Looking to contexts ranging from premodern Spain and Italy to nineteenth-century Russia, Germany, and America, the contributors to this volume explore the ways the political and intellectual aspirations of successive historical presents have repeatedly reshaped the forms and narratives of Jewish cultural memory.

Foreword David B. Ruderman
Introduction: Al-Andalus, Enlightenment, and the Renewal of the Jewish Past
—Adam Sutcliffe and Ross Brann
PART I. PHILOSOPHY, POETRY, AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN PREMODERN AL-ANDALUS AND ITALY
1. Aesthetic Models in Conflict: Classicist versus Ornamental in Jewish Poetics
—Joseph Yahalom
2. The Uses of Exile in Poetic Discourse: Some Examples from Medieval Hebrew Literature
—Esperanza Alfonso
3. Their Rose in Our Garden: Romance: Elements in Hebrew Italian Poetry
—Dvora Bregman
4. The Crisis of Medieval Knowledge in the Work of the Fifteenth-Century Poet and Philosopher Moses da Rieti
—Alessandro Guetta
PART II. RENEWING TEXTS, CHANGING HORIZONS: THE JEWISH ENLIGHTENMENTS APPROPRIATION OF ANDALUSI IDEALS
5. Judah Halevis Kuzari in the Haskalah: The Reinterpretation and Re-imagining of a Medieval Work
—Adam Shear
6. The Aesthetic Difference: Moses Mendelssohns Kohelet Musar and the Inception of the Berlin Haskalah
—Jonathan Karp
7. Varieties of Haskalah: Sabato Moraiss Program of Sephardi Rabbinic Humanism in Victorian America
—Arthur Kiron
PART III: REFASHIONINGS OF THE JEWISH PAST IN THE ERA OF HASKALAH
8. Solomon Maimon and His Jewish Philosophical Predecessors: The Evidence of His Autobiography
—Allan Arkush
9. Quarreling over Spinoza: Moses: Mendelssohn and the Fashioning of Jewish Philosophical Heroism
—Adam Sutcliffe
10. Strategic Friendships: Jewish Intellectuals, the Abbé Grégoire, and the French Revolution
—Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
11. Heine and Haggadah: History, Narration and Tradition in the Age of Wissenschaft des Judentums
—Jonathan Skolnik
List of Contributors
Index

Ross Brann is M. R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies at Cornell University and is author of Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-century Islamic Spain. Adam Sutcliffe teaches Jewish history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Judaism and Enlightenment.