“The Jewish Eighteenth Century and the Transformative Year 1782”

Shmuel Feiner, Bar-Ilan University

Shmuel Feiner is Professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University since 1989, and Chairman of the Jerusalem Leo Baeck Institute since 2007. Feiner is a historian of European Jewry in the 18th and 19th Centuries, focusing on the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and the trends of secularization and counter-modernity. He is the author of Haskalah and History, The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (Hebrew 1995; English, by the Littman Library, 2002), The Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew, 2002; English, by The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award; German, by Olms, 2007, winner of the Meyer-Struckmann-Preis, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf), Moses Mendelssohn (Hebrew, 2005; German, by Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 2009; English, by Yale University Press, 2010; Chinese by Showwe Information Co, Taipei, 2014), The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth Century Europe (Hebrew, 2010, winner of the Shazar Prize in Jewish History; English, by The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Feiner is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, 2012. His current current book project is A Biography of a Century: The Jews in Eighteenth Century Europe (two volumes).

Co-Sponsored by:

Institute for Advanced Study and Humanities Council