Books by Cedric Cohen-Skalli
Die Reihe Religiöse Positionierungen in Judentum, Christentum und Islam ist aus dem gleichnamigen... more Die Reihe Religiöse Positionierungen in Judentum, Christentum und Islam ist aus dem gleichnamigen hessischen Exzellenzprojekt an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt und der Justus-Liebig Universität Gießen erwachsen. Das interdisziplinäre Projekt erforscht Prozesse der wechselseitigen Positionierung der drei Religionen angesichts des Faktums von religiös-kultureller Pluralität und Differenz unter dem Einfl uss spezifi scher historischer, politischer und kultureller Konstellationen. Es untersucht, über welche Ressourcen jüdische, christliche und islamische Traditionen verfügen, um differenten Positionen und Konfl ikten dialogisch und mit Achtung zu begegnen. Die Reihe richtet sich an Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler in den Fachrichtungen Geschichte, Religionswissenschaft, Religionsphilosophie, Jüdische Studien, Islamwissenschaft, Theologie, Erziehungs-und Politikwissenschaften. This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the intersections between crisis, scholarship, and action. The aim of this book is to think about the "moment of crisis," through the concepts, writings, and methodologies handed down to us by Jewish thinkers in modernity. This book offers a broad gallery of accounts on the notion of crisis in Jewish modernity, while emphasizing three terms: interpretation, heresy, and messianism. The main thesis of the volume is that the diasporic and exilic experience of the Jewish people turned their philosophers and theologians into "experts in crisis management" who had to fi nd resources within their own religion, culture and traditions in order to react, endure and overcome short-and long-term historical crises. The underlining assumption is therefore that Jewish thought draws upon resources for conceptualizing and reacting to the current forms of crisis in the global, European, and Israeli spheres. The volume is intended for a wide readership in the humanities, social and political sciences and religious studies, taking as its assumption that scholars in modern Jewish thought have an extended responsibility to engage in contemporary debates.
December, 2022
Gustav Landauer was an unconventional anarchist who aspired to a return to a communal life. His a... more Gustav Landauer was an unconventional anarchist who aspired to a return to a communal life. His antipolitical rejection of authoritarian assumptions is based on a radical linguistic scepticism that could be considered the theoretical premise of his anarchism. The present volume aims to add to the existing scholarship on Landauer by shedding new light on his work, focussing on the two interrelated notions of skepsis and antipolitics. In a time marked by a deep doubt concerning modern politics, Landauer’s alternative can help us to more seriously address the struggle for a different articulation of our communitarian and ecological needs.
Tauber Institute Series for the Study of the European Jewry, BUP, 2020
Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the great inventors of Jewish modernity. A merchant, b... more Don Isaac Abravanel (1437–1508) was one of the great inventors of Jewish modernity. A merchant, banker, and court financier, a scholar versed in both Jewish and Christian writings, a preacher and exegete, a prominent political actor in royal entourages and Jewish communities, Abravanel was one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the aftermath of the expulsion of 1492. This book, the first new intellectual biography of Abravanel in twenty years, depicts his life in three cultural milieus—Portugal, Castile, and post-expulsion Italy—and analyzes his major literary accomplishments in each period. Abravanel was a traditionalist with innovative ideas, a man with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in the Renaissance. An erudite scholar, author of a monumental exegetical opus that is still studied today, and an avid book collector, he was a transitional figure, defined by an age of contradictions. Yet, it is these very contradictions that make him such an important personality for understanding the dawn of Jewish modernity.
An intellectual biography of Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) in the prestigious series "Outstandi... more An intellectual biography of Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) in the prestigious series "Outstanding Minds and great Personalities in Jewish History" released by the Zalman Shazar Center.
