: A rich array of twelfth to fifteenth century Arabic texts captures the advent of a supererogatory prayer known as ṣalāt al-raghā’ib, on the eve of the first Friday of the month of Rajab in late eleventh-century Jerusalem, and its wide dissemination. This corpus offers an unusually vivid picture of the formation and the transformation of a medieval bid’a, or, of an ‘invention of tradition’. Combining our expertise in Islamic law and in Ayyūbid and Mamluk era history, we use this (...) corpus for an in-depth study of popular piety, power politics, scholarly polemics and legal discourse. Twenty eight translated excerpts of various texts are presented in this paper, preceded by a detailed introduction. Exploring legal reasoning in its concrete political and social context provides a nuanced understanding of the development, mass proliferation and ensuing debate over a highly controversial and extraordinary potent religious practice. (shrink)

Conference held June 1990 under the auspices of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 182-215.

Hilkhot mezuzah, hilkhot berakhot, mile di-neziḳin--Cover.

The Wish to be Free. Society, Psyche and Value Change by Fred Weinstein; Gerald M. Platt Psychoanalytic Sociology. An Essay on the Interpretation of Historical Data and the Phenomena of Collective Behavior by Fred Weinstein; Gerald M. Platt.

This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine about the paper "Biomedical Informatics: We Are What We Publish", written by Peter L. Elkin, Steven H. Brown, and Graham Wright. It is introduced by an editorial. This article contains the combined commentaries invited to independently comment on the Elkin et al. paper. In subsequent issues the discussion can continue through letters to the editor.

We study human performance in two classical NP‐hard optimization problems: Set Cover and Maximum Coverage. We suggest that Set Cover and Max Coverage are related to means selection problems that arise in human problem‐solving and in pursuing multiple goals: The relationship between goals and means is expressed as a bipartite graph where edges between means and goals indicate which means can be used to achieve which goals. While these problems are believed to be computationally intractable in general, they become more (...) tractable when the structure of the network resembles a tree. Thus, our main prediction is that people should perform better with goal systems that are more tree‐like. We report three behavioral experiments which confirm this prediction. Our results suggest that combinatorial parameters that are instrumental to algorithm design can also be useful for understanding when and why people struggle to choose between multiple means to achieve multiple goals. (shrink)

Talmon's treatment of nationalism varies in his different writings. This study will try to characterize his views as expressed in his final work, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution. Through most of the book Talmon's preference for dealing with the vision of revolution, its prophets and bearers is very conspicuous. Their total devotion to restructuring and refashioning the whole world in accordance with the socialist ideology fascinated Talmon before it provoked him into analyzing (...) it to death. Nationalism, on the other hand, appears at best as a natural feeling of loyalty and at worst as a hateful, aggressive, and racist obsession. One of his outstanding interests in that book is in the internal debate among socialists about nationalism as a value and as a strategy, and in the tremendous prominence of Jews in this process. It is only towards the end of the book that Talmon presents his main thesis, the confrontation between the two totalitarian ideologies, Bolshevism and Fascism as deriving from socialism and nationalism, and embodying two kinds of determinism, economic and biological. Nationalism appears as an irrational phantasy, which had developed throughout the nineteenth century to its pivotal culmination in Nazism. This highly problematic thesis, though brilliantly expressed by captivating metaphors, should I think be explained and revised. (shrink)

Jacob Talmon was a believer in nationalism, and in Jewish nationalism of the Zionist variety in particular. He was convinced of the moral right of Jews to establish their own state in Palestine/eretz Yisrael. On the other hand, he was aware of the dangers inherent in nationalism, of its tendency toward chauvinism, intolerance toward “the other,” and violence. In the case of Zionism he contrasted the pre-1967 movement, which he believed was characterized by moderation in the spirit of his (...) hero, Chaim Weizmann, and post-1967 Zionism, which took on the very characteristics he deplored in right-wing Polish nationalism and in the extreme national movements of other ethnic groups. This article analyzes his critique of Israeli ideology and policy in the post-1967 period, and asks whether the distinction he makes between “good” Zionism as formulated by the founders of the movement, and “bad” Zionism as personified by Menachem Begin and the leaders of religious Zionism, is justified. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the problematic relationship between Talmon's liberalism and Zionism. My argument is that Talmon's nationalism (Zionism included)—historicist, romantic, visionary—lived in permanent tension with his liberalism—empiricist, pluralist, pragmatic. His critique of totalitarian democracy, reflecting his British experience, emerged independently from his Zionism, grounded in Central European nationalism. The two represented different worlds. Talmon lived in both, serving as an ambassador in-between them, without ever bringing them together. The essay's first section describes the political education of (...) the young Jacob Talmon (née Flajszer) and the making of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. It demonstrates the independence of Talmon's Cold War liberal project from his Zionism. The second section places Talmon in the context of Cold War liberal discourse, showing how integral his critique of revolutionary politics was to contemporary liberalism. The third illustrates the tensions between Talmon's view of Jewish history and his liberalism, between his Zionism and his critique of revolutionary politics. Focusing on Talmon's analyses of nationalism, it highlights the ambiguity of his Zionism. ☆ Originally a lecture at the conference on “Jacob Talmon and Totalitarianism Today: Legacy and Revision”, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 28 December 2006. (shrink)

