Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History
Toward a New Historical Perspective
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Brandeis University Press
Publishing:8th Dec '26
£120.00
This title is due to be published on 8th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Brings the legacy of sixteenth-century Safed into modern scholarship on Zionism to propose a new model of Jewish existence.
Sixteenth-century Safed was one of the most important centers of thought and learning in Jewish history, yet Zionist historical narratives, which emphasize the continuity of Jewish presence in Palestine, have consistently downplayed or ignored it. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin investigates this strange contradiction. His new book argues that Safed articulates a model of early modern Jewish national revival, one closely connected to the land and its material geography, yet radically different from the Zionist model that emerged in the late nineteenth century. While Zionism set out to restore Biblical Jewish sovereignty, rabbinic Safed’s emphasis on the Mishnah proposed a non-sovereign Jewish connection to the land.
As much a polemic as a historical and theological analysis, Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History offers a provocative new perspective on questions related to nationalism, Judaism, and Israel.
“Raz-Krakotzkin is one of the most creative and iconoclastic Jewish historians of our times. Fittingly, Safed, Zionist Culture, and Jewish History offers a bold new account of the Jewish past that recenters Safed as one of the great sites of Jewish cultural creativity. But Raz-Krakotzkin’s Safed is different from that of Scholem or Schechter. It defies facile dichotomies between tradition and modernity, east and west, and religious and secular. In fact, what Raz-Krakotzkin offers in this book is not only a brilliant new reading of the center of Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth century but a new epistemological lens through which to view history—and particularly Jewish history beyond the grip of a hegemonic Zionist reading.”
-- David N. Myers, UCLA“In unearthing the ‘Mishnah consciousness’ of early modern Safed and its scholars, Raz-Krakotzkin offers a unique viewpoint on the Holy Land that brings to light a different meaning of Jewish existence within its borders and allows for shared sovereignty. An erudite and pathbreaking study of the hidden meanings of Eretz-Israel as space and time.”
-- Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, New York University“How can Israel move beyond its present impasse? In this timely book, Raz-Krakotzkin turns to sixteenth-century Safed to rethink the making of Jewish memory and history, and offers alternatives to dominant narratives about Jewish history and Israel/Palestine.”
-- Sylvie Anne Goldberg, L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, PISBN: 9781684583270
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
312 pages