Intellectual History of the Enlightenment

Throughout the nineteenth century, Maskilic journals increased their publication of anti-Hasidic satires. From the eighteen-sixties onward, this literature came primarily as a response to the revival in the publishing of Hasidic hagiography and to the spread of Hasidism into new territory. To this point, no complete review or even general survey has been performed on this extensive polemical literature, despite the fact that it has much to teach us about Hasidism and the Haskalah in those years. We are not speaking of an insignificant bibliographical lacuna, but of a disregard for an entire field of research which would shed light not only on a forgotten chapter of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature but also on an important chapter in the relationships between Maskilim and Hasidim in that period and the genesis and development of the different streams of Hasidism. This Maskilic literature intended to do more than eradicate Hasidism; it aimed to strengthen the self-consciousness of the individual Maskilim who found themselves alone in Hasidic territory. Paradoxically, the literature documented the very movement it intended to eradicate from the world. The distorted reflection displayed in the anti-Hasidic literature does more than present a caricature of its subject -- it conceals hitherto unknown elements about the nature and development of the Hasidic movement. The present article deals with one such case, a satire on Bratslav Hasidism from 1863, which has at its core a Maskilic satirical text written by Yehiel Meller on pilgrimage to the grave of R. Nahman of Bratslav in Uman.





כתבי עת של משכילים לאורך המאה התשע עשרה הרבו לפרסם סאטירות בגנותה של החסידות. משנות הששים ואילך באה ספרות זו בעיקר כתגובה להתעוררות הדפסת ספרות השבחים החסידית ולהתפשטות החסידות במרחבים חדשים. לא קיימת עד עתה סקירה שלימה, ואף לא מיפוי כללי, של אותה ספרות פולמוסית ענפה, על אף שיש בה ללמד הרבה על דרכי החסידות וההשכלה באותן שנים.  לא מדובר רק בחסרון ביבליוגרפי שאין לו משמעות, אלא בהתעלמות משדה מחקר רב עניין שעשוי להאיר לא רק על פרק נשכח בספרות עברית ויידיש החדשה אלא גם על פרק חשוב ביחסים בין משכילים לחסידים באותה תקופה, ועל דרכי צמיחתם, פיצולם והתפתחותם של זרמים שונים בחסידות. הייתה זו ספרות שיותר מאשר נועדה לבער את החסידות נועדה לחזק את תודעתם העצמית של המשכילים הבודדים במרחבים החסידיים; ספרות שבאופן פרדוקסלי תיעדה תנועה אותה חפצו לבער מן העולם. הבבואה המעוותת בה התהדרה הסאטירה האנטי חסידית לא רק הציגה דימוי – אלא טומנת בחובה הצבעה על אלמנטים חדשים ועל התפתחויות בחסידות. במקרה אחד ממין זה הנוגע לחסידות ברסלב בשנות השישים של המאה התשע עשרה עוסק המאמר. שלפנינו - שעיקרו מהדורה של טקסט משכילי שכתב יחיאל מלר - בשנת 1863 - על העלייה לקבר ר' נחמן מברסלב באומן
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Megaleh Temirin (Revealer of Secrets), first published in Vienna in 1819, is one of the sharpest and wittiest pieces of Jewish literature written in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is perhaps the most important piece of Hebrew prose composed before the stories of Mendele Mocher Seforim. A sly and complex story deriding Hasidism and Hasidim, it is told through the correspondence between the beadles of Hasidic courts and contemporary rabbis, and it presents a dark picture of  avaricious frauds and swindlers whose main concern was control over territory and the souls of believers, a goal achieved by beguiling the authorities and attacking all opponents. Perl lends his book a ‘Hasidic’ feel both in its physical design and in its language, presenting a Maskilic version of In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov that lays Hasidism bare so that no reader will ever be able to look at that, or any other Hasidic book, in the same way again. In addition to the book’s satiric sting, which would have been enough to bring its readers a dual pleasure, Perl’s hints at contemporary people and places, hidden within anagrams and numerological tricks. With the unraveling of these clues, which also include the use of actual Hasidic sources, the book is a valuable, contemporary view of historical reality. A meticulous reading of the book may therefore open a window on the hidden worlds of Hasidism and the Haskalah at the start of the nineteenth century.

