Enlightenment and Prophecy: The Jews and Neo-Hellenic Nationalism

ABSTRACT

Even before the rise of nationalism and its counterpart anti-Semitism sensu stricto, anti-Judaic prejudices and stereotypes were widespread in the Christian Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire. These attitudes arose mainly from the commercial antagonism between the Christian and Jewish communities during the crisis that beset the empire from the seventeenth century onward. To examine these attitudes more closely, this article first focuses on the extreme anti-Judaic discourse in the sermons of eighteenth-century Father Cosmas Aitolos (Cosmas of Aetolia; d. 1779), an itinerant monk, who was canonized in 1961. It then turns to Rhigas Velestinlis’s enlightened vision of a tolerant multi-ethnic, multi-religious republic, which gradually replaced the Sultan’s oriental despotism, in which Jews, Muslims, and Christians were to be equal citizens. But this vision sank into oblivion, as the aspiration to national independence and to ethnical homogeneity prevailed in Greece, as well as everywhere in the Balkans. Although the early advocates of enlightened Greek nationalism embraced the language of citizenship and emancipation, they excluded from it the proviso of multi-ethnicity. Accordingly, they perceived the “Jewish Question” as one of gradually integrating a “foreign” religious minority into the Greek nation by “re-educating them in the values of Hellenism,” in the words of Adamandios Korais (1748–1833), and according them full citizenship only in the generations to come. All three distinctive attitudes towards the Jews are traceable in subsequent ideological trends and conflicts in Modern Greece.     

Enlightenment and reform: an overview of culture and politics in Enlightenment Italy

This essay analyses the influence of the work of Franco Venturi on Italian studies of the eighteenth century over the last fifty years. Venturi's ‘model’ has certainly been of fundamental importance in stimulating new research on the connections between Enlightenment and reform in the eighteenth-century Italian states and is still an essential point of reference for all research in the field. But the direction of eighteenth-century studies in Italy has been shaped also by the contributions of many other scholars. Starting in the 1970s Italian historians became increasingly interested in new questions that were being posed by historians in France and Britain, which contributed to a more general shift away from the biographical focus on individuals characteristic of much of Venturi's work in favour of more collective topics, new types of sources and new ways of interpreting them. This article describes the different themes around which relations between culture and politics in eighteenth-century Italy have been studied, from civil, military and ecclesiastical institutions to the administrative and reform elites, the world of salons and sociability, publishing, religious beliefs, gender differences and science.     

Enlightenment,Haskalah, and the State of Israel

ABSTRACT

This article charts the broad and transforming effects of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah on Zionism and on modern Israel’s government, judiciary, and political discourse. It traces this complex legacy using a semantic distinction between two Modern Hebrew terms for the Enlightenment, haskalah and ne’orut, that illustrates their importance in the political and discursive legacies of the State of Israel. The article then explores the recent populist and nationalist assaults against some of these legacies.     

Vikings in Brazil: the Iceland Brazil Association shaping Icelandic heritage

Abstract

The Iceland Brazil Association (AISBRA) was established in 1996 by a group of Brazilians of Icelandic descent, more than 100 years after the first generation of immigrants settled in Brazil in the nineteenth century. The association was the first organisation in Brazil to collectively emphasise and celebrate Icelandic heritage. The association caters to a disparate group of people that had, in many cases, little knowledge about their historical links to Iceland. In spite of the fragmented activities of AISBRA since its establishment, the number of participants has increased, reflecting their growing interest in their Icelandic past. This paper examines how the members of Iceland Brazil Association produce their heritage independently, outside the state recognised heritage, within the Brazilian national context. We analyse how identities are re/shaped in new ways to engage with the past and how values from the past are extracted and turned into contemporary economic, social, and political values. This paper stresses heritage-making as a social imaginary used to define collective identity, which, while based on ancestry, also intersects with ideas of race and class. Representations of their Icelandic heritage allow the members of the Brazil Iceland Association to emphasise their ‘Europeanness’ and thus their associations with whiteness in contemporary post-colonial Brazil.     

