Discourses of Civilization: The Shifting Course of a Modern Jewish Motif

This chapter focuses on 'Jewish civilization', in which the term served the interests of Jewish intellectuals far better when counterpoised against the German Romantic notion of a distinct national culture. It probes the significance of 'civilization' at several key rhetorical moments during the last two hundred years. It also recounts the event when German Jews endeavoured to reach a high standard of civilization through concerted self-cultivation and social integration in the early nineteenth century. The chapter talks about European Jews who applied their own standards of 'civilization' to other 'oriental' Jews. It describes the years between the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War, when Mordecai Kaplan equated Jewish peoplehood and civilization.