Jewish exiles and European thought in the shadow of the Third Reich. Baron, Popper, Strauss, Auerbach /david Weinstein ; Avihu Zakai.
- Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, (c)2017.
- 1 online resource (340 pages)
Includes bibliographies and index.
Cover; Half title; Title; Copyright; Contents; Preface; Archives; List of Abbreviations; Introduction: Exile and Interpretation; 1 Hans Baron: Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Tyranny; Introduction; Crisis; Hedgehogs and Foxes: Baron and the Early Italian Renaissance; Life and Study in Weimar Germany; The Discovery of Civic Humanism; Exile; The Making of The Crisis; Epilogue; 2 Karl Popper: "Critical Interpretation" as Fighting Fascism; Introduction; Fighting Fascism and the Power of Ideas; Ambivalence and Assimilation; Being a Jew and Being of Jewish Origin. "Arguing from the Concentration Camp"Critical Rationalism and Critical Interpretation; Popper's Fascist Plato and Its Reception; That "dangerous clown," and Marx; Ideology and Anachronism; Popper, Berlin, and Their Common Enemies; Epilogue; 3 Leo Strauss as "Talmud in the Wrong Place"; Introduction; The Cave of Historicism; Franz Rosenzweig; "Natural Understanding"; Reading "Exactly"; Interpreting Hobbes in the 1930s; The Poison Pill of Hobbes; Atheism with a "Good Conscience"; "Platonic" Liberalism; Philosophical History and Exegetical Magic. Reading "Exactly," Textual Autonomy, and the Crisis of ModernityEpilogue; 4 Erich Auerbach and the Crisis of German Philology; Introduction; Knowing the Enemy; Philology and History; Philology and Ideology; From Weimar to Yale; The Elimination of the Old Testament; It's Personal; Epiphany in Istanbul; Philology, Teleology, and Historicist Humanism; Mimesis: Form and Content; Mimesis: Method and Approach; Epilogue; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Hans Baron, Karl Popper, Leo Strauss and Erich Auerbach were among the many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals who fled Continental Europe with the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Their scholarship, though not normally considered together, is studied here to demonstrate how, despite their different disciplines and distinctive modes of working, they responded polemically in the guise of traditional scholarship to their shared trauma. For each, the political calamity of European fascism was a profound intellectual crisis, requiring an intellectual response which Weinstein and Zakai now contextualize, ideologically and politically. They exemplify just how extensively, and sometimes how subtly, 1930s and 1940s scholarship was used not only to explain, but to fight the political evils that had infected modernity, victimizing so many. An original perspective on a popular area of research, this book draws upon a mass of secondary literature to provide an innovative and valuable contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history.