The culmination of Eliezer Schweid’s life-work as Jewish intellectual historian, this five-volume work provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the major thinkers and movements in modern Jewish thought, in the context of general philosophy and Jewish social-political historical developments. A major theme of the work is the response of Jewish thought to the rise and crisis of Western humanism from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Volume One, “The Period of the Enlightenment,” includes a methodological introduction to the larger work, as well as thorough presentations of Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Maimon, Ascher, Wessely, Schnaber and Krochmal. Capsule essays on Kant, Hegel, and Schelling highlight the issues they raise that would be of crucial importance for Jewish thought. "Schweid introduces the reader to many writers and thinkers who pioneered a new approach toward Jewish law and lore [...]. This is a work which should be in every university and seminary library." Morton J. Merowitz, Librarian and independent scholar, Buffalo, NY (AJL Reviews, Nov/Dec 2011)

The last generation of German Jewish philosophers—the best known (Buber, Rosenzweig, Baeck, Strauss, Scholem) and the less known (Breuer, Birnbaum, Klatzkin, Guttmann)—are thoroughly explicated here with generous primary text citations appearing in English for the first time.

The culmination of Eliezer Schweid’s life-work as a Jewish intellectual historian, this five-volume work provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the major thinkers and movements in modern Jewish thought, in the context of general philosophy and Jewish social-political historical developments, with extensive primary source excerpts. Volume Two, "The Birth of the Jewish Historical Studies and the Modern Jewish Religious Movements," discusses the major Jewish thinkers of central and eastern Europe before 1881, in connection with the movements they fostered: German-Jewish Wissenschaft (Zunz), Reform (Formstecher, Samuel Hirsch, Geiger), Neo-Orthodoxy (S. D. Luzzatto, Steinheim, Samson Raphael Hirsch), Positive-Historical (Frankel, Graetz), and Neo-Haredi (Kalischer, Malbim, Hayyim Volozhiner, Salanter). In addition, extensive attention is given to the thinkers of the east-European Haskalah, both earlier (Levinsohn, Rubin, Schorr, Mieses, Abraham Krochmal) and later proto-Zionist thinkers (Zweifel, Smolenskin, Pines, Lilienblum).

The culmination of Eliezer Schweid’s life-work as a Jewish intellectual historian, this five-volume work provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the major thinkers and movements in modern Jewish thought, in the context of general philosophy and Jewish social-political historical developments, with extensive primary source excerpts. Volume Three, The Crisis of Humanism, commences with an important essay on the challenge to the humanist tradition posed in the late 19th century by historical materialism, existentialism and positivism. This is background for the constructive philosophies which sought at the same time to address the general crisis of moral value and provide a positive basis for Jewish existence. Among the thinkers presented in this volume are Moses Hess, Moritz Lazarus, Hermann Cohen (in impressive depth, with a thorough exposition of the Ethics and Religion of Reason), Ahad Ha-Am, I. J. Reines, Simon Dubnow, M. Y. Berdiczewski, the theorists of the Bund, Chaim Zhitlovsky, Nachman Syrkin, and Ber Borochov.

The period of the Yishuv (1900–48) saw a flourishing of creative thinkers who reworked the contours of Jewish and Zionist thought while building the Jewish homeland. Eliezer Schweid, who grew up during the period he describes here, writes profoundly and sympathetically about these thinkers—Gordon, Brenner, Jabotinsky, Bialik, Kaufmann, Kook, Katznelson, and others from a standpoint of intimate first-hand knowledge. The issues they wrestled with are vital for an understanding of Israel’s recent development and remain crucial for envisioning the possibilities of Israel’s future both internally and in relation to its neighbours, the world, and Jewish tradition.

A comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of modern Jewish thought, Volume 2 (of 5) covers the major thinkers of the nineteenth-century German-Jewish religious movements and the east-European Haskalah, with extensive primary source excerpts.