The first volume (Imagined Hasidism) serves as an introduction to the complex satirical writings of Josef Perl of Tarnopol (1773-1839). At the center of the book stands an analysis of the satires, Megaleh Temirin (1819) and Bochen Tzadik (1838), including a systematic treatment of the ‘characters’ in the central works and a discussion of the dozens of manuscripts to be found in the Perl Archive in Jerusalem. Perl’s writings are analyzed here in the fuller context of Hebrew and Yiddish literature in general and Maskilic and Hasidic literature in particular, as well as other polemical writings and governmental records critical of Hasidism. The study thus presents a complex and nuanced picture of the relationship between literature and history, between the anti-Hasidic reports and the more complicated historical reality, and lays the groundwork for further research into the genre of nineteenth-century Maskilic satire.

The second and third volumes (Megaleh Temirin) present for the first time an annotated edition of Megaleh Temirin. It is based on the first edition and the scattered manuscripts and it includes a comparison to its Yiddish translation. The book is accompanied by appendices on its origins and contents, including fundamental treatments of several passages: an explication of the encoded names, the Hasidic sources used by the author, and the variants found in the manuscripts and in the only edition of the book in Yiddish.

The editor of the book, Professor Jonatan Meir, teaches in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University. He has published several articles on the Haskalah of Eastern Europe, Hasidism, and a number of varied topics in twentieth-century Kabbalah.



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Contents


Introduction                                                                                     
Scholarship on the anti-Hasidic writings of Josef Perl • Hasidic hagiography and the emergence of satire • Two-fold reading of Perl’s writings and the gematriyot • Satire, literature, and history • ‘Holy Books’ and subversive books

Chapter 1: Josef Perl, Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov, and the ‘Holy Books’
Prayer of the fall of Hasidism and the expungement of their books • Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht and the critique of hagiography • Sefer Sipurey Ma‘asiyot and the parodic response to it • Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov, ‘heretical books’ and the ‘Holy Books’ • In praise of the true Tsaddikim • ‘Laughter of the heretics’: testimonies about the polemics against Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • ‘Holy Books’, ‘sacredness of hagiography’, and parodies of hagiography • Appendix: Parodic manuscript about an opponent of the ‘Holy Books’ who was reborn as a horse

Chapter 2: Speaking Names in Sefer Megale Temirin                             
Time of the composition of Megale Temirin, censorship, and a note on the Buch • Hasidic books and the emergence of parody • Structure of Sefer Megale Temirin • The Introduction to Sefer Megale Temirin • Main Hasidic courts • The court in Żołyń (Łożne) and the peregrinations of the Buch • The court of Dishpal (Międzyboż), moneyboxes of the Besht, the holy relics • The court in Aklo (Olika) and the ritualized reading of Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • Function of the footnotes and the parodic hagiography • History of the rabbis – clandestine opponents of Hasidism • The Besht in Tarnopol • Rabbi Meir Jacob of Zasław and the letters from Galicja  • Zaddikim in Galicja • Ciphered stories • ‘Holy Places’: reincarnations of a praise from Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht • The revelation of the Buch and the death of the secretary • ‘Gang of criminals’: another death and an escape to the Land of Israel • The End: Ovadia Ben Petahia and the rabbi of Opatów

Chapter 3: Joseph Perl, Hirsh of Zydaczów, and the Polemics of Gematriyot
Reb Zevi Hirsh of Zydaczów and Hasidism in Galicja • Maskilic opposition to the Zydaczówer • Letters concealed in Sefer Megale Temirin • A manuscript about the misdeeds of the Hasidim • Books, education, and a note on Reb Nathan of Nemirov • Zydaczówer’s ban on the Maskilim and the first Gematria • Parodic letter of Perl and the second Gematria • About the parodic letter and the jumble of gematriyot • Denunciation and expulsions of R Zevi Hirsh • ‘Father of impurity’: Joseph Perl and the writings of the rabbi of Komarno • Final note • Appendix: Parodic letter against the Zydaczówer

Chapter 4: Speaking Names in the Book of Sefer Bohen Zaddik               
The manuscript of Sefer Bohen Zaddik and the difficulties with its publication • Structure of the book • In search for the true Zaddik and the rabbi of Opatów • Travels of Ovadia Ben Petahia between the towns of Galicja • Kromcza Ruska (Zaleszczyki) or the entrance to Galicja • ‘Briks’ (Tarnopol): Rabbi Jehoshua Heschel Babad and the school • ‘Bicik’ (Lemberg) Rabbi Jacob Orenstein and a ban on the Maskilim • ‘Abdera’ (Brody) Rabbi Ephraim Zalman Margaliot and Sefer ha-Zoref • The explanation of the names of the rabbis • Utopia and dystopia • The hidden butcher and his kabbalistic writings • The discovery of the colonies • The image of the disciples of the Gaon and the ‘true Hasid’ • ‘The solution for the East’ or heterotopia •  The will to flee and the emissary

