Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s

Stern’s Jewish Materialism is a brilliant and deeply learned book that calls into question widely held historiographical views regarding the modernization of European Jewry. At first glance, the rabbinic subject of Stern’s first book, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, 2013), and the materialist thinkers of this one, his second, would appear to have little in common. Yet, in different ways, they represent alternatives to the common equation of Jewish modernization with secularization and the influence of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. Whereas in The Genius, Stern sought to demonstrate what was modern about Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon (1720–1797), one of the founding figures of what would eventually become Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Judaism, in Jewish Materialism, Stern argues that a cohort of Russian Jewish intellectuals embraced different forms of materialism in the 1870s without rejecting Judaism. On the contrary,...