Jewish Modernity in Lithuania: From Talmud and Mussar to Revolution and Zionism

Catalog description

For two centuries, Jewish Lithuania served as a center of Jewish religious, cultural, and political life. This region served as a bastion of traditional Talmudic learning even as it functioned as the cradle of such modern intellectual and political movements as Haskalah, religious Zionism, Jewish socialism, and Yiddishism. In this class, we will study the works of leading representatives of each of these movements. Two of the questions that the course will address are the larger historical reasons for Lithuanian Jewry's remarkable creativity and the extent to which the secular movements continued the legacy of their religious predecessors.