Spinoza,Bayle, and the Enlightenment Politics of Philosophical Certainty

This article explores the complex and contested intellectual relationship between two of the key thinkers of the Early Enlightenment: Spinoza and Bayle. The key issue of contention between them is not, it is argued, the question of the existence and nature of God, but their profoundly contrasting visions of the nature of philosophy as a politically emancipatory practice. The article analyzes Bayle's rejection of Spinoza's systemic certainty, and the significance of this rejection in relation to Bayle's own anti-systemic philosophy of openness and incompletion. This contrast between Bayle and Spinoza is deployed to clarify the interpretation of Bayle's theory of toleration and of his late writings.     

Insect invaders,seasonality and transhumant pastoralism in the Icelandic shieling economy

Abstract

The seasonal movement of people and animals to summer farms, or shielings in outfield pastures was a key element of Iceland's farming practice for over a millennium. At these sites, cattle and sheep husbandry, dairying and the harvesting of outfield resources took place. Despite their central role in the Icelandic economy, evidence for shielings in the landscape is ambiguous and the identification of a site as a shieling, as opposed to a farm, has relied upon written and place name evidence. The Norse colonists introduced a range of insects in their fodder, stored food, dunnage and ballast. Many of these are unable to live under natural conditions in Iceland and are dependent on people for survival. In 1991 Buckland and Sadler suggested that these species might be expected to be absent at shielings, as the sweepstake of their introduction and the seasonal hiatus in occupation would preclude their successful colonisation. This paper presents new evidence from a sub-fossil insect assemblage, which indicates that some of these insects are present at an Icelandic shieling. The implications of this for discerning the materials imported to shielings and the usefulness of Coleoptera for the identification of seasonality in the North Atlantic is discussed.     

The lenses of nationhood: an optical model of identity

ABSTRACT. This paper tries to make the case for a model of political identity based on an optical metaphor, which is especially applicable to nations. Human vision can be separated into sentient object, lenses and inbuilt mental ideas. This corresponds well to identity processes in which ‘light’ from a bounded territorial referent is refracted through various lenses (ideological, material, psychological) to focus in certain ways on particular symbolic resources like genealogy, history, culture or political institutions. Distinguishing between referent, lenses and resources helps us more precisely situate many hitherto disparate problems of national identity. These include the ‘ethnic‐civic’ dilemma, the mystery of national identity before nationalism, and the relationship between local and national, and individual and collective, identities. The model also clarifies the place of universalist ideology, which currently fits poorly within the leading culturalist and materialist theories of nationalism.     

Religion and the Enlightenment: A Review Essay

Recent studies of the Enlightenment suggest that its relationto religion is far more complex than a simple process of increasingsecularization. The book by Sheehan shows, by examining translationsof the Bible into English and German in the Enlightenment, howreligion was reshaped, leading eventually to the dogma-freeChristianity proposed by Matthew Arnold. Israel's book arguesthat alongside the relatively cautious mainstream Enlightenmentthere was always a radical Enlightenment, heavily indebted toSpinoza, that was rationalist, atheist, and libertarian, andanticipated the dominant liberal values of the present day.Neither of these important studies, however, considers two areasthat remain under-researched: the popular Enlightenment (‘Volksaufklärung’),that is to say, the diffusion of Enlightenment thought amonguneducated people; and the Catholic Enlightenment which flourishedparticularly in Italy, Austria, and south Germany.     

Nationalisms and the Orthodox worlds

This review article explores the role nationalism has played in the world dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The focus is on the recent contributions of Paschalis Kitromilides who has written extensively on this topic. The article assesses the four books dealing with the relationship between religion, politics, Enlightenment and nationalism in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The analysis emphasises the complex and contradictory relationship between nationalisms and the Orthodox Churches pointing to the profound transformation that has taken the place in this relationship over the last 250 years.     