Il libro mira a ricostruire un episodio di storia toscana ed ebraica che, pur dipanandosi, nel 14... more Il libro mira a ricostruire un episodio di storia toscana ed ebraica che, pur dipanandosi, nel 1493, per soli sei-sette mesi, consente di evidenziare una lunga serie di aspetti peculiari del rapporto fra ebrei e cristiani nel Rinascimento italiano. Si tratta di una serie di accuse, processi, incarcerazioni, incriminazioni fatte contro la persone del noto prestitore ebraico Davide da Tivoli che se conchiudono con la chiusura del suo banco a Lucca e la sustituzione del prestito ebraico dal Monte di Pietà. La vicenda ha potuto essere indagata, fin negli aspetti più minuti, grazie ad un incrocio fortunato di una larghissima gamma di fonti, sopratutto una notevole collezione di 19 lettere di cui si presenta qui una edizione critica. Il dossier delle lettere merita particolare attenzione per l’altissimo livello socio-economico e culturale dei corrispondenti, Davide da Tivoli e suoi due cognati Isacco e Simone da Pisa, i cui nomi sono tutti ben noti nella storia dell’ebraismo rinascimentale italiano. Ma la vera eccezionalità del dossier è legata al fatto di accogliere, oltre a corrispondenza in volgare, anche lettere scritte in ebraico, accompagnate da traduzioni coeve. Questa collezione di lettere ci permette di addentrarci nell’attività epistolare quotidiana di numerose famiglie ebraiche in Toscana nel tardo Quattrocento, e ci offre una perspettiva rara sia sui rapporti familiari, sociali e culturali fra prestitori ebraici sia sul loro legami con persone e instituzione del mondo cristiano.
Almost five hundred years after his death, Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) remains a legendary fi... more Almost five hundred years after his death, Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508) remains a legendary figure of Sephardic history, and above all of the Expulsion of 1492. There are numerous“portraits” that have been painted of him by pre-modern and modern scholars. And still we hesitate and cannot discern which is the true one. This first critical edition of Abravanel’s Portuguese and Hebrew letters opens a unique window on a complex cultural process of assimilation and dissimulation of humanism among the fifteenth-century Jewish elite. On the one hand, it establishes Abravanel’s assimilation of Iberian humanism and of major aspects of the Petrarchian consolatio; on the other hand, it points at the strategies used by him to dissimulate and adapt humanism to Jewish leadership. The duality of Jewish humanists like Don Isaac was obviously a great richness, but it indicated as well their difficulty in expressing themselves coherently and comprehensively in one of the two agoras - Jewish or Christian – in which they were involved as literati and writers. The present edition and study of Abravanel’s Portuguese and Hebrew letters sheds a new light on the complexity of this new figure of the Jewish humanist.
Hebrew translation of the Geshom Scholem's first masterpiece Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
Les amants les plus scandaleux du XXe siècle en furent aussi les deux plus importants philosophes... more Les amants les plus scandaleux du XXe siècle en furent aussi les deux plus importants philosophes. En 1924, Hannah Arendt a dix-huit ans. C'est une jeune étudiante avide de savoir, mince, avec des yeux rayonnants et une intelligence vive comme l'éclair. Elle rencontre Martin Heidegger, trente-quatre ans, marié et père de famille, qui enseigne la philosophie à l'université de Marbourg. De petite taille, maigre et d'allure sportive, introverti, plein de fureur mais aussi d'une surprenante modestie, il attire à son cours les étudiants les plus prometteurs, notamment Hans-Georg Gadamer, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith, Günther Anders, Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas... Comme l'expliquera quarante ans plus tard Hannah Arendt, "la rumeur le disait : la pensée est redevenue vivante, les trésors de la culture qu'on croyait morts reprennent sens. Il y a un maître, il est peut-être possible d'apprendre à penser."
Entre Arendt et Heidegger débute alors une liaison durable et turbulente où l'amour et la philosophie vont s'entremêler. Avec en toile de fond un moment dramatique de l'histoire intellectuelle, celui qui, en Allemagne, a vu la pensée "allemande" et la pensée "juive" séparées dans la violence.
Papers by Cedric Cohen-Skalli
Levinas Studies 17, 2023
The economic shift initiated in the 1980s, the reign of the market and the computer, often result... more The economic shift initiated in the 1980s, the reign of the market and the computer, often resulted in the reappearing of a "feudal legal structure. .. consisting of networks of allegiance." 1 This paradox (ultra-modernity and neo-feudalism) is rarely considered a historical tool for studying late twentieth-century philosophy. This article is a first step in that direction, using Supiot's characterization of the period as a "shift from law to tie" to approach the work of Levinas. In Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, Levinas defends a revelation of or exposure to the Other directed against the "neutralization of the Other" as being, object, or phenomenon. It is meant to liberate an interpellation by the Other before and beyond any general constitution of the object by the subject. Can this shift in twentieth-century philosophy be reconsidered if we add to Levinas's own account Supiot's historical understanding concerning the withering-away of general normative forms in favor of personal ties of allegiance?
