Max Joseph
Edited by: George Y. Kohler
The book "Judaism at a Crossroads" was first published in German in 1908. The author, Rabbi Max Mordecai Joseph (1868-1950), was considered an exceptional phenomenon in those days. He was a prominent member of the Liberal Judaism camp and at the same time an enthusiastic Zionist activist. "Judaism at a Crossroads" is a defense of the Zionist idea, which makes use of religious arguments and merciless calculations of the author with the assimilationist tendencies of his German colleagues in the non-Orthodox camp. In order to address the existential crisis of Judaism in the modern era, in order to overcome the problems posed by the Enlightenment, and yet to avoid a return to the Talmud and the ghetto, political Zionism must be shaped by moral and religious idealism. For him, the only way to survive religious Judaism is Zionism. This original claim is the novelty of the book, which is now published for the first time in a Hebrew translation.