Socrates and the Jews

“Socrates and the Jews is a triumph of critical scholarship. With this book, Leonard throws new light on the troubled inheritance of the Enlightenment, which bequeathed to modernity a series of ways of working through its own contorted rupture from the past. No one who reads this study will ever again be able to think of the category ‘Greek’—that prototype and anti-type of modernity—without simultaneously calling to mind its inextricable but neglected congener, ‘Jew.’ Leonard convincingly demonstrates how these notions, paired together, have served as problematic and contested sites, both imaginary and real, in the emerging and evolving conceptions of race, nation, culture, and modernity in European thought, from Moses Mendelsohn, the ‘Jewish Socrates,’ to Sigmund Freud, who could recast Moses as either quasi-Greek or Egyptian. The intervening chapters on Kant, Hegel, Arnold, and Marx are as illuminating as they are disturbing to read.”

“In Socrates and the Jews,Leonard compellingly retraces the mutual imbrications of Greek-Jew figurations and post-Enlightenment philosophical and political discourses, resulting in an extraordinarily rich and multilayered book that is at once intellectual history, reception study, and philosophical-cum-philological inquiry. Leonard’s mastery of the myriad literatures she engages is stunning. A remarkable achievement.”

“Modernity as the site of our present predicament demands to be thought and rethought. The question is how? The argument of Miriam Leonard’s profound and important book is that central to that project has to be an understanding of the way the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem works to structure the ways modernity has been thought and continues to be thought. Her book makes it clear that terms such as ‘secularism,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘philosophy,’ even ‘Judaism’ demand reconsideration. What drives that demand is the complex set of interrelationships that are already there constructing the presence of the modern, a presence which once analyzed indicates the naivety of the assumption that modernity occurs at the end of religion. Recalling and working through the opposition between Athens and Jerusalem works beyond the disavowal of religion in the name of an affirmation of the Enlightenment by noting their already present imbrication. Leonard’s book demands urgent consideration by anyone interested in understanding the quality of the ‘day’ in which thinking today has to occur.”