The Enlightenment,Pyropolitics, and the Problem of Evil

Abstract

In this article I argue that the ideal of rationality espoused by the European Enlightenment hinges on the separation of the light of reason from heat, with which it had been conjoined in the classical element of fire at least since the Greek antiquity. As a result, evil, from the standpoint of the Enlightenment is tantamount to heat without light, while evil, critically viewed outside this tradition, inheres in the absolute separation between the two aspects of the life-giving, albeit ineluctably dangerous, fire.     

Viral nationalism: romantic intellectuals on the move in nineteenth‐century Europe

ABSTRACT. Intellectuals were important to the spread of nationalist ideology in nineteenth‐century Europe for a variety of reasons. Firstly, their works facilitated the international spread of the discourse of nationalism; secondly, they mediated between the fields of political institutions and cultural reflection. This article looks at the international mobility and networks of romantic‐nationalist intellectuals, and uses the case of August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874) as an example.     

The changing shape of island epidemics: historical trends in Icelandic infectious disease waves, 1902–1988

Iceland's centuries-long history of epidemics with its unusually complete disease records has attracted study from several disciplines. But detailed spatial data of particular interest to historical geographers date only from 1895 and were consistently maintained for about a century thereafter. Within this period, this paper concentrates on morbidity records of reported cases of infectious diseases for an 87-year window which was open between 1902 and 1988. In this time slice, spatially detailed data for seven demographically important infectious diseases allow the geography of 131 discrete epidemic waves with a recorded total of 529,000 cases to be tracked. Changes in the behaviour of the seven diseases over the period are analyzed and related to both epidemiological theory and to the changing historical geography of the island. The paper complements earlier Icelandic work by the authors on the historical geography of single diseases (measles, influenza and poliomyelitis) by extending the range of diseases, and by considering their common spatial behaviour and their interrelationships.     

自下而上:罗伯特·达恩顿的法国启蒙运动研究

通过挖掘鲜为人知的档案材料并借鉴社会学家布迪厄的“文学场”理论,罗伯特.达恩顿形成了研究法国启蒙运动的独特路径——“观念的社会史”。此种研究方法将思想史与社会史相结合,力图在社会的网络结构中追踪思想观念的传播。达恩顿认为,被研究者忽视的下层文人和地下出版物是启蒙精神与革命意识形态向社会渗透的重要载体。通过考察格拉布街文人的悲惨境遇与激进思想,勾勒传播畅销禁书的文化与社会环境,他实现了自下而上的启蒙运动研究,并重新阐释了启蒙与革命的关联。达恩顿史学对18世纪法国的思想、文化史研究影响深远,但同时也因其解释框架排除了著名哲人与经典文本而遭受批评。     

五四"启蒙运动"说的历史考辨

在各种关于五四新文化运动的定性中,“启蒙运动”说无疑是最为常见的比附之一。事实上,最晚在20世纪20年代末30年代初,这种比附在左翼文化人中就已经较为流行。但是,并不能简单地把“启蒙运动”阐释视为“马克思主义方案”。出于现实革命斗争的需要,共产党人对“启蒙运动”说的认同是有限度的。而且,五四启蒙传统的丰富多元性决定了用“启蒙”来描述五四历史认识主体的复杂性,以及他们所阐释出的“启蒙”内涵的丰富多元性。     

The Italian Enlightenment and the Rehabilitation of Moral and Political Philosophy

ABSTRACT

By reconstructing the eighteenth-century movement of the Italian Enlightenment, I show that Italy’s political fragmentation notwithstanding, there was a constant circulation of ideas, whether on philosophical, ethical, political, religious, social, economic or scientific questions, among different groups in various states. This exchange was made possible by the shared language of its leading illuministi—Cesare Beccaria, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Antonio Genovesi, Mario Pagano, Pietro Verri, Marco Antonio Vogli, and Giammaria Ortes—and resulted in four common traits. First, the absence of a radical trend, such as the French materialist-atheist trend and, British Deism. Second, the rejection of inhumane laws and institutions, capital punishment, torture, war and slavery. Third, the idea of public happiness as the goal of good government and legislation. And fourth, the conception of the economy as a constellation where social capital, consisting of education, morality, and civility, plays a decisive role. I conclude that the Italian Enlightenment, not unlike the Scottish Enlightenment, was both cosmopolitan and local, which allowed its leading writers to develop a keen awareness of the complexity of society alongside a degree of prudence regarding the possibility and desirability of its modernization.     