The Oxford Handbook of the Books of Kings, 2024
This chapter presents how Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508), one of the greatest leaders and thinke... more This chapter presents how Don Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508), one of the greatest leaders and thinkers of Iberian Jewry in the period of the expulsion of 1492, understood the biblical gure of King Solomon in the immediate aftermath of 1492. To counter the power of the Catholic monarchs, who were responsible for expelling Don Isaac Abravanel and his coreligionists from the Iberian Peninsula, Don Isaac wrote a commentary on the books of Kings. This commentary extols the might of King Solomon. It dedicates half of Abravanel's commentary to a description and discussion of various aspects of King Solomon's kingdom. This chapter focuses on the idealization of King Solomon and its meaning.
Religions
The journey of Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras and his stay in Florence at the turn of the f... more The journey of Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras and his stay in Florence at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been celebrated as an event that decisively shaped the course of European humanism. The later return of Enlightenment humanism to Ottoman lands in the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries can be described as the return of Chrysoloras. This return is generally known in a fragmentary form as a regional phenomenon: the story of Greek, Arab, Turkish and Jewish nationalisms and of the Ottoman reforms. It is also framed historically as the evolution from a traditional and theological society to new forms of epistemic, literary, civic and national communities, while often leaving aside failures and later contradictory transformations. The present essay offers an integrative study of modern humanism in late Ottoman and post-Ottoman contexts. The migration of Enlightenment humanism to the Middle East raised a wide range of expectations, projecting a new national or imperial organization within a harmonious diplomatic relationship with Christian Europe and the Americas. Yet, the more the revivalist and reformist projects evolved, the more they involved ethnic and religious conflicts and colonial intervention. This article illuminates the rise and fall of humanism in Middle Eastern contexts.
Modern Jewish Thought on Crisis, 2024
The article presents an inter-regional and inter-religious discussion of the crisis of liberalism... more The article presents an inter-regional and inter-religious discussion of the crisis of liberalism that challenges some of the common assumptions in the study of intellectual history. The paper begins by painting with a broad brush the migration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European liberal transformations to the rapidly changing Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In the second part, the essay focuses on Paris’s interwar intellectual scene, where this expansion of liberalism is reflected critically from the perspective of the European crisis of the 1930s. Moving from the East to the West, the chapter reconstructs step by step a growing convergence that established itself between the theopolitical question of the late Ottoman Empire and important intellectual trends in the interwar period in Paris. For this purpose, it uses as a guiding thread a Jewish intellectual episode: Leo Strauss’s rediscovery of a Jewish–Islamic philosophical model successfully developed during the Middle Ages. The reconstruction of this episode and its intellectual background in the 1930s illuminates an overlooked interconnection with similar questioning in the late and post-Ottoman Levant.
Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2023
Jean-François Lyotard's intellectual evolution in the late 1970s and 1980s is well known in conti... more Jean-François Lyotard's intellectual evolution in the late 1970s and 1980s is well known in continental philosophy. In 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard became famous for his report on "the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation". Later, in his magnum opus Le diférend he expanded on this, claiming that "a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general". Yet, this creative moment in Lyotard's career, responsible for shaping the philosophical concept of the postmodern condition, is rarely connected to his book La guerre des Algériens (1989). This work was supposed to implement his new postmodern concepts in relation to the war in Algeria. The present article looks at La guerre des Algériens, within its broader historical and philosophical context, as a unique opportunity to evaluate the validity of Lyotard's philosophical shift, especially his new concept of radical heterogeneity at work in history.
Il Pensiero Rivista di Filosofia LXI, 2022
This article offers a history of the German concept of translation in four
stages, moving from Lu... more This article offers a history of the German concept of translation in four
stages, moving from Luther’s Verdeutschung to Mendelssohn’s translation of the Psalms, and from the re-elaboration of the translation concept by Freud, Rosenzweig and Benjamin to Derrida’s Des tours de Babel. During the postwar years, many philosophers have studied different aspects of the Classical and Romantic elaboration of the German concept of translation. The contribution of this article is not to revisit these analyses, that are by now well known, but to shed light on the role played by certain Jewish thinkers in the history of the Germanic concept of translation at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th, and also, later, within the French philosophy of the years 1960-1990.
Skepsis and Antipolitics, 2023
This article proposes the first systematic explanation and analysis of Gustave Landauer’s central... more This article proposes the first systematic explanation and analysis of Gustave Landauer’s central concept of Antipolitik. Liberation from the rule of the one or the many is at the heart of Landauer’s notion of antipolitics. For the purpose of understanding the originality of Landauer’s antipolitical stance, this essay juxtaposes Landauer’s key texts on this concept with several sources that constitute its philosophical background. With reference to La Boétie, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Proudhon, Kropotkin, Aristotle, Tönnies, and Marx, it clarifies three central dimensions in Landauer’s concept of antipolitics: the psychological critique of political modernity, the search for a renewal of the spirit, and the therapeutic return to the community.
