New Perspectives on Jewish Cultural History

<p>This book presents original studies of how a cultural concept of Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history came to make sense in the experiences of people entangled in different historical situations. Instead of searching for the inconsistencies discontinuities or ruptures of dominant grand historical narratives of Jewish cultural history this book unfolds situations and events where Jewishness and a coherent Jewish history became useful meaningful and acted upon as a site of causal explanations. Inspired by classical American pragmatism and more recent French pragmatism we present a new perspective on Jewish cultural history in which the experiences problems and actions of people are at the center of reconstructions of historical causalities and projections of future horizons. The book shows how boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish are not a priori given but are instead repeatedly experienced in a variety of situations and then acted upon as matters of facts. In different ways and on different scales these studies show how people's experiences of Jewishness perpetually probe test and shape the boundaries between what is Jewish and non-Jewish and that these boundaries shape the spatiotemporal linkages that we call history.</p>