Chapter 5: The Imaginary Influence of Sefer Megale Temirin                     
The myth about the success of the book • Pamphlet Megale Sod • The manuscript about the misdeeds of the Hasidim • Dialogues about Sefer Megale Temirin • For whom Sefer Megale Temirin was intended and who read it • Note concerning Sefer Megale Temirin in Yiddish • Influence real and imagined • Was Sefer Shivhe ha-Besht written by a parodist? • Temerl Bergson and Sefer Megale Temirin • Writ of defense of Hasidism • Sefer Megale Temirin and the Hebrew literature • Appendix: writ of defense of Joseph Judah Lob Sossnitz

Afterword: Note on the Anti-Hasidic Outlook                                       

Bibliographic Abbreviations   

Reviews:
(1) Dan Meron, 2013, ‘Megaleh Temirin’, Kivunim Hadashim 29, 55 pages (Hebrew)
(2) David Assaf, 2014, ‘Hasidim will not Read it but Tear it’, Haaretz, Tarbut ve-Sifrut, p .6 (Hebrew) http://onegshabbat.blogspot.co.il/2014/04/blog-post_18.html
(3) Eliezer Brodt, 2014, 'New book Announcement- Megale Temirin', The Seforim Blog http://seforim.blogspot.co.il/2014/01/new-book-announcement-megale-temirin.html
(4) Matan Hermoni, 2014,  הסבתא המופקרת של הספרות העבריתHaaretz, Sfarim (Hebrew) http://www.haaretz.co.il/.premium-1.2382365
(5) Shinichi Yamamoto, 2015, 山本　伸一, "ヨナタン・メイール編著『想像のハシディズム』", ユダヤ・イスラエル研究　第28号  http://www.waseda.jp/assoc-jsjs/jistudies.html
(6) David Biale and David Assaf,, 2015, 'Revealer Revealed', Jewish Review of Books, pp. 17-21  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1454/revealer-revealed/
(7) Hillel Halkin, 2015, "Sex, Magic, Bigotry, Corruption- and the First Hebrew Novel', Mosaic Magazine,  http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2015/05/sex-magic-bigotry-corruption-and-the-first-hebrew-novel/
(8) Tomer Persico, 2015, "Interview", Lula'at haEl http://tomerpersico.com/2015/08/10/meir_perl/
(9) Ariel Evan Mayse, 'Review', Jewish History (2015)ת  http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10835-015-9245-2
(10) Review - Gal-Ed

The academic commemoration of Philip Melanchthon, humanist, reformer and 'teacher of Germany' (praeceptor Germaniae), occurred for the first time on a large scale in 1760, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death. This article offers a first exploration of the bicentennial. It explores how Melanchthon's commemorators in central Europe positioned him as a hero of the early German Enlightenment, singling out and reinterpreting his labours for the 'improvement of humanity'. Shorn of context, divested of theological and ecclesiastical commitments, Melanchthon became the model scholar and the pride of Lutheran Germany, who transcended confessional particularities to instruct all of Europe.

Open Access. See: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/philip-melanchthon-and-the-age-of-enlightenment-notes-on-his-commemoration-in-1760/77774F438285AF54F8EC1935D3504A4F

Josephinism is a mixed blessing: Beacon of hope and unforgivable pitfall, the rational reform of the Habsburg realms was seen as the Empire's last genuine chance of survival as well as the seed of its destruction by nineteenth-century intellectuals and twentieth-century historians. Our introduction traces the production and usages of Josephinism, situates it in its various historiographical contexts and uses it as a touchstone to evaluate Enlightenment studies.   

Eduard Winter and Fritz Valjavec came from "German" settlement promontories in Central Europe and this imparted their work on Josephinism with distinct proclivities.

Both developed their conceptions in perceived situations of engulfment and struggle for survival. Winter, who started his career as a nationally conscious German Bohemian priest from Grottau/ Hrádek nad Nisou, was to enjoy skyrocketing success as chairholder at the Heydrich Foundation in Nazi-occupied Prague and reinvented himself as champion of German-Slavonic mutuality as professor in Communist East Germany after 1947. Young Winter combined pedagogical zeal and social awareness, he castigated the ossfied institutions Catholic church that neglected its national missions and thwarted modernist tendencies. Winter's Josephinism was a response to Habsburg liberal anticlericalism, Seeking to dispel the lingering prejudices about Josephinism, he showed that it was no berserk attack on the church, but embodied what he desired for the Catholicism of his day: A programme of social reform that was religious, national, and modernist.

