Josephus' description of the Essenes illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls

The essay analyses the notion of ‘purity’ in the early writings of Walter Benjamin, focusing more specifically on three essays written around the crucial year 1921: ‘Critique of Violence’, ‘The Task of the Translator’, and ‘Goethe's Elective Affinities’. In these essays, ‘purity’ appears in the notions of ‘pure means’, ‘pure violence’, ‘pure language’, and, indirectly, the ‘expressionless’. The essay argues, on the one hand, that the ‘purity’ of these concepts is one and the same notion, and, on the other, that it is strongly indebted to, if not a by-product of, Kant's theorisation of the moral act. In order to make this claim, the essay analyses Benjamin's intense engagement with Kant's writings in the 1910s and early 1920s: ‘purity’ is a category strongly connoted within the philosophical tradition in which the young Benjamin moved his first steps, namely Kantian transcendental criticism. The essay argues that the notion of ‘purity’ in Benjamin, though deployed outside and often against Kant's theorisation and that of his followers, and moreover influenced by different and diverse philosophical suggestions, retains a strong Kantian tone, especially in reference to its moral and ethical aspects. Whereas Benjamin rejects Kant's model of cognition based on the ‘purity’ of the universal laws of reason, and thus also Kant's theorisation of purity as simply non empirical and a priori, he models nonetheless his politics and aesthetics around suggestions that arise directly from Kant's theorisation of the moral act and of the sublime, and uses a very Kantian vocabulary of negative determinations construed with the privatives-los and -frei (motiv-frei, zweck-los, gewalt-los, ausdrucks-los, intention-frei, etc). The essay explores thus the connections that link ‘pure means’, ‘pure language’ and ‘pure violence’ to one another and to the Kantian tradition.     

The History of the Jehovah's Witnesses: An Appraisal of Recent Scholarship

Zoe Knox's analysis of the English‐language historiography of the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society was published in this journal in 2011. It assessed four types of historical writing on the organisation: the Watch Tower Society's own publications; material produced by two categories of detractors, namely ex‐Witnesses and Christians writing from other denominational perspectives; and academic studies. There are vast quantities of all but the last of these. Her article thus concluded with a call for scholars to take this religious community more seriously as an historical subject, echoing an appeal made by Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone to social scientists in 1997. This review essay is intended to supplement Knox's historiographical analysis by appraising recent publications on the history of the Jehovah's Witnesses. As we shall see, although scholarship on this topic remains sparse, particularly given the organisation's visibility, since 2011 several important books have appeared alongside others which make contributions to the limited sum of our knowledge of the origins and emergence of the organisation and the way it has operated in different historical contexts. In short, the field requires reappraisal in light of these publications.     

Developments in Polish Scholarship on German History, 1945-2000: Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction points out major developments in Polish scholarshipon German history between the end of the war and the presentday. The fraught relationship between Polish and German scholarswas not merely a result of the destruction of the war yearsbut older nationalist traditions of history-writing, which needto be taken into account as well as the status of partitionedPoland between 1795 and 1918.     

History of Tibet (I): Ancient Sea, Monkey and King

The Tibetan Plateau, known as the Roof of the World, is the place where people of the Tibetan ethnic group live and multiply. Here Was a Stretch of Ancient Sea Originally The plateau used to be a part of the ancient sea, but became land when the waters receded during the late Eocene Epoch about 10 million years ago. The nse of the Himalayas, and behind the towering mountain ranges the Tibetan Plateau, was one of the greatest events in world geological history. Although this occurred some…