The Angel of History Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem [Paperback]

InThe Angel of History, Mos?s looks at three Jewish philosophersFranz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholemwho formulated a new vision of history in 1920s Germany by moving away from the spirit of assimilation and the Enlightenment belief in humanity's inevitable progress. Instead, they imagined history as discontinuous, made of moments that form no totality but whose ruptures are both more significantand more promisingthan any apparent homogeneity.Their direct experience of the twentieth century's great upheavals led these three thinkers to abandon the old models of causality that had previously accounted for human experience, and their cultural and religious background allowed them to turn to the Jewish experience of history. Jewish messianism always had to confront the experience of catastrophe, deception, and failure. Mos?s shows how this tradition informed a genuine Jewish conception of history in which redemption mayor may notoccur at any moment, giving a new chance for hope by locating utopia in the heart of the present. The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem, which first appeared in France in 1992 but has just been published in English by Stanford University Press (in a translation by Barbara Harshav), is a brilliantly lucid introduction to the work of these three figures...The Angel of Historyoffers an introduction to some of the most brilliant and influential Jewish thinkers of the last century. Anyone who is interested in how German Judaism responded, at the highest and most passionate levels, to its imminent destruction should start by reading Stephane Moses. Moses examines how and why these three great German Jewish thinkers turned away from conceptions of history that were rooted in the Enlightenment, and formulated a view of messianism informed by Jewish beliefs. . . Recommended for university and special collections. With the attentive ear of a literary scholar to the rhetorical texture of texts, tl“¼