Jews

The Making of a Diaspora People

Irving M. Zeitlin

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745660172, 9780745660165
• eBook ISBN: 9780745661483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book is a comprehensive account of how the Jews became a diaspora people. The term 'diaspora' was first applied exclusively to the early history of the Jews as they began settling in scattered colonies outside of Israel-Judea during the time of the Babylonian exile; it has come to express the characteristic uniqueness of the Jewish historical experience. Zeitlin retraces the history of the Jewish diaspora from the ancient world to the present, beginning with expulsion from their ancestral homeland and concluding with the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In mapping this process, Zeitlin argues that the Jews' religious self-understanding was crucial in enabling them to cope with the serious and recurring challenges they have had to face throughout their history. He analyses the varied reactions the Jews encountered from their so-called 'host peoples', paying special attention to the attitudes of famous thinkers such as Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wagner, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the Left Hegelians, Marx and others, who didn't shy away from making explicit their opinions of the Jews.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Jewish studies, diaspora studies, history and religion, as well as to general readers keen to learn more about the history of the Jewish experience.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. “Diaspora”: On the Genealogy of a Concept
• 2. Varieties of Jewish Religious Experience
• 3. Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism
• 4. The Babylonian Empire
• 5. The Babylonian Exile and the Persian Supremacy (586–332 BCE)
• 6. Alexander the Great and the New Hegemony of the West
• 7. The World Diaspora
• 8. The Diaspora in the First Century CE
• 9. The Jews in the Roman Near East
• 10. The Jews Move to Poland
• 11. Sabbatai Zevi
• 12. Gershom Scholem’s Error
• 13. The Rise of Hasidism and the Baal-Shem-Tob
• 14. The Jews of Spain
• 15. The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
• 16. The Enlightenment and the Jews
• 17. The Germanies
• 18. The Left Hegelians and the so-called “Jewish Question”
• 19. From Religion to Race
• 20. From Gobineau and H. Stewart Chamberlain to Wagner
• 21. The Rise of Nazism
• 22. The Early Nazi Regime and the Jews as Perceived by Non-Jewish Contemporaries
• 23. World War I, the Collapse of the Old Regimes, and the Rise of Totalitarianism
• 24. Max Weber on Bureaucracy and its Relevance for an Analysis of the Shoah (Holocaust)
• 25. Charisma, Bureaucracy, and the “Final Solution”
• 26. Leon Poliakov’s Complementary Analysis of the Shoah
• 27. The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto
• 28. Zionism, Israel, and the Palestinians
• Works Cited
• Index