Geography of Hope: Exile, the Enlightenment, Disassimilation »

Pierre Birnbaum is a leading French historian and sociologist. His works available in English include The Heights of Power: An Essay on the Power Elite in France (1982), States and Collective Action: The European Experience (1988), Anti-Semitism in France: A Political History from Leon Blum to the Present (1992), The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews of France from Gambetta to Vichy (Stanford, 1996), Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France (2000), The Idea of France (2001), and The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (2003).

In Geography of Hope, French sociologist and historian Pierre Birnbaum examines the work of the some of the prominent Jewish social scientists of the past two centuries in order to analyze their range of responses to the tensions between the Enlightenment call for universalism and the reality of Jewish particularism.

Introduction: Toward a Counterhistory     1
Around a Surprising Encounter with Heinrich Graetz   Karl Marx     36
The Memory of Masada   Emile David Durkheim     83
The Stranger, from Berlin to Chicago   Georg Simmel     123
An "Authentic French Jew" in Search of His Roots   Raymond Aron     169
Hannah and Rahel, "Fugitives from Palestine"   Hannah Arendt     203
The Awakening of a Wounded Nationalism   Isaiah Berlin     242
The End of Whispering   Michael Walzer     288
A Home for "Fallen Jews"   Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi     332
Conclusion: Exile, the Enlightenment, Disassimilation     374
Notes     385