New Books In Eastern European Studies

Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s (Yale University Press, 2018) is a radical new book that uncovers a hitherto ignored intellectual movement in Jewish Eastern Europe, and finds new antecedents to the story of modern Jewish history. In it, Professor Eliyahu Stern recontextualizes a group of Jewish thinkers who sought to understand the ways in which Jewish identity could be interpreted not in terms of law, tradition, and ritual practice, but, after an engagement with the thought of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, in terms of land, labor, and bodies. “Jewish materialists” asked what it meant to be a Jew in a period when rabbinic authority waned, and the physical pressures of poverty and anti-semitism dominated daily life, a time when to be religious was an economic choice. The central chapters of the book focus on several different forms of materialism – what Stern terms social, scientific, and practical materialisms – best captured in the works of figures such as Rabbi Joseph Sossnitz,