TY  - BOOK
AU  - Efron,John M.
TI  - German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic
SN  - 9780691167749
PY  - 2015///]
CY  - Princeton, NJ : 
PB  - Princeton University Press, 
KW  - Haskalah
KW  - Germany
KW  - History
KW  - 18th century
KW  - Jews
KW  - Cultural assimilation
KW  - Identity
KW  - 19th century
KW  - Intellectual life
KW  - Sephardim
KW  - Social life and customs
KW  - HISTORY / Jewish
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Abraham Geiger
KW  - Abravanel
KW  - Antisemitism
KW  - Antithesis
KW  - Apostasy
KW  - Arabs
KW  - Arthur Ruppin
KW  - Ashkenazi Jews
KW  - Baruch Spinoza
KW  - Biblical Hebrew
KW  - Blood libel
KW  - Bourgeoisie
KW  - Central Synagogue
KW  - Christianity
KW  - David Sorkin
KW  - Eastern Europe
KW  - Edward Said
KW  - Friedrich Nicolai
KW  - German language
KW  - German literature
KW  - Germans
KW  - Gershom Scholem
KW  - Gothic architecture
KW  - Gottfried Semper
KW  - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
KW  - Hebrew language
KW  - Hebrews
KW  - Heinrich Heine
KW  - Historical fiction
KW  - Horowitz
KW  - Ideology
KW  - Illustration
KW  - Immanuel Kant
KW  - Isaac Satanow
KW  - Israelites
KW  - Jewish culture
KW  - Jewish diaspora
KW  - Jewish emancipation
KW  - Jewish history
KW  - Jewish identity
KW  - Jewish literature
KW  - Jewish studies
KW  - Judah Halevi
KW  - Judaism
KW  - Judea
KW  - Kabbalah
KW  - Land of Israel
KW  - Leo von Klenze
KW  - Literary criticism
KW  - Literature
KW  - Ludwig Philippson
KW  - Marrano
KW  - Martin Jay
KW  - Maskil
KW  - Meyer Kayserling
KW  - Modernity
KW  - Moses Mendelssohn
KW  - Moses ibn Ezra
KW  - Mosque
KW  - Nathan Adler
KW  - Newspaper
KW  - Nobility
KW  - Norbert Elias
KW  - Notion (ancient city)
KW  - Orientalism
KW  - Persecution
KW  - Philosopher
KW  - Piety
KW  - Poetry
KW  - Popular culture
KW  - Princeton University Press
KW  - Pronunciation
KW  - Prussia
KW  - Racism
KW  - Reform Judaism
KW  - Ridicule
KW  - Romanticism
KW  - Sanskrit
KW  - Self-criticism
KW  - Sensibility
KW  - Sepharad
KW  - Sephardi Hebrew
KW  - Sephardi Jews
KW  - Shlomo
KW  - Spanish and Portuguese Jews
KW  - Suggestion
KW  - Superiority (short story)
KW  - Synagogue architecture
KW  - Synagogue
KW  - The Civilizing Process
KW  - The Philosopher
KW  - Torah study
KW  - Western culture
KW  - Wissenschaft des Judentums
KW  - Writing
KW  - Yad Vashem
KW  - Yiddish
KW  - Zionism
N1  - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Acknowledgments --; Introduction --; Chapter One. The Sound of Jewish Modernity --; Chapter Two. “Castilian Pride and Oriental Dignity” --; Chapter Three. Of Minarets and Menorahs --; Chapter Four. Pleasure Reading --; Chapter Five. Writing Jewish History --; Epilogue --; Notes --; Bibliography --; Index; restricted access
N2  - In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as German Jews struggled for legal emancipation and social acceptance, they also embarked on a program of cultural renewal, two key dimensions of which were distancing themselves from their fellow Ashkenazim in Poland and giving a special place to the Sephardim of medieval Spain. Where they saw Ashkenazic Jewry as insular and backward, a result of Christian persecution, they depicted the Sephardim as worldly, morally and intellectually superior, and beautiful, products of the tolerant Muslim environment in which they lived. In this elegantly written book, John Efron looks in depth at the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry.Efron examines how German Jews idealized the sound of Sephardic Hebrew and the Sephardim's physical and moral beauty, and shows how the allure of the Sephardic found expression in neo-Moorish synagogue architecture, historical novels, and romanticized depictions of Sephardic history. He argues that the shapers of German-Jewish culture imagined medieval Iberian Jewry as an exemplary Jewish community, bound by tradition yet fully at home in the dominant culture of Muslim Spain. Efron argues that the myth of Sephardic superiority was actually an expression of withering self-critique by German Jews who, by seeking to transform Ashkenazic culture and win the acceptance of German society, hoped to enter their own golden age.Stimulating and provocative, this book demonstrates how the goal of this aesthetic self-refashioning was not assimilation but rather the creation of a new form of German-Jewish identity inspired by Sephardic beauty
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400874194
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781400874194
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781400874194/original
ER  -