Magdeburg, Falckenberg 1860, First edition.
Hardcover, leather spine and cloth covered boards, gilt spine titles, octavo, x + 564 + [2] pages. Index, errata.
In German (fraktur)

A first edition volume from Graetz's monumental and pioneering History of the Jews. The individual volumes were published separately over a period of many years.

"If Jost was the pioneer, Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891) should be regarded as the true father of modern Jewish historiography and the most important historian of the Wissenschaft. His monumental history of the Jews, Geschichte der Juden von den aelten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (comprising eleven volumes written in non-chronological order between 1853-1876) was radically different from that of his predecessor, sometimes in the quality of his writing and sometimes in the author's conception of history. We are no longer in the presence of the cold and distant rationalism that had guided Jost. This is a work that shows the author's sympathy for his subject, for, in keeping with the scientific exigencies (he uses a considerable mass of sources in various languages), he gets involved in the narration of the events. This is a living history describing the Jews' long struggle for survival, the uniqueness of their destiny, the sufferance infringed by their enemies, but also their moments of joy and their achievements. Tempted by the Reform he nevertheless remains loyal to ancestral Judaism, being influenced by the Dix-neuf epitres sur le judaisme (1836) of Samson-Rapahel Hirsch (1808-1888), the most eminent thinker of Neo-orthodoxy: "As big as my discontent with the Talmud was, this book [Hirsch's epistles] restored the harmony between the two of us. So I returned to the Talmud like to a mistress whose virtue I had unjustly doubted. I decided to study this work with passion and to acquire philosophical knowledge". Graetz considered Judaism as a political-religious body whose "soul is the Torah and body the Holy Land". He expounded his outlook on the history of 1846 in an article-program, Konstruktion der juedischen Geschichte, published in the 'Journal pour les interets religieux du judaisme'. Unlike many adepts of the Wissenschaft who saw the Jews exclusively as members of a religious community (Religions-Gemeinschaft), Graetz also saw them as a people (Volksgemeinschaft). It is this national attitude that is present in all his historical work. Although influenced by Moses Hess, who had written in his famous Rome et Jerusalem (1862) that the Jews constituted a nation, Graetz still did not believe in the political rebirth of the Jews in Palestine, already prophesized by that work. Nevertheless, he remained partisan of a Jewish cultural nationalism, fiercely opposing the Jewish-German symbiosis and courageously responding to the attacks launched by von Treitschke, nationalistic and anti-Semite historian, in the eleventh and last volume of his History of the Jews, in a pamphlet entitled Ein wort ueber unserer Judentum (1880)".

From the 'Science of Judaism' to the 'New Israeli Historians': landmarks for a history of Jewish historiography By Carol Iancu

The complete set of all 11 volumes (10 of which are first editions) is available in a separate listing.

CONDITION: Good Covers and Very Good Contents. (Covers have edge and corner wear, rubbing. Contents are complete, clean and intact with occasional light foxing spots. Tight binding.)