The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans and the Eighteenth-century Study of Scripture: v. 7 (Harvard Judaic Monographs) - Tapa blanda

This book represents an original contribution to the understanding of the central text of Jewish scriptural exegesis in the eighteenth century, Moses Mendelssohn's "The Book of the Paths of Peace" (1779-83), usually known as the "Biur," which was a translation of the Pentateuch into German (printed in Hebrew letters) with a verse-by-verse commentary and a general introduction in Hebrew...The great strength of Breuer's book is to examine the work not in the perspective of subsequent developments in German Jewry but rather in terms of the cultural problematic in which it was written. With impressive erudition and consistent lucidity, Breuer shows the work's relationship to contemporary European, and especially German, biblical scholarship on the one side, and to the traditions of Jewish exegesis on the other. The result is a strikingly original re-reading. -- David Sorkin "Journal of Jewish Studies [UK"

This text explores the early Jewish confrontations with modernity and burgeoning 18th-century interest in the study of Scripture, Edward Breuer examines the complex relationship between the Jewish Enlightenment and the German "Aufklarung". The revival of a textual and linguistic approach to Bible study among Jews, exemplified by the new translation and commentary published by Moses Mendelssohn, was largely reflective of the aesthetic and literary concerns of contemporary Europeans. "The Limits of Enlightenment" demonstrates that this revival was also informed by an acute awareness of critical European scholarship and an attempt to respond to its modern challenges. Alongside its openness to European society and culture, the German-Jewish Enlightenment was thus also shaped by a newly perceived need to defend centuries of Jewish learning and tradition.