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Jewish Secularism
Jewish secularism refers to secularism in a Jewish context, denoting the definition of Jewish identity with little or no attention given to its religious aspects. The concept of Jewish secularism first arose in the late 19th century, with its influence peaking during the interwar period. History The Jews and secularisation The Marranos in Spain, who retained some sense of Jewish identity and alienation while formally Catholic, anticipated the European secularisation process to some degree. Their diaspora outside Iberia united believing Catholics, returnees to Judaism (on both accounts, rarely fully at comfort in their religions) and deists in one "Marrano nation." Baruch Spinoza, the herald of the secular age, advocated the demise of religious control over society and the delegation of faith to the private sphere. Yet his notions lacked anything specifically Jewish: He believed that without the ceremonial law to define the Jews, their collective existence would eventual ...
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Ahad Haam
Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (18 August 1856 – 2 January 1927), primarily known by his Hebrew name and pen name Ahad Ha'am ( he, אחד העם, lit. 'one of the people', Genesis 26:10), was a Hebrew essayist, and one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers. He is known as the founder of cultural Zionism. With his secular vision of a Jewish "spiritual center" in Israel, he confronted Theodor Herzl. Unlike Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, Ha'am strived for "a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews". Biography Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am) was born in Skvyra, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) to pious well-to-do Hasidic parents. At eight years old, he began to teach himself to read Russian. His father, Isaiah, sent him to heder until he was 12. When Isaiah became the administrator of a large estate in a village in the Kiev district, he moved the family there and took private tutors for his son, who excelled at his studi ...
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Saul Ascher
Saul Ascher (6 February 1767 in Berlin – 8 December 1822 in Berlin) was a German writer, translator and bookseller. Life Saul Ascher (born Saul ben Anschel Jaff), was the first child of Deiche Aaron (c. 1744 Frankfurt – 1820 Berlin) and bank broker Anschel Jaffe (1745 Berlin – 1812 Berlin). In 1785, he attended high school in ''Landsberg an der Warthe'' (now Gorzów Wielkopolski). Ascher married Rachel Spanier on 6 June 1789 in Hanover. Spanier was the daughter of Nathan Spanier, the head of the Ravensberg Jewish community. On 6 October 1795, their only child, a daughter Wilhelmine, was born. On 6 April 1810, Ascher was arrested in Berlin, but was released on April 25 due to political pressure. On 6 October, he was awarded a doctoral degree '' in absentia'' from the University of Halle. In 1812, the year his father died, Ascher received his letter of citizenship. Ascher joined the Jewish reform-oriented ''Gesellschaft der Freunde'' (Society of Friends) in 1816. At the ...
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Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, psychologist, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his hypothesis of social Darwinism. Spencer originated the expression " survival of the fittest", which he coined in ''Principles of Biology'' (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book '' On the Origin of Species''. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism. Riggenbach, Jeff (24 April 2011The Real William Graham Sumner, Mises Institute. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, literature, astronomy, biology, sociology, and ps ...
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Ahad Ha'am
Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (18 August 1856 – 2 January 1927), primarily known by his Hebrew name and pen name Ahad Ha'am ( he, אחד העם, lit. 'one of the people', Genesis 26:10), was a Hebrew essayist, and one of the foremost pre-state Zionist thinkers. He is known as the founder of cultural Zionism. With his secular vision of a Jewish "spiritual center" in Israel, he confronted Theodor Herzl. Unlike Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, Ha'am strived for "a Jewish state and not merely a state of Jews". Biography Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (Ahad Ha'am) was born in Skvyra, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) to pious well-to-do Hasidic parents. At eight years old, he began to teach himself to read Russian. His father, Isaiah, sent him to heder until he was 12. When Isaiah became the administrator of a large estate in a village in the Kiev district, he moved the family there and took private tutors for his son, who excelled at his studi ...
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Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved throughout history as the main liturgical language of Judaism (since the Second Temple period) and Samaritanism. Hebrew is the only Canaanite language still spoken today, and serves as the only truly successful example of a dead language that has been revived. It is also one of only two Northwest Semitic languages still in use, with the other being Aramaic. The earliest examples of written Paleo-Hebrew date back to the 10th century BCE. Nearly all of the Hebrew Bible is written in Biblical Hebrew, with much of its present form in the dialect that scholars believe flourished around the 6th century BCE, during the time of the Babylonian captivity. For this reason, Hebrew has been referred to by Jews as ''Lashon Hakodesh'' (, ) since ...
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Russian Alphabet
The Russian alphabet (russian: ру́сский алфави́т, russkiy alfavit, , label=none, or russian: ру́сская а́збука, russkaya azbuka, label=none, more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. It comes from the Cyrillic script, which was devised in the 9th century for the first Slavic literary language, Old Slavonic. Initially an old variant of the Bulgarian alphabet, it became used in the Kievan Rusʹ since the 10th century to write what would become the Russian language. The modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: twenty consonants (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ), ten vowels (, , , , , , , , , ), a semivowel / consonant (), and two modifier letters or "signs" (, ) that alter pronunciation of a preceding consonant or a following vowel. Letters : An alternative form of the letter El () closely resembles the Greek letter lambda (). Historic letters Letters eliminated in 1917–18 * — Id ...