Valjevec, from a Danube-Swabian background, grew up in Zagreb before living in Budapest and Munich. He chose the "people" (Volk) and its culture as the linchpin of history. This served two strategies of dissociation: Valjavec rebelled against desiccated "Geistesgeschichte" and conceptually emancipated his subject from the confines of statehood, a move that was beneficial both in the interwar period with its scattered settlement situation and after 1945 when he became a leading historian of the displaced "Volksdeutsche" who found shelter in the Federal Republic of Germany. Valjavec's reading of the Josephinian Enlightenment resulted in a paradox: Its culturally German trailblazers brought advancement to the less mature nations of East Europe, while Josephinism diluted national sentiment among the Germans of Austria, thus making them latecomers vis-à-vis the other "national revivals" in the Monarchy the emperor they worshipped had ignited.

Joseph Perl's Bohen Zaddik is one of the most complex satires of Hasidism written in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is the sequel to the main anti-Hasidic work he had composed earlier, Sefer Megale Temirin, published in 1819, a work that critiques the social context of the Hasidism of his day. In Bohen Zaddik he widens his scope to attack the rabbinate of Galicia and Jewish society in general. The work underwent various revisions from the first draft, composed in the 1820s, through its printing in 1838. Previous scholarship regarding this book has focused on literary and linguistic analysis, overlooking much of the historical substratum. The article concentrates on identifying the figures mentioned in the work, particularly the rabbis of Galicia, who are the apparent object of the author's polemic, rather than the Hasidim, as presumed earlier. By deciphering the allusions to names and places in the work, and by comparing the printed version of the text to the earlier recension found only in manuscript, a new layer of the work is uncovered, challenging a number of central scholarly assumptions and reorienting the reader to a richer appreciation of the writings of Joseph Perl.

The College of New Jersey (which later became Princeton University) provides an example of how Scottish philosophy influenced American higher education in an institutional context during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article compares the administrations of John Witherspoon (served from 1768 to 1794), Samuel Stanhope Smith (served from 1795 to 1812) and James McCosh (served from 1868 to 1888) at Princeton and examines their use of Scottish philosophy in restructuring the curriculum and reforming its institutional purpose. While presiding over Princeton during its most significant transitional moments, these philosophers of the Scottish School of Common Sense instituted different versions of moral education. Meanwhile, Witherspoon's legacy of balancing the interests of Evangelicalism and Scottish philosophy as Princeton's driving purpose influenced the creation and reception of nineteenth-century programmes of moral education. The broader question this article addresses is: how did the interconnecting points among Scottish philosophy, Calvinism and moral education inform notions of didactic Enlightenment at Princeton across a century?

This study complicates one part of the scholarly legend that Gottlob Christian Storr infused the Kantian letter with an Orthodox spirit. In §§17-18 of his DC, Storr positions Immanuel Kant’s physico-theological and moral arguments for rational belief in God within an argument for the divine authority of Scripture—on which he suggests the reliability of the book’s dogmatic statements rest. By foregrounding some versions of Kant’s arguments (while hiding others) and by illegitimately drawing biblical-theological conclusions from transcendental and limited-speculative premises, the scholarly story goes, Storr made it seem as if Lutheran Orthodoxy follows from Kant’s arguments for rational belief in God. I argue rather that Storr put Kant’s arguments in the mouth of reason—construed as a figure in a traditional Lutheran story of transformation. In this story—told from a post-transformation perspective—reason’s awareness of God is both transformed by an encounter with Word and it is a placeholder that makes a comparison between ‘pre’ and ‘post’ transformation visible. In this encounter with Word, reason comes to trust that the God who is able to help is also willing to help, and to trust that the God who reveals his willingness to help is also the divine Author of Scripture. Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s Because Kant’s arguments—on Kant’s own terms—concern only reason’s rational belief in a God who is able to see the secrets of our hearts and are cognitive symbolic, Storr is able (while keeping within the bounds of the Lutheran dogmatics genre) to (re)present them as symbolic summaries of Scripture (i.e., as dogmatic statements) that harmonize neatly with reason’s self-understanding. Storr does not cherry-pick the Kantian words that support his cause, but exploits the compatibility of Kant’s heuristic language with the Lutheran heuristic. And he does not cast methodological rigor aside so much as he incorporates Kant’s arguments into a Lutheran rule for hierarchically combining human- relative modes of argumentation and measures of reliability with divine or Scripture- relative modes and measures. While he owes much to sixteenth-century thinking, Storr answers a pressing question of the late eighteenth-century: how to reliably bring together multiple modes of argumentation and measures of reliability.

