| David Sorkin | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Discipline: | Jewish History |
| Notable Ideas: | Port Jew, Subculture, Religious Enlightenment, Emancipation |
| Workplaces: | Yale University |
| Alma Mater: | University of Wisconsin–Madison University of California, Berkeley |
David Sorkin is the Lucy G. Moses professor of Jewish history at Yale University.[1] Sorkin specializes in the intersection of Jewish and European history,[2] [3] and has published several prominent books including Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries.
Sorkin graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1975 (Phi Beta Kappa). In 1977 he received a Masters degree in Comparative Literature, and in 1983 a PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.[4]
He has taught at Brown (1983-1986), Oxford (1986-1992), the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1992-2011), and the CUNY Graduate Center (2011-2014).
Sorkin has published several prominent works on Jewish history.[5] His first book, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 published in 1987, argued that emancipation did not lead to "assimilation" but rather Jewish culture in the German states constituted a "subculture."[6] In 1996 he wrote Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, a concise study of Mendelssohn's Jewish thought in which, on the basis of the neglected Hebrew writings, he argued that Mendelssohn used radical ideas for conservative ends. The book has been translated into French, German, and Italian.[7]
In 2000 he wrote The Berlin Haskalah and German Religious Thought: Orphans of Knowledge. The book, first delivered in 1997 as the Sherman Lectures in the Department of Religions and Theology at Manchester University (UK), argued that the Haskalah should be understood within the context of wider Central European religious and intellectual changes rather than as a singular Jewish phenomenon.[8] In The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) published in 2008, Sorkin reconceived the relationship of the Enlightenment to religion, arguing that religious thinkers of all confessions used Enlightenment philosophy and science to rearticulate belief.[9] His most recent book is Jewish Emancipation: A History Across Five Centuries (2019), the first comprehensive study of the subject. It demonstrates that emancipation was and remains the principal event of modern Jewish history. It has been translated into Romanian and Chinese.
Sorkin has co-edited three volumes: Profiles in Diversity: Jews in a Changing Europe, 1750–1870 (1998),[10] New Perspectives on the Haskalah (2001),[11] and What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe (2004).[12] He served as associate editor of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), which won the National Jewish Book Award.[13] With Edward Breuer as co-editor and translator he published, Moses Mendelssohn's Hebrew Writings (Yale Judaic Studies, Yale University Press, 2018).
Sorkin's books have had a notable impact.[14] [11] The American Historical Review described Sorkin's The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna as a work that makes "very interesting discoveries about the parallel developments within different religions in the eighteenth century." Similarly, The New York Times described it as a "persuasive work" about how "Europe's major religions produced movements of religious reform compatible with the enlightenment."[15] Central European History reviewed it as a book of "very great importance, for early modernists and modern historians alike."[16]
Sorkin has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1994-5) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005–06). He is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research.