Publisher's Synopsis
The text provides a detailed genealogy of the development of modern Judaism into its modern branches and ideological forms, explicating the hidden theological and philosophical motors of transformation that led to Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, the German philosophies of Orthodoxy, Zionism, and the modern forms of Judaism merged with Zionism: Religious Zionism, Reform Zionism, and Reconstructionist Judaism. The analysis largely explores 18th-20th century Germany, the period in which a confluence of events, ideologies, and sentiments led to a reformation of German, and consequently, Global Jewry. The investigation aims to illuminate the vehicle and mechanisms of this reformation in accordance with both the visible and invisible chains of thought rooted in Judaic theology and the German Enlightenment: the eschatology of the Exile and Exodus, Von Dohm's ideology of emancipation, secular Messianism, Bildung, the Jewish mission, the Aufklarung, and the Haskalah.
Cakir pulls from a number of the most notable and accredited researchers in the field (David Sorkin, George Mosse, Jacob Golomb, Ned Curthoys, Steven B. Smith, Jacob Katz, Arthur Cohen, Amnon Rubenstein, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Magnus Shulamit, etc), a wide expanse of general literature and philosophy, and the foundational literature of 18th/19th century Jewish thinkers (Leopold Zunz, Abraham Geiger, Zacharias Frankel, Samson Raphael Hirsch, Theodor Lessing, Theodor Herzl, Abraham Isaac Cook, Moses Hess, Martin Buber, David Ben-Gurion, etc) branching together ostensibly separate processes of thought in order to provide a coherent, revealing, and comprehensible map of a topic that has largely remained enigmatic and thoroughly complex. The main proposition of the text is that the political and social development of post French Revolution Europe is inseparable from the development and transformation of Judaism, and, therefore, that a true study of Modernity remains hopelessly incomplete without an incorporation of this interrelated development. By examining the history of German Jewry in this manner, The Prophecy of the West reveals the hidden vital motors of Western history that modern academia has yet been unable to discern. The final image that confronts the reader at the close of the book is one that presents a concrescence of opposites as a consummation of universality: the end of the prophecy.
