This volume features Eliezer Schweid’s most original essays and an interview with him. Together they express his fundamental outlook: the faith of a secular Jew, articulating responsibility toward one’s neighbor, one’s people, the world, and God in a secular age.

The culmination of Eliezer Schweid's life-work as a Jewish intellectual historian, this five-volume work provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the major thinkers and movements in modern Jewish thought, in the context of general philosophy and Jewish social-political historical developments, with extensive primary source excerpts. Volume Three, "The Crisis of Humanism," commences with an important essay on the challenge to the humanist tradition posed in the late 19th century by historical materialism, existentialism and positivism. This is background for the constructive philosophies which sought at the same time to address the general crisis of moral value and provide a positive basis for Jewish existence. Among the thinkers presented in this volume are Moses Hess, Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen (in impressive depth, with a thorough exposition of the Ethics and Religion of Reason), Ahad Ha-Am, I. J. Reines, Simon Dubnow, M. Y. Berdiczewski, the theorists of the Bund, Chaim Zhitlovsky, Nachman Syrkin, and Ber Borochov.

"The Qur'an, the Holy Scripture of the Muslims, also deals with the question of the status of Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel. Many of its exegetes, following in the tracks of Islam's holy book, have done so as well. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, these Islamic sources express an approach asserting that this land is promised exclusively to the People of Israel. This book explores these sources and discusses them in light of the recent developments."--Publishers website

Like Spinoza in his Theological-Political Treatise, Schweid helps us grasp the potential for seeing radically new messages in this oldest of books, the Bible. The American Founding Fathers realized that the Bible offers strong support for the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Socially, it offers a message of egalitarianism, especially in the provisions of the Jubilee. It is hardly an accident that two modern political movements found mottos ready at hand from the 25th chapter of Leviticus: "Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" (engraved on the Liberty Bell), and "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity" (motto of the Jewish National Fund). Schweid helps us to appreciate the broader message of the narrative of creation and settlement of the land in its ecumenical and planetary dimensions. The world is God's creation, and its resources are to be deployed as necessary for the sustenance and need-fulfillment of all peoples and all creatures equally--a message very much relevant to the ecological crisis facing us all at the present time.

The last generation of German Jewish philosophers—the best known (Buber, Rosenzweig, Baeck, Strauss, Scholem) and the less known (Breuer, Birnbaum, Klatzkin, Guttmann)—are thoroughly explicated here with generous primary text citations appearing in English for the first time.

Presented here is a systemized worldview of how the sequence of time is structured through mitzvot, symbols, prayers, as well as weekly festival and holiday Bible readings and study.

Jewish Philosophy is multicultural and multidisciplinary, marking the convergence of Jewish and non-Jewish cultures and the interaction of the philosophic method with Jewish thought. This book examines the writings of several paradigms in Jewish philosophy - loyal to the teachings of Jerusalem and eager for the wisdom of Athens.