Gershom Scholem wrote his famous article, “Redemption through sin”, in 1937, and J.L. Talmon gained the inspiration for his first book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, in the years 1937–1938 at the time when the Moscow trials revealed to the world the bitter reality of what was happening in the Soviet Union. Scholem and Talmon were contemporaries and witnesses of the transformation of communism in the Soviet Union from a vision of egalitarian and universal redemption into a bureaucratic (...) and nationalistic despotism. The major scholar of the history of religious Messianism and the major scholar of the history of secular Messianism both widened the scope of their investigations—the first extending them into the history of Sabbataianism and the second into the French Revolution—and both reached a similar conclusion: both recognized, as Scholem put it, “the profound truth relating to the dialectics of history … of the historical process whereby the fulfilment of one political process leads to the manifestation of its opposite. In the realization of one thing its opposite is revealed”. The two great Israeli historians of ideas plumbed the depths of one of the most fascinating and at the same time tragic manifestations of la condition humaine: the human challenge of bringing the heavenly city down to the vale of tears, and the price that men have to pay for their Messianic passion. (shrink)

Jacob Talmon and Michael Oakeshott represent two opposite tendencies in the anti-totalitarian world view. Both thinkers share many central features of this broad intellectual trend, such as the equation between the Soviet and Nazi regimes, Anglophilia and the rejection of the utopian quest. Yet this basic agreement should not distract us from significant differences in attitude and temperament. Talmon, like most other critics of totalitarianism, was strongly affected by the atmosphere of a profound intellectual and political crisis in (...) Europe, and he regarded the danger of totalitarianism to be an inherent aspect of modernity itself. His liberalism was that of ‘fear’. By contrast, for Oakeshott, who believed in the strength of liberal, and specifically British, civilisation, totalitarianism was merely a child of resentment, a parasitic force with no positive message of its own. He thus displayed a greater measure of confidence in the fortunes of liberal modernity. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 94 Heft: 2 Seiten: 609-611.

Summary This article presents a comparative analysis of the concepts of totalitarian democracy and positive liberty in the work of Jacob Leib Talmon and Isaiah Berlin. Its main purpose is to show that a combined analysis of Talmon and Berlin's biographical relationship and their individual texts demonstrates that Talmon's idea of totalitarian democracy may have had a greater influence on Berlin's notion of positive liberty than Berlin seems to have ever acknowledged. The article first summarises the intellectual (...) and biographical relationships that tied these two authors together in a personal friendship and an intellectual fellowship that lasted for more than three decades. In the second part, the insights drawn from the investigation of the authors' intellectual and biographical relationships are linked to an analysis of their texts, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Two Concepts of Liberty. Finally, in the third part of the article, three crucial aspects of Talmon's definition of totalitarian democracy are considered: the interpretation of the Enlightenment and Rousseau's thought, the view of the French revolution, and the possible impact each of these has on subsequent Marxist and socialist reflection, to see how they are addressed in Berlin's idea of positive liberty. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] edited volume is based on the proceedings of an international workshop held in 2009 on the theme of ‘Material Evidence and Narrative Sources’ during the fourteenth annual gathering of the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, focused on ‘Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of Islamic Societies’. Fifteen articles seek to integrate (...) material and textual evidence for the medieval and modern Middle East, deliberately adhering to a trend of interdisciplinarity that began in the 1970s, exemplified in the approach of specific studies by Michael Cook, Leor Halevi, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar, and Jacob Lassner, as well as in the recent publications of the editors, D. J. Talmon-Geller’s Islamic Piety in Medieval Syria: Mosques, Cemeteries and Sermons under the Zangids... (shrink)

