence studies: there is often no sound philological evidence of influence, or the “connection” is so general that it is difficult to see Nietzsche as the source of influence, or the alleged influence was of short duration, and it is difficult to understand what remains Nietzschean in the individual influenced.

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 396-409
Author(s):  
Robert C. Holub

Abstract Jewish Nietzscheans have traditionally shied away from any detailed examination of Nietzsche’s comments on contemporary Jewry or the Jewish religion. Scholars who have examined Jewish Nietzscheans have therefore sought to connect Nietzsche with some dimension of Jewish thought through similarities in views between Nietzsche and the Jewish intellectuals who were purportedly influenced by him. The two books under consideration in this essay strain to find solid connections between Nietzsche’s philosophy and the writings of eminent Jewish writers. Daniel Rynhold and Michael Harris examine how selected Nietzschean concepts can also be found in the work of the noted Jewish thinker Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. David Ohana, by contrast, examines a variety of Jewish writers who at some point exhibited an enthusiasm for Nietzsche, ranging from Hebrew scholars and translators to German-Jewish intellectuals. Both books suffer from many of the shortcomings of general Nietzschean influence studies: there is often no sound philological evidence of influence, or the “connection” is so general that it is difficult to see Nietzsche as the source of influence, or the alleged influence was of short duration, and it is difficult to understand what remains Nietzschean in the individual influenced.


Aschkenas ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-349
Author(s):  
Matthias Springborn

Abstract This biographical essay is designed to give a survey of Constantin Brunnerʼs early years, from his childhood and youth until the end of his student days, based on the available letters, manuscripts and published writings. A major focus is on Brunnerʼs intellectual development from protected child, spiritually shaped by Jewish orthodoxy, to aspiring religious scholar and finally to the secular philosopher known today. The article is therefore a contribution to a range of research topics: to the field of German-Jewish biography during the period of the German Empire; but also to the history of ideas, particularly in relation to the secularization of religious minorities. It also touches upon developments inside the Jewish community: the way different intellectual and religious currents are related to each other, the informal networks between Jewish intellectuals and how national (German or Jewish) identity is related to the Jewish self-image.


2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Eli Gordon
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-342
Author(s):  
Paul Michael Kurtz

Hellenic language and culture occupy a deeply ambivalent place in the mapping of Jewish history. If the entanglement of the Jewish and the Greek became especially conflicted for modern Jews in philhellenic Europe, nowhere was it more vexed than in the German-speaking lands of the long nineteenth century. Amidst the modern redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish as well as doubts about the genuine Jewishness of Hellenistic Judaism, how did scholars identify Jewish authorship behind ambiguous, fragmented, and interpolated texts – all the more with much of the Hebraic allegedly deprived by the Hellenic? This article not only argues for the contingency of diagnostic features deployed to define the Jewish amidst the Greek but also maintains the embeddedness of those features in nineteenth-century Germany. It scrutinizes the criteria deployed to establish Jewish texts and authors of the Hellenistic period: the claims and qualities assumedly suggestive of Judaism. First, the inquiry investigates which characteristics German Jewish scholars expected to see in Greek-speaking Jewish writers of antiquity, interrogating their procedures and their verdicts. Second, it examines how these expectations of antiquity corresponded to those scholars’ own modern world. The analysis centers on Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) and Jacob Freudenthal (1839–1907), two savants who helped establish the modern study of Hellenistic Judaism. Each overturned centuries of learned consensus by establishing an ancient author – Pseudo-Phocylides and Eupolemus, respectively – as Jewish, rather than Christian or pagan. This article ultimately reveals the subtle entanglements as well as the mutually conditioning forces not only of antiquity and modernity but also of the personal and academic, manifest both in the philological analysis of ancient texts and in the larger historiography of antique Judaism in the Graecophone world.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Yael Munk

This article relates to the complex approach of Dina Zvi-Riklis’ film Three Mothers (2006) to immigration, an issue that is central to both the Jewish religion and Israeli identity. While for both, reaching the land of Israel means arriving in the promised land, they are quite dissimilar, in that one is a religious command, while the other is an ideological imperative. Both instruct the individual to opt for the obliteration of his past. However, this system does not apply to the protagonists of Three Mothers, a film which follows the extraordinary trajectory of triplet sisters, born to a rich Jewish family in Alexandria, who are forced to leave Egypt after King Farouk’s abdication and immigrate to Israel. This article will demonstrate that Three Mothers represents an outstanding achievement, because it dares to deal with its protagonists’ longing for the world left behind and the complexity of integrating the past into the present. Following Nicholas Bourriaud’s radicant theory, designating an organism that grows roots and adds new ones as it advances, this article will argue that, although the protagonists of Three Mothers never avow their longing for Egypt, the film’s narrative succeeds in revealing a subversive démarche, through which the sisters succeed in integrating Egypt into their present.


Author(s):  
Thomas C. Fu ◽  
Thomas T. O’Shea ◽  
Kyle A. Brucker ◽  
Carolyn Q. Judge ◽  
Christine M. Ikeda ◽  
...  

Numerical simulations of wedge impact experiments, undertaken by the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, NSWCCD, and more recently by the United States Naval Academy, USNA, Hydromechanics Laboratory, were performed using the computational fluid dynamics code Numerical Flow Analysis, NFA, to assess its capabilities in simulating the short duration hydrodynamic loading associated with free-surface impact. NSWCCD performed experiments using drop heights of 15.24 cm (6 in) and 25.4 cm (10 in), while the Naval Academy used drop heights of: 7.94, 12.7, 15.88, 25.4, 31.75, 38.1, and 50.8 cm (3.125, 5.0, 6.25, 10.0, 12.5, 15.0, and 20.0 in), measured from the keel of the wedge to the calm water surface. Simulations and comparisons were made at heights of 15.24 cm (6 in) and 25.4 cm (10 in) with the NSWCCD data, and 12.5 inches for the USNA data providing for a detailed examination of NFA’s ability to simulate and predict short duration hydrodynamic impacts.


2009 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-233
Author(s):  
Paola Ferruta

AbstractThe relationship between the religious political group of the Saint-Simonians and the German movement for political reform around 1830 has already been amply investigated. Significantly less explored is the Jewish aspect of this connection. The article focuses on the significance of the participation of the Jewish members of the Saint-Simonian movement and the cultural transfer initiated by them with German Jewish intellectuals and political activists such as Gabriel Riesser.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cao Chen ◽  
Qi Shi ◽  
Xiao-Ping Dong

Abstract Background COVID-19 pandemic has affected more than 200 different countries and territories and caused more than 4.5 million infected cases and 310,000 deaths worldwide. Methods We collected the daily reported infected cases in 11 mostly affected countries from governmental and professional websites, including China, South Korea, France, USA, Italy, Germany, Spain, UK, Iran, Turkey and Russia. The duration times of the epidemic from the day with more than 100 cases (>100) to the day with less than 100 cases (<100) in the individual countries were comparably analyzed based on the alterations of the numbers and ratios of the daily reported cases. Meanwhile, the daily Rt values each country were separately calculated. Results We found that the duration times of decreasing period were much longer than that of increasing period. Compared with other countries, China and South Korea showed remarkably short duration times, which was likely associated with the strictly implementation of the control measures. The Rt values of all tested countries reduced to around 1.0 on the day with the largest number of cases. Conclusion The alteration of the daily Rt value seems to be related more closely with the changes of the ratios of daily cases, rather than the absolute numbers of daily cases in one country, meanwhile the implementation of strictly tailored control measures will greatly reduce the duration of the COVID-19 epidemic.


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