"The author of the essay has started investigating the writings of Alexander von Humboldt as a member of a German-American research cooperation in 2001. The project was affiliated to the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, it was directed by Professor Frank Baron and was aimed at digitizing and electronically publishing the English translations of the works of Alexander von Humboldt. The project entitled The Humboldt Digital Library: A Global Network of Knowledge has come to an end by now, its results are available on the internet, see http://www.avhumboldt.net/index.php?page=136. As an anthropologist and historian of cultural anthropology, the author explored the Hungarian relations of the work of Alexander von Humboldt. She revealed how much he knew about Hungary (its geography, its language and, to a certain extent, its history), and that he not only had personal connections, acquaintances in contemporary Hungarian aristocratic and scientific circles, but he also made trips to Hungary (in 1797 and 1811). It is primarily certain members of the Podmaniczky family – József Podmaniczky (1756–1823) for sure, and perhaps also Károly Podmaniczky (1772–1833) – as well as other Protestant scientists like Pál Almási Balogh (1794–1867) who could function as his closest acquaintances in Hungary. Having a considerable reception in Hungarian scientific culture, the works of Alexander von Humboldt seem to have had an impact upon the emergence of, among others, geography and world ethnology in that country. They were praised by the geographer János Hunfalvy (1820–1888), a pioneer of ethnology/universal ethnography, too. The impact of Humboldt testifies the presence of the French géographie humaine but also a Romantic Gesamtforschung in 19th century Hungary -- research directions that the Hungarian scholars of the age could and did turn against Habsburg science."

https://read.dukeupress.edu/eighteenth-century-life/article-abstract/45/3/88/174274/Home-Is-Where-the-Heart-Is-The-Rise-of-Emotional?redirectedFrom=fulltext

The figural ties between the emergent political arena of the late eighteenth century and the literary one that preceded it were claimed to be based upon a functional dichotomy between a private sphere of emotive ties and associations, and a public sphere of rational criticism (Habermas, 1962). This categorical distinction, however, scantily registered the emergence of a corollary affective economy in this period, which redefined social, political, and physical spaces according to their emotional content, or lack thereof. This article focuses on the rise of emotional language, its spatial configurations, and its dissemination processes during the late German Enlightenment in three thematic contexts: The Popular Enlightenment (Volksaufklärung) and its emphasis on the enhancement of literacy among the lower classes as a channel for emotional refinement; the visual representation of domestic bourgeois emotional scenarios in the context of the Franco-German cultural exchange surrounding the French Revolution; and the emergence of Heimat (‘homeland’) as an increasingly ubiquitous emotion-bound metaphor in the nationalization of space. Through these prisms, major shifts in the cultural dynamics of space and emotion in this period are analyzed.

En 2014, el Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII conmemoró los 250 años del fallecimiento de Benito Jerónimo Feijoo con el congreso "Con la razón y la experiencia: Feijoo 250 años después". El resultado de dicha reunión académica es el volumen homónimo que recoge 36 trabajos organizados en 6 bloques temáticos y supone una puesta al día de la investigación feijoniana. En 2014 también publicaron la antología temática "Lidiando con sombras", a cargo de Elena de Lorenzo, Rodrigo Olay y Noelia García, que  presenta una cuidada introducción y una selección de fragmentos representativos de la totalidad del corpus de Feijoo.

“Historia, derecho y reforma. Los proyectos polémicos de Pascoal de Melo Freire y sus críticos en Portugal, 1788-1789” | VI Encuentro Internacional de Jóvenes Investigadores de Historia Moderna “Los Caminos del Modernismo”, Fundación Española de Historia Moderna (FEHM-CSIC), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela/Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Facultade de Xeografía e Historia/Facultad de Geografía e Historia, Santiago de Compostela, 17-19 Mar 2022.

