Taking as its basis an epistemological culture-historical concept, this book enquires into the independence of cultural self-perception from the ever-changing social models for the interpretation of community. The interacting aspects of unity and uniqueness tied the German Jews into numerous discourses debating their place and recognition in a society defined increasingly in national terms. External demands for distance on the one hand and for integration on the other stimulated the redefinition processes until new, workable concepts emerged of a self-conscious Judaism that was at the same...

This is an intellectual biography of the Italian Jewish writer and politician David Levi (1816-1898). Freemasonry, Saint-Simonianism, and the Enlightenment are his vessels for a new, secular, interpretation of Jewish identity and for innovative views on Judaism’s relation with modernity.