This volume attempts to make a modest contribution to the historical study of Jewish doubt, focusing on the encounter between atheistic and sceptical modes of thought and the religion of Judaism. Along with related philosophies including philosophical materialism and scientific naturalism, atheism and scepticism are amongst the most influential intellectual trends in Western thought and society. As such, they represent too important a phenomenon to ignore in any study of religion that seeks to locate the latter within the modern world. For scholars of Judaism and the Jewish people, the issue is even more pressing in that for Jews, famously, the categories of religion and ethnicity blur so that it makes sense to speak of non-Jewish Jews many of whom have historically been indifferent or even hostile to religion.

Themed volume: Atheism, Scepticism and Challenges to Monotheism.
Editor: Daniel R. Langton.
Assistant editor: Simon Mayers.

Open Access, freely available online: www.melilahjournal.org/p/2015.html

Contents:

1. Introduction.
2. Kenneth Seeskin, From Monotheism to Scepticism and Back Again.
3. Joshua Moss, Satire, Monotheism and Scepticism.
4. David Ruderman, Are Jews the Only True Monotheists? Some Critical Reflections in Jewish Thought from the Renaissance to the Present.
5. Benjamin Williams, Doubting Abraham doubting God: The Call of Abraham in the Or ha-Sekhel.
6. Károly Dániel Dobos, Shimi the Sceptical: Sceptical Voices. in an Early Modern Jewish, Anti-Christian Polemical Drama by Matityahu Nissim Terni.
7. Jeremy Fogel, Scepticism of Scepticism: On Mendelssohn’s Philosophy of Common Sense.
8. Michael Miller, Kaplan and Wittgenstein: Atheism, Phenomenology and the use of language.
9. Federico Dal Bo, Textualism and Scepticism: Post-modern Philosophy and the Theology of Text.
10. Norman Solomon, The Attenuation of God in Modern Jewish Thought.
11. Melissa Raphael, Idoloclasm: The First Task of Second Wave Liberal Jewish Feminism.
12. Daniel R. Langton, Joseph Krauskopf’s Evolution and Judaism: One Reform Rabbi’s Response to Scepticism and Materialism in Nineteenth-century North America.
13. Avner Dinur, Secular Theology as a Challenge for Jewish Atheists.
14. Khayke Beruriah Wiegand, “Why the Geese Shrieked”: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Work between Mysticism and Sceptics.

Melilah is published electronically by the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester (ISSN 1759-1953), and as a printed edition by Gorgias Press.