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Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages.Aram Yardumian"A Tale of Two Hypotheses: Genetics and the Ethnogenesis of Ashkenazi Jewry".University of Pennsylvania. 2013. Yiddish is primarily written in the Hebrew alphabet. Prior to World War II, its worldwide peak was 11 million, with the number of speakers in the United States and Canada then totaling 150,000. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers,Solomon Birnbaum, ''Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache'' (4., erg. Aufl., Ha ...
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Moritz Steinschneider
Moritz Steinschneider (30 March 1816, Prostějov, Moravia, Austrian Empire – 24 January 1907, Berlin) was a Moravian bibliographer and Orientalist. He received his early instruction in Hebrew from his father, Jacob Steinschneider ( 1782;  March 1856), who was not only an expert Talmudist, but was also well versed in secular science. The house of the elder Steinschneider was the rendezvous of a few progressive Hebraists, among whom was his brother-in-law, the physician and writer Gideon Brecher. Education At the age of six Steinschneider was sent to the public school, which was still an uncommon choice for Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time; and at the age of thirteen he became the pupil of Rabbi Nahum Trebitsch, whom he followed to Mikulov, Moravia in 1832. The following year, in order to continue his Talmudic studies, he went to Prague, where he remained until 1836, attending simultaneously the lectures at the Normal School. In 1836 Steinschneider ...
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Science Of Judaism
"''Wissenschaft des Judentums''" (Literally in German the expression means "Science of Judaism"; more recently in the US it started to be rendered as "Jewish Studies" or "Judaic Studies," a wide academic field of inquiry in American Universities) refers to a nineteenth-century movement premised on the critical investigation of Jewish literature and culture, including rabbinic literature, to analyze the origins of Jewish traditions. The ''Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden'' The first organized attempt at developing and disseminating ''Wissenschaft des Judentums'' was the ''Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden'' (''Society for Jewish Culture and Jewish Studies''), founded around 1819 by Eduard Gans, (a pupil of Hegel), and his associates. Other members included Heinrich Heine, Leopold Zunz, Moses Moser, and Michael Beer, (youngest brother of Meyerbeer). It was an attempt to provide a construct for the Jews as a ''Volk'' or people in their own right, indepe ...
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Torah Im Derech Eretz
''Torah im Derech Eretz'' ( he, תורה עם דרך ארץ – Torah with "the way of the land"Rabbi Y. Goldson, Aish HaTorah"The Way of the World", Ethics of the Fathers, 3:21/ref>) is a phrase common in Rabbinic literature referring to various aspects of one's interaction with the wider world. It also refers to a philosophy of Orthodox Judaism articulated by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), which formalizes a relationship between traditionally observant Judaism and the modern world. Some refer to the resultant mode of Orthodox Judaism as Neo-Orthodoxy. Derech Eretz The phrase ''Torah im Derech Eretz'' is first found in the Mishna in Tractate ''Avoth'' (2:2): "Beautiful is the study of Torah with ''Derech Eretz'', as involvement with both makes one forget sin". The term ''Derech Eretz'', literally "the way of the land", is inherently ambiguous, with a wide range of meanings in Rabbinic literature, referring to earning a livelihood and behaving appropriately, among ot ...
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Orthodox Judaism
Orthodox Judaism is the collective term for the traditionalist and theologically conservative branches of contemporary Judaism. Theologically, it is chiefly defined by regarding the Torah, both Written and Oral, as revealed by God to Moses on Mount Sinai and faithfully transmitted ever since. Orthodox Judaism, therefore, advocates a strict observance of Jewish law, or ''halakha'', which is to be interpreted and determined exclusively according to traditional methods and in adherence to the continuum of received precedent through the ages. It regards the entire ''halakhic'' system as ultimately grounded in immutable revelation, and beyond external influence. Key practices are observing the Sabbath, eating kosher, and Torah study. Key doctrines include a future Messiah who will restore Jewish practice by building the temple in Jerusalem and gathering all the Jews to Israel, belief in a future bodily resurrection of the dead, divine reward and punishment for the righte ...
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Reform Judaism
Reform Judaism, also known as Liberal Judaism or Progressive Judaism, is a major Jewish denomination that emphasizes the evolving nature of Judaism, the superiority of its ethical aspects to its ceremonial ones, and belief in a continuous search for truth and knowledge, which is closely intertwined with human reason and not limited to the theophany at Mount Sinai. A highly liberal strand of Judaism, it is characterized by lessened stress on ritual and personal observance, regarding ''halakha'' (Jewish law) as non-binding and the individual Jew as autonomous, and great openness to external influences and progressive values. The origins of Reform Judaism lie in 19th-century Germany, where Rabbi Abraham Geiger and his associates formulated its early principles. Since the 1970s, the movement has adopted a policy of inclusiveness and acceptance, inviting as many as possible to partake in its communities rather than adhering to strict theoretical clarity. It is strongly identifie ...
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