Senior Research Fellow Sarah Hammerschlag
"Sowers and Sages: The Renaissance of Judaism in Post War Paris"
Senior Research Fellow Symposium
Thursday, January 28, 2010
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Swift Hall, Common Room
"What do you hope to accomplish this year as a Martin Marty Senior Fellow, and how does the MMC look as a place to do your work?"
I plan to work on a new book project tentatively titled Sowers and Sages: the Renaissance of Judaism in postwar Paris. This project will treat the Jewish intellectual movement that developed in Paris in the 1950’s and 1960’s aimed at resuscitating European Judaism after World War II. During these decades prominent French Jewish intellectuals reinvested in Judaism and trained a generation of students to become spokespersons for the tradition. What unified the movement was its sense of mission—namely a belief that the time had come for Judaism’s core truths to be translated and transmitted to the world, for the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic tradition, moreover, to serve as the foundation for a critique of the West. I hope to provide an historical narrative of this movement, treating its origins, its central figures and its political impact, but I also plan to use this narrative to analyze the strategies that allow a religious tradition to legitimate itself when faced with a break with the past and to consider the political effect of these strategies, particularly as they involve distilling the tradition into a dehistoricized essence.
The Martin Marty Center provides me with the exciting opportunity to engage with other scholars whose concerns center on the impact of religion on the public sphere. The earliest stages of my dissertation were completed at the Marty Center as a junior fellow and I feel lucky to be able to call once again on the wisdom of other fellows at the center as I embark on my next book project.
More information on the Marty Center's Senior Research Fellows Program.