论《黑暗传》的口承叙事文化现象——以八种传抄本为主要探讨对象

一、《黑暗传》的价值与定位《黑暗传》是一部保存着汉族的神话与历史,传唱于丧葬仪式的民间叙事长诗,大致流传于湖北省神农架林区附近,也就是古鄂西一带。这一部叙事长诗的流传,是在1980年代大陆田野采录风气盛行的时期,由地方文化工作者采录下来的。最先辑录于《神农架民间歌谣集》1之中,而后受到学界的关注,采录者胡崇峻先生通过陆续搜集,整理了其它的流传唱本,集结为《神农架〈黑暗传〉多种版本汇编》。     

Passionately internationalist: Fred Halliday and nationalism studies

The aim of this academic obituary is to briefly consider Fred Halliday's (1946‐2010) contribution to nationalism studies. The article will first discuss Halliday's understanding of nationalism, which he defines as a set of ideas that asserts that the world is divided into distinct peoples with a particular history and various entitlements, and his position in the theoretical debate on nationalism. It will then focus on Halliday's combat with the ethical doctrine of nationalism, more specifically the tension between the moral claims of the latter and what he loosely terms Enlightenment principles. The article will conclude by a brief discussion of Halliday's political commitments and his internationalism.     

Gianrinaldo Carli at the centre of the Milanese Enlightenment

Gianrinaldo Carli was a central figure in the origin of the Milanese Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. Carli's political career as well as his works connected him both to the mid-century reforms by Pompeo Neri and to the times of Beccaria and the Verri brothers—the heyday of Lombard intellectual life in Europe. Not originally from Lombardy, but from the Venetian periphery, Carli became an erudite scholar of witchcraft and magic and an influential functionary of the Habsburg administration in Milan. He remains most famous for his works on money and his contributions to the journal Il Caffè. Most of his later political writings, which were widely circulated in Italy following the American Revolution, originated in debates with Pietro Verri over the nature of Natural Law, of the Social Contract, and the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. They illustrate key aspects of Lombard political culture of the 1780s: a culture that was critical of Rousseau, trustful of the reformist experience and supportive of Enlightened Absolutism. Within this context, Carli's works have traditionally been difficult to place.     

A State Within the State: The Inquisition in Enlightenment Thought

ABSTRACT

Enlightenment thinkers wrote many pages against the Inquisition. In particular, they widely criticized the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, which they regarded as the epitomes of cruelty and fanaticism. Both inquisitions were established at royal request and remained subjected to the authority of the kings until they were abolished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indeed, therein the kings nominated the grand inquisitors, who were invested with civil jurisdiction for reasons that were at least as much political as religious. However, Enlightenment writers almost always portrayed the Inquisition as the ultimate example of the many ills derived from clerical authority, ecclesiastical autonomy and monastic despotism. Kings and civil magistrates were, in fact, usually depicted as victims of inquisitorial power. This common portrayal of the Inquisition reveals that the Enlightenment idea of toleration was essentially constructed for reducing the power of churches to disturb public peace and challenge civil authority. Thus, this idea of toleration was in effect less capable of denouncing political intolerance, let alone of promoting the separation of church and state.     

论新启蒙运动

新启蒙运动是中国共产党为配合抗日民族统一战线的建立而在思想文化领域里发起的一场运动.它吸引了一些具有自由主义倾向的知识界人士参加.但是从一开始,这一运动内部就充满分歧,共产党人和自由主义者对"思想自由"、"新哲学"、"理性"等概念的解释完全不同.共产党人还为新启蒙运动设定了长远的政治目标和现实的政治斗争对象.抗战进入相持阶段后,新启蒙运动的口号已不适应变化了的形势,共产党人从此不再热心于新启蒙运动,取而代之的是学术中国化运动.