THE ORIGINS OF JEWISH SECULARIZATION IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE
by Shmuel Feiner, translated by Chaya Naor
University of Pennsylvania Press, 384 pp., $65
THE MIXED MULTITUDE: JACOB FRANK AND THE FRANKIST MOVEMENT, 1755-1816
by Pawel Maciejko
University of Pennsylvania Press, 376 pp., $65
WOMEN AND THE MESSIANIC HERESY OF SABBATAI ZEVI, 1666-1816
by Ada Rapoport-Albert, translated by Deborah Greniman
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 402 pp., $64.50
In 1789, an anonymous pamphlet was published in London that bore witness to what its traditionalist author found most shocking in a world rocked by revolution:
Those from the new world, the heretics and agnostics, lie asleep in their beds until the time of the morning prayers has passed. And after such a man has risen from his bed, he does not hasten to do the work of the Lord, but only after seeing to the needs of his home and partaking of other pleasures. Then he lays phylacteries in order to keep up appearances with the other members of the household. And he takes care not to leave the phylacteries on too long lest they leave a mark on his forehead. Or that someone from his crowd might see him wearing phylacteries, which would cause him great shame.
Although the "heretic" described here still prays, this paragraph compresses a catalog of the changes associated with the secularization of Europe's Jews: heretical belief, violation of the commandments, behavior dictated by social convention in place of rabbinic law, and abandonment of the "work of the Lord" in favor of material pleasures. (Who knew that sleeping in was a sign of modernity?)
How exactly does a traditional, religious society secularize and why? The question continues to bedevil historians of Europe and other areas of the world. According to one theory associated with the great German sociologist Max Weber and more recently with Peter Berger, it was the Protestant Reformation that banished the angels from earth and sequestered them firmly in the heavens . . .
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