Judith Olszowy-Schlanger

Silvana Greco

In honor of the writings of Giulio Busi, scholar of Jewish culture, the book investigates from a multidisciplinary perspective the extraordinary richness of Jewish culture in the Diaspora from antiquity to the latter part of the 20th century. A number of rabbinic writings, medieval manuscripts from the South of France, visual qabbalah, the Yiddish language, artistic expressions as well as the philosophical and social traditions of some prominent twentieth-century figures will be explored. While the Jewish cultural tradition has always incorporated the cultural influences of the broader socio-historical context in which it was embedded, it has in turn been a source of inspiration for the intellectual élite of the majority society. In this regard, the volume will examine the fruitful mutual exchange between Jewish scholars and Christian humanists during the Renaissance. However, the life of Jews in the Diaspora did not always take place in a context of peaceful integration. It was punctuated by harsh confrontations and persecution. Finally, the book will illustrate how precisely during the darkest and most tragic period of the 20th century, Jewish culture was an important tool of resistance and struggle against Nazi-Fascism.

Festschrift for Giulio Busi on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday

Counting the Miracles: Jewish Thought, Mysticism, and the Arts from Late Antiquity to the Present

This book proposes, for the first time, an in-depth analysis of the Philosophie sociale, published in Paris in 1793 by Moses Dobruska (1753-1794). Dobruska was a businessman, scholar, and social philosopher, born into a Jewish family in Moravia, who converted to Catholicism, gained wide recognition at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and then emigrated to France to join the French Revolution. Dobruska, who took on the name Junius Frey during his Parisian sojourn, barely survived his book. Accused of conspiring on behalf of foreign powers, he was guillotined on April 5, 1794, at the height of The Terror, on the same day as Georges Jacques Danton. From Dobruska's ideas, which were widely used between the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century without attribution to their author, emerge some of the key concepts of the social sciences as we know them today. An enthusiastic and unfortunate revolutionary and sometimes a brilliant theorist, Moses Dobruska deserves a role of his own in the history of sociology.

Silvana Greco

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