El volumen "España y el continente americano en el siglo XVIII" es la edición de los trabajos presentados en el VI Congreso de la SEESXVIII y es publicado por Ediciones
Trea, que ya acoge un nutrido catálogo de títulos de referencia sobre el Setecientos español —entre ellas, las de las actas de los IV y V congresos, "La época de Carlos IV" (2009) y "Hacia 1812, desde el siglo ilustrado" (2013)—. El volumen articula los trabajos en un apartado de conferencias plenarias al que le siguen cinco bloques temáticos, e incluye un detallado prólogo, un imprescindible índice onomástico, pues el libro supera las mil páginas, y una sección final que ofrece una síntesis de cada uno de los artículos integrantes.

During a transitional period of Scottish history, responses to the French Revolution in the 1790s significantly affected Enlightenment intellectual culture across Scotland and, in particular, its existence in Edinburgh. The emergence of powerful counter-Enlightenment interests—championed by Henry Dundas—sought to censure the diffusion of ideas and values associated with France's revolution. In doing so, they targeted all controversial philosophical writings and liberal values for censorship and, in turn, gradually crippled the unique circumstances that had birthed the Scottish Enlightenment. Alarmed by the effect counter-Enlightenment policies had on Scottish intellectual culture, Dugald Stewart professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University (1785–1810) countered this threat with a system of moral education. His programme created a modern version of Thomas Reid's Common Sense philosophy whilst advancing that the best way to prevent the adoption of supposedly dangerous political and philosophical ideas was examining their errors. The tensions between counter-Enlightenment policies and Stewart's system of moral education erupted in the 1805 election of John Leslie as professor of mathematics at Edinburgh University, but the Leslie affair was not an isolated episode. This controversy embodied tensions over ecclesiastical politics in the Church of Scotland, national secular politics, and Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy. At the same time, Stewart believed the Leslie affair would determine the fate of not only Edinburgh University but also the Scottish universities’ entwined relationship with Enlightenment. This article examines how Dugald Stewart's prominent role in the 1805 John Leslie affair pitted counter-Enlightenment interests against those of an emerging generation of the Scottish Enlightenment.

This chapter offers a reappraisal of the relationship between the imperial idea, civilising missions, and “national culture” in the Habsburg Monarchy between the 1770s and the 1850s: In does so by focusing on the underpinnings, reputation, and consequences of the cultural politics of eighteenth-century “enlightened absolutism”. The chapter fleshes out how protagonists of the “national revivals” in the first half of the nineteenth century constructed a potent phantom menace in order to stir their envisaged audiences into action: They painted a gloomy image of the purposeful suppression of “national cultures” in the Habsburg lands and thereby made culture the main arena of political contestation. They “culturalised” imperial rule, suggesting that Habsburg governance drastically curbed the potential of their respective national culture. In doing so, the discourse controllers of the “revivals” gave short shrift to rival aspects of citizenship, to the rule of law and to the economic liberties enshrined under Joseph II, Leopold II, and Francis I. “Culture” became the shibboleth of the revivalists. They skillfully made the Enlightenment part of their own venerable ancestry, belittling the claims of collateral heirs to this legacy. The appeal to “culture” was a potent device for the unification of the envisaged nation from within in a time of increasingly blurry hierarchies between the estates: “Culture” enhanced the abridged status of a nationally conscious nobility as patrons of cultural rejuvenation and refinement. Imagining culture as the panacea for the nation and for the Monarchy writ large, the revivalists structured their concerns around the resistance to a key threat: Josephinian “Germanisation”. The chapter shows that this was a cultural cliché co-designed by the revivalists themselves: They ascribed a “germanizing” proclivity to imperial governance and retroprojected it in time. By the same token national revivalists whittled away the prestige of Habsburg statecraft as an engine of improvement and transposed it to their own fieldwork as restorers and enunciators of national culture.

"El Sistema Colonial Develado" de Jean Louis Vastey.

Muy feliz de anunciarles que ya esta en la calle la primera traducción al castellano de "Le Système Colonial Dévoilé" (1814) la obra cumbre de Jean Louis Vastey el intelectual más importante de la revolución haitiana. La edición y el estudio preliminar a mi cargo. La traducción realizada por Laura Léger y el prólogo de Marlene Daut, máxima autoridad en la materia. Trabajo de edición de Javier Marín. Editado por Ediciones del CCC. Muchísimas gracias a tod@s ell@s por sumarse a esta aventura de recuperar a un imprescindible, olvidado, de Nuestra América.

