Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s

315 Pages·2018·5.744 MB·English

by  Eliyahu Stern

Jewish Materialism
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Jewish
Materialism
t h e i n t e l l e c t u a l r e v o l u t i o n
o f t h e 1 8 7 0 s
Eliyahu Stern
New Haven & London
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Published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of
Yale University and with assistance from the foundation established in memory
of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.
Copyright © 2018 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948470
isbn 978-0-300-22180-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
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Th is paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
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For Sherlley
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Contents
Preface, ix
Acknowledgments, xiii
Note on Transliteration, xv
Introduction: Materialisms, 1
1 Tradition, 32
2 Social Materialism, 56
3 Scientifi c Materialism, 85
4 Practical Materialism, 114
5 Th e Materialization of Spirit, 147
Conclusion: Jewish Body Politics, 182
Notes, 193
Bibliography, 253
Index, 283
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Preface
Th is book could not have been written had I accessed only the standard
collected works of the period under investigation. For in conducting archival
research for this project, I discovered that many of the articles and essays that
today stand as the authoritative output of Russian Jews in that revolutionary
decade had been emended, rewritten, judiciously cut, or simply expurgated
by editors and publishers who wished to conceal ideas that clashed with their
twentieth-century political worldviews. Th ese acts ranged from simple substi-
tution of words and phrases to the deletion of entire sections within essays to
working to suppress the publication of particular writers’ archives.
To be sure, I am not the fi rst person to recognize these violent acts of
historical suppression. Th e fi rst authors who wrote on Russian Jewish life
in the late nineteenth century—scholars such as Joseph Klausner, Samuel
Leib Zitron, Israel Sossis, Morris Winchevsky, Kalman Marmor, and Samuel
Agursky—privately noted some of the many malfeasances I found. How-
ever, perhaps because of their own political biases, these men did not fi nd it
necessary to present the full extent to which primary documents had been
doctored. Th ey tacitly—or in some instances willfully—participated in the
historical cover-up. Most important, they failed to identify what about the
writings of the 1870s later generations found so threatening that they needed
to alter them in such profound ways.
ix
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