Modern Gnosis and Zionism reveals the compound connection between Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) – a post- Nietzschean common approach that proliferated in the German culture of the turn of the nineteenth century – and Zionist thought. The book closely discusses Life Philosophy, its cultural and philosophical background, yet focuses mainly on Life-Philosophy as a modern version of Gnostic theology. It further demonstrates how Life Philosophy as modern Gnosis provided emerging Zionist thought with the metaphysical basis for the Zionist political argument. Zionist ideology, revealed through the analysis of a wide range of Zionist thinkers from the early twentieth century, is consequently argued to be a political-theological strategy, a type of argumentation in which political concepts are founded in (modern Gnostic) theology. Within this framework Modern Gnosis and Zionism, takes issue with a wide range of topics, such as the history of modernity and secularization, the theory of psychology, modern research on Gnostic theology, concepts of time, aesthetics and gender, as well as Zionist interpretation of history and of Jewish identity, its dialogue with Anti-Semitism and an inner-Zionist messianic impulse. As such this innovative book echoes the new rise of scholarly interest in the relations between politics and theology, the 'secular' and the 'religious

By closely examining the interaction between intellectual and material culture in the period before the Nazis assumed power in Germany, the author comes to the conclusion that, contrary to widely held assumptions, consumer culture in the Weimar period, far from undermining reading, used reading culture to enhance its goods and values. Reading material was marked as a consumer good, while reading as an activity, raising expectations as it did, influenced consumer culture. Consequently, consumption contributed to the diffusion of reading culture, while at the same time a popular reading culture strengthened consumption and its values. Thus the book presents the argument that the Weimar period, characterized as it was by economic hardship and political instability, witnessed a constant widening of the gap between the world of print as a “virtual” area in which the world of symbols and images of the new consumer culture developed, and the daily realities of most social strata. In the German context of the 1920s, this was a fateful and ominous trend.

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The twenty-one studies on the Jews of Old Poland here collected explore many hitherto uncharted aspects of Jewish life and experience in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Crucial questions such as relations between the Catholic Church and the Jews, Jewish politics, antisemitism and Jewish settlement are examined using the integrative and comparative approaches championed by Jacob Goldberg, to whom the volume is dedicated.