This book considers the image of the Israelite in 18th century Germany. This was important at the time because new concepts of ethnicity, government, civil society, and nation were being articulated. Germans were looking to the Israelites as a basis for remodeling German culture. – The author is a post-doctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University. He has published numerous articles on the history of ideas, German-Jewish relations, and the history of sexuality. He is an essayist and literary critic for El Haaretz, a major Israeli newspaper.