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Books by Cedric Cohen-Skalli
Entre Arendt et Heidegger débute alors une liaison durable et turbulente où l'amour et la philosophie vont s'entremêler. Avec en toile de fond un moment dramatique de l'histoire intellectuelle, celui qui, en Allemagne, a vu la pensée "allemande" et la pensée "juive" séparées dans la violence.
Papers by Cedric Cohen-Skalli
stages, moving from Luther’s Verdeutschung to Mendelssohn’s translation of the Psalms, and from the re-elaboration of the translation concept by Freud, Rosenzweig and Benjamin to Derrida’s Des tours de Babel. During the postwar years, many philosophers have studied different aspects of the Classical and Romantic elaboration of the German concept of translation. The contribution of this article is not to revisit these analyses, that are by now well known, but to shed light on the role played by certain Jewish thinkers in the history of the Germanic concept of translation at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th, and also, later, within the French philosophy of the years 1960-1990.
Entre Arendt et Heidegger débute alors une liaison durable et turbulente où l'amour et la philosophie vont s'entremêler. Avec en toile de fond un moment dramatique de l'histoire intellectuelle, celui qui, en Allemagne, a vu la pensée "allemande" et la pensée "juive" séparées dans la violence.
stages, moving from Luther’s Verdeutschung to Mendelssohn’s translation of the Psalms, and from the re-elaboration of the translation concept by Freud, Rosenzweig and Benjamin to Derrida’s Des tours de Babel. During the postwar years, many philosophers have studied different aspects of the Classical and Romantic elaboration of the German concept of translation. The contribution of this article is not to revisit these analyses, that are by now well known, but to shed light on the role played by certain Jewish thinkers in the history of the Germanic concept of translation at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th, and also, later, within the French philosophy of the years 1960-1990.
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several of his best friends with a terrible feeling: a sense of tension between the unique
hopes incarnated by Landauer and the spiritual and political void his passing left behind.
This article is an attempt to capture the tragic shift from a living revolutionary who projected his unique anarchist views onto the failed Munich Revolution to the efforts of a group of close friends who searched to save their dear Landauer from the infamy of failure, making of his months in Munich and his death an important amendment to his spiritual and political legacy.
government of Benjamin Netanyahu of endangering the very existence of the
State of Israel and the Israeli nation.
The present project invites women scholars to join a conference in Haifa and read Buber from a multiplicity of philosophical and disciplinary perspectives. The presented papers of the conference will be submitted for publication as an edited volume. Our aim is to expand the canon of Buber scholarship and to offer a more inclusive reading of his multifaceted work.
Martin Buber (Vienna 1878 - Jerusalem 1965) was an extraordinarily versatile thinker writing on a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, politics, theology, ethics, education, Hasidism, Bible, translation, religion, sociology, psychology, art, and mysticism. We believe that Buber’s remarkable
multiplicity of interest invites a greater diversity of readership. We wish to bring to the forefront the voices of women’s scholarship to reclaim and reinvigorate Martin Buber’s legacy in light of the centenary of his seminal book I and Thou (1922/23).
By offering perspectives from women, our conference seeks to introduce new ways of reading and new approaches to Buber’s legacy, providing greater diversity and giving more attention to neglected voices. In this way, our conference will increase the visibility of women scholars from different cultural, religious, social, and ethnic backgrounds. Keynote Speakers: Prof. Vivian Liska, Universitity of Antwerpen, Prof. Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University The conference is scheduled to take place in Haifa, from July 17-18, 2023.
in the Italy of the Long Renaissance.
What does the study of previously untapped sources with a new series of questions reveal about the capacity for political action and the formulation of political thought among Jewish men and women in Long Renaissance Italy (thirteenth to seventeenth centuries)? The minority situation and the resulting constant need for negotiation led to specific processes of political participation that can be traced in important documentary sources. However, this participation and documentation have thus far been neglected by historiography. This seminar will examine this "Jewish politics" in order to prove the existence of political agency and to describe it in terms of its specific characteristics (pragmatism, pursuit of group interests, recourse to mediation and alliances, its own institutional and documentary structuring) and its interactions with European politics. One fundamental aspect of the relationship between Jews and politics is the philosophical reflection that some Jewish intellectuals reserved for the political tradition. During the seminar, the participants will discuss important texts from the history of Jewish and Christian political thought (fourteenth and eighteenth centuries).
The Forward 2023:
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The JNS 2023:
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