Leo Baeck (1873–1956) was a rabbi, public intellectual, and the official leader of German Jewry during the Holocaust. The Jewish Imperial Imagination shows the myriad ways in which the German imperial enterprise left its imprint on his religious and political thought, and on modern Judaism more generally. This book is the first to explore Baeck's religious thought as political, and situate it within the imperial context of the period which is often ignored in discussions of modern Jewish thought. Baeck's work during the Holocaust is analysed in-depth, drawing on unpublished manuscripts written in Nazi Germany and in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. In the process Yaniv Feller raises new questions about the nature of Jewish missionizing and the German-Jewish imagination of the East as a space for colonisation. He thus develops the concept of the 'Jewish imperial imagination', moving beyond a simple dichotomy of ascribing to or resisting hegemonic narratives.

‘… productive potential and immense richness…’

Philipp Nielsen Source: The Journal of Modern History

‘Readers of Yaniv Feller’s erudite and important new book about Leo Baeck will confront an initial provocation: Is the book’s title - The Jewish Imperial Imagination - a circuitous euphemism for Zionism? It is to Feller’s credit that his book refrains from answering this question directly and instead furnishes the analytic tools necessary for posing the problem in a more precise way. He prompts us to ask: Does the nom de guerre, Zionism, mark the limits of the Jewish imperial imagination? Or is the Jewish imperial imagination the more expansive terrain from which Zionism emerges? Through his patient reading of Baeck’s writing, Feller explores this opposition as a call for a general critique of Jewish power.’

Adam Y. Stern Source: The Journal of Religion