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Chapter 1 - Under the Aegis of Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

Yaniv Feller
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Summary

This chapter is dedicated to the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), an era that saw the apex of German imperial expansionism. It was a period ripe with numerous intersecting visions of supersessionism, expansion, and domination. A major challenge for Baeck was Adolf Harnack’s turn-of-the-century popular lectures and subsequent book titled The Essence of Christianity. Harnack presented a pure and positive essence of Christianity against a legalistic and negative Jewish tradition. Baeck’s first major work, The Essence of Judaism (1905) responds to Harnack and subsequent challenges from the History of Religions School. Yet this type of response was shaped by the heydays of German imperialism, both abroad and in the attempts to colonize the former Polish territories. This is a formative phase for Baeck’s thought and many of his ideas, including the distinction between state power (Macht) and spiritual energy (Kraft), his views on Jewish missionizing, as well as his relation to Zionism. All these emerge in this period and continue to play a role in his thought throughout his life.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Jewish Imperial Imagination
Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought
, pp. 20 - 47
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Under the Aegis of Empire
  • Yaniv Feller, University of Florida
  • Book: The Jewish Imperial Imagination
  • Online publication: 08 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009321877.002
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  • Under the Aegis of Empire
  • Yaniv Feller, University of Florida
  • Book: The Jewish Imperial Imagination
  • Online publication: 08 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009321877.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Under the Aegis of Empire
  • Yaniv Feller, University of Florida
  • Book: The Jewish Imperial Imagination
  • Online publication: 08 November 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009321877.002
Available formats
×