De la contratapa

El manto de silencio impuesto sobre la Revolución de Haití ocluyó el protagonismo de miles de esclavos negros en la más radical de las revoluciones modernas y, consecuentemente, su singular significado político. De igual forma, condenó al olvido a una pléyade de intelectuales que, después de 1804, utilizaron la pluma para llevar adelante un furibundo ataque contra el orden colonial, racista y esclavista imperante en la época. Jean Louis Vastey (1781-1820) fue entre todos ellos el más destacado. Autor de una enjundiosa obra, asaltó como ningún otro la cosmovisión eurocéntrica y colonial, desnudando sus contradicciones, sus falacias y sus mitos. Apropiándose de la Ilustración y el cristianismo desde la perspectiva de las víctimas que se rebelaron en contra de sus amos y las potencias europeas, construyó una teoría crítica sincrética. En muchos sentidos, preanunció las principales conceptualizaciones de las corrientes panafricanas, anticoloniales, tercermundistas y poscoloniales que emergieron mucho tiempo después en Nuestra América y el Tercer Mundo. Vastey no sólo fue el principal exégeta del proceso haitiano sino un pionero del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano y periférico. Injustamente silenciado durante largas décadas, hoy Vastey vuelve. Con la primera traducción al castellano de Le Système Colonial Dévoilé (1814), una de sus obras más incisivas, nos proponemos restituirlo al sitial que se merece: el de un clásico que nunca debió haber sido olvidado.
http://edicionesdelccc.tiendas.coop/libros/sistema-colonial

In his memoirs, the Venetian adventurer and writer Giacomo Casanova confessed that he had often felt the temptation of suicide, particularly, but not only, after failing to seduce a woman. Moreover, he wrote various pieces on this subject, including two long tracts: Discorso sul suicidio [Discourse on suicide], published in 1769, and Nove dialoghi [Nine dialogues], written in manuscript in 1782 but left unpublished by Casanova. These two tracts show an evolution in Casanova’s views on suicide. While in Discorso sul suicidio Casanova attacks those who, like Voltaire, judge self-killing a legitimate action, in Nove dialoghi he seems torn between accepting the possibility of suicide and rejecting it as an impracticable option. Nevertheless, both tracts prove that, in matters of philosophy, Casanova was much less daring than he was in real life. In fact, his writings on voluntary death reflect the specificity of the Italian context, where the debate on this topic in the second half of the eighteenth century was dominated by the figure of the Celestine priest Appiano Buonafede, and was still bound by intellectual, moral and psychological constraints imposed by the Catholic tradition.
Casanova’s Discorso sul suicidio and Nove dialoghi were not among the most successful and influential contributions to the eighteenth-century debate on suicide. However, his views on self-killing represent an intriguing and provocative attempt to discuss this subject from a multifaceted perspective and, in some respects, are emblematic of the controversial nature of the European debate on this issue. Therefore, this paper analyses Casanova’s major writings on suicide against the background of the European and Italian disputes on voluntary death.

New Date - 30-4-2015

Evening in the Honor of the Books -

Imagined Hasidism / Sefer Megale Temirin, by Jonatan Meir; -

Bratslav Ma’asiyot, by Zvi Mark. -

Speakers: Jonatan Meir, Zvi Mark, Israel Bartal

https://www.facebook.com/beitbialik/posts/1048909911789828

In 1791, the Benedictine Charles Walmesley (1722–97), Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, wrote to his colleague Bishop Douglass: “We exist indeed in miserable times. We have our share here, and they suffer a great share abroad; but there was a Wo pronounced by the Prophet on this period of the Church.” Given the societal pressures on English Catholics, the upheavals in revolutionary France, and the doctrinal and political strife throughout Catholic Europe, one can understand Bishop Walmesley’s pessimism. But Walmesley’s apocalyptic interpretation of recent struggles – with recalcitrant progressive “Cisalpines” like Joseph Berington, or with news coming out of Pistoia, Austria, and France – was interpreted to fit a narrative of history that Walmesley himself had held for decades. In 1771, Walmesley published, under the pseudonym “Sig. Pastorini” the General History of the Christian Church, his first (and programmatic) apocalyptic work, in which he divided history into seven ages, in an attempt to prophetically interpret the seven Seals, Trumpets, and Vials of the book of Revelation. While the book earned the scorn of “enlightened” Cisalpines like Alexander Geddes, it was widely acclaimed, reprinted, and translated. This essay explores Walmesley’s interpretation of history and prophecy, which I will argue was profoundly shaped by his view of Protestantism, and shows how his apocalypticism impacted his interactions with the progressive Cisalpines, his ideological opponents. These latter, who had a typical “Enlightenment” view of history, had capitulated, in Walmesley’s view, to the poison of the Fifth Age.