This essay provides a general introduction to the special number on Jacob L. Talmon (1916–1980). The essay sketches the outlines of Talmon's intellectual biography, beginning with his study of the origins of totalitarian democracy, moving through his analysis of nationalism and political messianism, and ending with his study of the ideological clash of the 20th century. The essay raises the question of whether Talmon should be seen as a thinker wishing to defend existing traditions (i.e. a “priest”), (...) or as a radical anti-authoritarian skeptic (i.e. a “jester”). Moreover, being both an anti-nationalist liberal, and a zionist at the same time, Talmon, the essay shows, was aware of the fact his own stance was problematic and at times even paradoxical. The last section of the essay presents the seven essays, which are included in the special issue. (shrink)

This essay seeks to examine the history of the intellectual comradeship between J.L. Talmon and the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The scholarly dialog between the two began in 1947, continued until Talmon's death in 1980, and is well documented in their private correspondence. I argue that there were two levels to this dialog: First, both Berlin and Talmon took part in the Totalitarianism discourse, which was colored by Popperian terminology, and thus (...) I claim that their ideas should be examined as part of the Cold-War political discourse. The second level stemmed from their similar East-European origin, their mutual Jewish identity, and their attitude towards the Zionist movement. At times the two levels of discourse conjoined commensurably, but in other cases the juxtaposition of the two created conceptual tensions. Examining Berlin and Talmon's thought from this dual perspective, I argue, can shed new light on the inner conflicts and conceptual tensions that each of them had to face. In particular, I claim that both thinkers tried to integrate their Anglophile liberal heritage with their support of National movements in general, and the Jewish National movement in particular. Nevertheless, the different approaches of Talmon and Berlin present two concepts of liberal Nationalism: While Talmon assumed that Zionism solved the Jewish individual's dilemmas by making Jews members of a commune attached to soil; Berlin sought to preserve the individual in an inviolable sphere and thus was more ambivalent in his attitude towards the state of Israel. In conclusion, I offer to see Talmon as a classic Zionist liberal and Berlin as a supporter of what I call “Diaspora Zionism”, an approach, which would later provide the grounds for Berlin's celebrated pluralism. (shrink)

Previously issued as author's dissertation, 2004/2005, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitèat, Mèunchen.

Extremists who have been well educated in science are quite common, but nevertheless puzzling. How can individuals with high levels of scientific education fall prey to irrationalist ideologies? Implicit assumptions about rationality may lead to tremendous and conspicuous developments. When correction of social deficits is seen as a pressing problem, it is quite common that individuals conclude that some religious or political system contains the all-encompassing answer, if only it is applied with sufficiently high standards. Implicit assumptions about rationally high (...) standards often demand consistency, system and justification. The strict application of these standards to political and/or religious systems leads quite readily to extremism. J. L. Talmon has shown how the rationality of the Enlightenment led to intolerance, dictatorship and torture. The Enlightenment view of rationality can also encourage irrationalist ideologies and extremism: it leads individuals to conclude that various religions and/or political systems contain all encompassing answers, if only they are systematic, coherant and justified. Alternative theories of science and rationality, which view rationality as critical, partial, and progressive, and which seek to improve imperfect standards, can help avoid the unintended support of extremism rendered by established views of rationality. Unfortunately such theories meet enormous resistance: they call into question well-established canonical doctrines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive UtopianismAntonis Balasopoulos (bio)It is well known that the decline of programmatic or so-called blueprint utopias and utopianism came on the heels of a widespread and concerted attack against them during the first two decades of the Cold War. In the writings of thinkers like Hayek, Popper, Talmon, Kolakowski, and many others, program became synonymous with hubris.1 It was construed (...) as a dangerous effort to regulate the diversity of human subjectivity and the complexity of the social organism, a repressive will-to-order and predictability that tainted utopias by associating them with Totalitarianism. In Popper’s exemplary exposition:The Utopian attempt to realize an ideal state, using a blueprint for society as a whole, is one which demands a strong centralized rule of a few, and which therefore is likely to lead to a dictatorship. [...] [Utopia] claims to plan rationally for the whole of society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitious claim.2 [End Page 489]Yet, though this view of how Utopia, to recall Robert C. Elliott, became “a bad word,” is accurate in itself, it also reflects only the negative or destructive side of Cold War anti-utopianism, a trend whose logical inconsistencies and ideological biases have already been ably dissected in the work of Russell Jacoby, Marc Olssen, and Darren Webb, to name but a few.3What one could term the “positive” or “productive” side of anti-utopian denunciations of the dogmatically programmatic character allegedly inherent in utopias went well beyond the exigencies of generating a geopolitical and ideological enemy image. It involved an effort to reconcile western subjects to seismic and highly consequential shifts within postwar, late-capitalist societies themselves. If, as I have argued elsewhere, utopian fictions (and, indeed, nonfictions) before the Cold War period can be read as fictions of organization—of everything from architecture and urban planning, to production, sexuality and biological reproduction, clothing, or diet—it is also the case that in them, “organization” is a response, a reaction to traumatic historical experiences of disorganization, from the decline of the ancient city-state in the case of Platonic utopianism; to the impoverishment and dislocation of rural communities in the era of Thomas More; to the experience of the fracturing of religious community during the religious, civil, and international wars that marked the seventeenth century; to the dramatic impact of early nineteenth-century industrialization on artisanal and agrarian communities, on family cohesion and on the rhythms of the premodern working day.4My argument is, then, that the anti-utopian denunciation of blueprint and program was not simply motivated by the liberal capitalist attack against the planned and highly regulated character of economy and society in the countries of so-called actually existing socialism. It was also motivated by the ideological need to normalize and legitimize the transition, within western capitalist societies themselves, to what Scott Lash and John Urry called “disorganized capitalism.” Lash and Urry’s book, originally published during the decade of the triumphant rise of neoliberalism, in 1987, launches its investigation by tellingly quoting the passage of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto that focuses on the creatively destructive aspects of capitalist social transformation: the bourgeoisie, Lash and Urry observe, is a class “with vested interest in change, crisis and chaos”; the social world over which it presides is one “which swings wildly out of control, menacing and destructive.”5 In their introduction, the authors outline the basic features of the postwar shift from the organized capitalism of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its disarticulated successor formation during the rise of [End Page 490] neoliberal governance. Under the rubric of “disorganization” (which is to say, of a mutation within the western capitalist economic and social order), they include de-industrialization and the decline in the absolute and relative size of the working class in the core capitalist economies; the rise of flexible forms of labor organization in the place of defunct Taylorist principles; the weakening of trade unionist organization; the increasing decoupling of large monopolies from the control and regulation... (shrink)

