Shmuel Feiner's
innovative book recreates the historical consciousness that fired the
Haskalah—the Jewish Enlightenment movement. The proponents of this movement
advocated that Jews should capture the spirit of the future and take their
place in wider society, but as Jews—without denying their collective identity
and without denying their past. Claiming historical legitimacy for their
ideology and their vision of the future, they formulated an ethos of modernity
that they projected on to the universal and the Jewish past alike.



What was the image of
the past that the maskilim shaped? What tactics underpinned their use of
history? How did their historical awareness change and develop—from the
inception of the Haskalah in Germany at the time of Mendelssohn and Wessely,
through the centres of Haskalah in Austria, Galicia, and Russia, to the
emergence of modern nationalism in the maskilic circles in eastern Europe in
the last third of the nineteenth century? These are some of the questions
raised in this fascinating exploration of an ideological approach to history
which throws a searching new light on the Jewish Enlightenment movement and the
emergence of Jewish historical consciousness more generally.