Hyman Hurwitz and the Possibilities and Limitations of the Sympathetic Imagination in the Work of Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and Coleridge

The article offers information on the book Hebrew Tales, by Hyman Hurwitz and notes that the traditional Jewish wisdom is harmonized with contemporary British culture. The author offers his views on Hurwitz\u27s work towards the Talmud, in comparison to the work and lives of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the profound possibilities and limitations of Romantic sympathy. It discusses the contributions of the Jews of England to either Enlightenment or Romantic thought and how William Hazlitt, an advocate of Jewish naturalization had managed to balance respect for the Enlightenment ideals

"The invisible spirit alone" : the romance of reform in Grace Aguilar's theological writings.

The Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar lived in the early nineteenth century when England was experiencing revolutions and reforms in philosophy, politics, and religion. The daughter of Sephardic immigrants, Aguilar authored novels, poetry, essays, theology, and midrash. She is perhaps the most well-known and the most prolific nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish woman writer. Aguilar's works, especially her theology, channel various ideological streams that were running through English thought in the early nineteenth century. Aguilar, who is usually considered a "traditionally observant" Jew, presents herself as a Victorian woman who values the very "Victorian" concepts of domesticity and womanhood present in much nineteenth-century literature for women. The ideal Victorian woman is pure and good, tends to the needs of her children, husband, and home, and is the religious center of the home; Aguilar preached the importance of these domestic values in her theological work. Though ostensibly traditional in these respects, her theological works argue for the political emancipation of the Jews, for radical reforms in Jewish belief and practice, and for the value and dignity of Jewish women, all while she defends Judaism against disparagement from Christians and provides a model of conduct for Jewish women. This work seeks to present the "spirit" of Grace Aguilar's theological works The Women of Israel (1845) and The Spirit of Judaism (1842) through three different historical lenses. By "spirit" I mean the driving force behind her theology, that which moves her arguments: her own unique concept of the "Jewish spirit.