Revolutionary Jews from Spinoza to Marx: The Fight for a Secular World of Universal and Equal Rights

Defines how Jewish intellectuals of the Enlightenment influenced later European revolutionary movements

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a small but conspicuous fringe of the Jewish population became the world’s most resolute, intellectually driven, and philosophical revolutionaries, among them the pre-Marxist Karl Marx. Yet the roots of their alienation from existing society and determination to change it extend back to the very heart of the Enlightenment, when Spinoza and o...