This volume, hopefully the first of a series devoted to the re-publication of his works, includes two essays by Salvatore Rotta (1926-2001), professor, for a long time, at the University of Genoa, and one of the leading European scholars in early modern history of the last century. The foreword is by one of his disciples, Prof. Rolando Minuti of the University of Florence. The essays deal, respectively, with the reception of Montesquieu, and that of Voltaire in Italy in the long eighteenth century. Subscriptions are encouraged and most welcome.

The history of Central European historiography is still something of a Cinderella subject: it is due to disciplinary dispensations and language boundaries that critical, comparative, and comprehensive studies of the historiographies of the region have remained rare exceptions. This volume breaks new ground by focusing on the Central European historiography of the Enlightenment in the twentieth century, on the works of Eduard Winter (1896–1982) and Fritz Valjavec (1909–1960) and on their reception in the region in particular. It brings together studies on Austrian, Czechoslovak, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Yugoslavian historiography.
Winter's and Valjavec's books, published in Brno/Brünn under Nazi occupation in 1943 and 1944 respectively, established “Josephinism” as a central category of research on the Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Winter and Valjavec were both embroiled in Nazi rule, Winter served as a professor at the Heydrich Foundation at Prague, Valjavec held a chair at Alfred Six's Berlin academy of political science and was a member of the Einsatzgruppe D in whose activities in the Bukovina he participated. The chapters of our book show the conduits and catalysts of Enlightenment research under the impact of Nazi rule, they analyse to what extent the concepts and politics of Ost-, Südost- and Volkstumsforschung dovetailed with governmental directives, and study how Winter and Valjavec managed to garner support for their research programs after 1945 in both halves of bisected Europe: Valjavec was installed as the director of the Institut für Südostforschung in Munich, while Winter, after a brief stint at Vienna, relocated to the GDR, becoming professor at Halle and later at East Berlin.
Our book traces how Winter's and Valjavec's “Josephinism” was ensconced as a key concept for the study of the Habsburg Monarchy. It highlights that Winter's and Valjavec's concepts were shaped by their own experience of this very Monarchy and of its collapse: Both came from German-speaking families in bilingual contexts, Winter was born in North Bohemia, Valjavec grew up in the Banat and in Budapest, and their epistemes and concepts of regional scientific collaborations reflect these origins. The book looks at the fortunes of “Josephinism” in the region from the 1940s to the present. It contextualises the sprawling literature on “Josephinism” in all successor states of the Monarchy, and it fleshes out the promise and perils of its application as a basic template and instant structuring device: what can “Josephinism” reveal, what does it occlude? This reflection on "Josephinism" offers important lessons on how the diverse historical trajectories within the Monarchy can be synchronized, and about the political-cultural imperatives behind commonly used strategies of generalization, of projecting the history of one region of the Monarchy on its entirety. These matters of selection and selectivity as well as of periodization – of the sequence of Baroque, Enlightenment, and Restoration in particular – are salient issues in all chapters.

The current pre-dominant scientific paradigm connects the French Revolution with the radical Enlightenment initiated by Spinoza. Democratic republicanism, fostered by Spinoza in opposition to aristocratic-oligarchic republicanism, provided, mediated by Rousseau, and other thinkers, the intellectual background for the Revolution, or, at least, part of this background. This is what Jonathan Israel held for true also in the context of the 2017 ISIH conference. As such, this is an ideological paradigm, related to ideological foundations, i.e. foundations based on political theory, of the Revolution. I do not want to enter the lively discussion, pro and contra Jonathan Israel’s view, a debate that the British scholar has primed (since the early 1990s), and that is still ongoing.
In this paper, I argue that the Revolution, and the creation of the first-ever totalitarian State in modernity, needed, even more than ideological foundations, an epistemological basis grounded on metaphysics. Both Spinoza and Malebranche based their philosophy on Descartes. In this, they belonged to a rationalistic school of thought that included figures quite similar to that of Malebranche, like Arnold Geulinck (briefly mentioned in this paper), and, above all, Leibniz. If we concede – and this is not a foregone conclusion – that the French Revolution took place in a space and time in which Cartesian dualism was still one of the prevalent epistemological as well as ontological models – Malebranche’s thought might have played a major role, even in sheer political-ideological context, and later on in the context of policies more than in that of ideologies.