ABSTRACT After the tragedies of the twentieth century, the utopian impulse was subject to searching criticism by a host of liberal intellectuals including Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon. Looking to history and political philosophy, these thinkers impugned utopianism for so frequently destroying the freedoms it appeared to pursue. Defined by its theoretical contradictions, the utopian project, rooted in the politics of the Enlightenment, bore some responsibility for the totalitarianism and genocide that had shaped their lives. (...) As this critique became liberal orthodoxy, a heretic group of anarchist thinkers challenged these conclusions. While travelling some distance with the liberal critics, for Paul Goodman, Marie Louise Berneri, and Herbert Read, the twentieth century, rather than invalidating the utopian urge made its boldness and experimentalism all the more vital. Their act of heresy was defending utopianism as a central component of their anarchist critique of the present. (shrink)

During much of his prolific career, the late historian Jacob Talmon was preoccupied with revolutionary movements, and was especially unsettled by, and attracted to, the force displayed by the French and Russian Revolutions. The young United States’ long and bloody war against the British Empire, followed by the creation of a republican novus ordo seclorum, supposedly fitted Talmon's revolutionary model and narrative. Hence, it is hard to account for the complete absence of the American Revolution from Talmon's (...) extensive and celebrated trilogy. This paper examines how Talmon understood revolutions and how the major historiographical schools interpreting the American Revolution could not accommodate, for different reasons, Talmon's paradigm of the nature and essence of revolutions. The paper further demonstrates how not only the failings of different historical interpretive schemes convinced Talmon to ignore the American Revolution. Rather, since the American Revolution could be conceived either as Lockean or Machiavellian, but in any event not as Rousseauian, Talmon overlooked its Atlantic nature; he chose to focus solely on messianic Europe. The paper will thus analyze the meaning and consequence of the fact that Talmon left the examination of the pursuit of happiness to Americanists, and chose to leave 1776 out of his corpus. Indeed, a missing revolution. (shrink)

I have in this paper used Rousseau's advocacy of popular festivals, and through this his no less influential appeal to Antiquity, as ways of connecting his thought with important aspects of the French Revolution, aspects which Rousseau can be seen to have inspired. To connect Rousseau with the Revolution is in no way to make of him a proponent avant la lettre of what J.L. Talmon called ‘totalitarian democracy’. This unfortunately influential concept is in my opinion an oxymoron of (...) dubious applicability even to our own, sad century -- and of no application at all to a century in which the word ‘totalitarian’ had no meaning and, indeed, did not exist. As to democracy, I am content to regard Rousseau's fervent advocacy of radical, participatory democracy as being as unalloyed as any political argument can be. (shrink)