English masques were allegorical entertainments with dance and music, costumes, songs and speeches, and festive scenery. As a protean phenomenon, which flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, masques might assume the character of a low-key countryside event, a civic festivity, a high-profile state occasion, a university rompor a jollification at the Inns of Court in London. Plays of the early modern period often treated their audiences with a masque en miniature: silent dancing highlighted pivotal moments in the action and added to the suspense. Shakespeare's The Tempest includes a wedding masque whose “graceful dance” of nymphs and reapers “in country footing” is dangerously interrupted by invaders. In Restoration operas, masques showcased magical characters and dazzled spectators with spectacular ballet and scene transformations. Masques fused English traditions with foreign performance practices. With their abundance of danced pantomime, they represent an important precursor to John Weaver's balletic drama in the eighteenth century. This chapter will provide a brief history of this multifarious genre, and explore in greater depth the impact of continental balletic forms on masques performed in London during the early seventeenth century.

Masque-like mummeries had been popular since at least the early Tudor period. Henry VIII is said to have introduced disguisings in Italian style to the English court. In 1512, the king and his courtiers celebrated epiphany

Audience participation remained a crucial element in “masks”. As the Milanese ambassador reported about nightly revels in 1514, the king was dancing “in his shirt and without shoes” with the ladies, and leaping “like a stag”.

Premiere of Giselle ou les Wilis

Monday 28 June 1841

Ballet-Pantomime in 2 acts at the Académie Royale de Musique

The first chords of Rossini's music announcing the beginning of the third act of the opera Moïse can be heard faintly by the spectators who, uninterested in the 1827 opera chestnut, still wander about the Opéra's foyer as its prominent clock strikes eight. They have at least another hour before the curtain rises to reveal the long-awaited and much talked about new ballet, Giselle. Others – men, dressed in black tailcoats and top hats, asserting their privileged status derived from their associations with the worlds of business, of politics and the intelligentsia – have paid for the entitlement of entering the foyer de la danse to chat with the dancers. Aglow with the excitement of opening night, the dancers warm up and mark out their steps before the foyer's full-length mirrors. Or, in their dressing-rooms, they look to their make-up, jewels, last-minute fitting of their villagers’ costumes; many lay out their calf-length white dresses of layered gauze and crowns of flowers for the ballet's second act peopled with wilis, those enchanting dancing ghosts of maidens who, having died before their wedding day, lure each passing man into a dance that only ceases with his death from exhaustion and their diurnal fade-out. As is customary at the Paris Opéra, the evening will last three to four hours, almost until midnight.

Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes arrived in Paris in 1909 and immediately turned ballet into a high fashion in the Western hemisphere. But in 1920 a rival introduced itself to Paris: the Ballets Suédois. This company dared to perform in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, home ground of the Russians before the First World War. The newcomers quickly established themselves in the French capital and challenged Diaghilev's concept of avant-garde ballet. They took modernism to a new level and defined avant-garde not through the brilliance of ballet stars or spectacular extravaganza but through a concept that extended beyond all known theatrical conventions. Throughout its brief and hectic existence from 1920 to 1925, the Ballets Suédois were constantly criticised for being not Swedish enough as well as too Swedish, and above all for not presenting real ballet. In many ways the critics were right. The company was more international than Swedish in its character and instead of reinforcing the balletic tradition it searched for new paths in dance. The company's name pointed to its Swedish founders and its most prominent dancers. Its existence had come out of the art collection of the Swedish aristocrat Rolf de Maré, who had assembled significant modernist works by European, and particularly French, artists during the 1910s. He himself was the favourite grandchild of another great art collector in Sweden, the Countess Wilhelmina von Hallwyl. Around 1900 she was considered one of the wealthiest people in her country. Her grandson inherited her fascination for art and for collecting it. Both grandparents provided Rolf de Maré with the financial independence to pursue his exquisite but expensive interests. This financial independence also allowed him to feel secure enough to live his life as openly gay.

Ask any young woman on her way to a performance of Giselle or Sleeping Beauty what most clearly symbolises ballet and she will probably answer – the skirt and the pointe shoe. She will not quote sentences from the story and may recall only a few names of the characters. But after the performance she will remember the ballet costume of the female dancer. If she ever had ballet lessons she will reminisce about her first pointe shoes; she might still have them in the attic. Why this cult of the costume? Has ballet no message? Is it merely a flighty art form of beautiful lines, of flowing skirts and satin shoes?

The history of these two items of dress tell us exactly the opposite. The skirt and the point shoe represented a complete change in the nature of the ballet as an art form. They have not always been there. When they were introduced in the 1830s, roughly 180 years ago, they initiated a revolution in artistic values and a fundamental shift in the attitude towards women in public life.

How and why the tutu and the slipper achieved this pride of place in ballet will be explained in what follows. Less clear is why much ballet today still uses a dress code frozen in time.

The extraordinarily successful phenomenon of the romantic ballet represents a period of renewal of theatre dance but also a symbiosis between the performed and the written, between dancer and critic. Romantic ballet is an aesthetic movement both embodied and discursive. Ballet in the 1830s and 1840s cannot be considered without taking into account its written testimonies, which described a new and sensational physical technique, suggestive stage technology and an elaborate dramatic style. A cult of the romantic ballerina grew up that soon reached the higher spheres of myth-making. While there had always been admiration for stellar dancers, the ‘star system’ came into its own in the nineteenth century. The new writing on dance followed an era of aesthetic redefinition and fits perfectly in to Habermas's theory of the emergence of Öffentlichkeit or the “public sphere”. The commercialisation of opera performance brought in its wake a demand for consumer information and led to a flood of journalistic and fictional writings that grounded ballet firmly in the rapidly developing field of publicity. Audiences expanded and diversified. They extended to those who did not have to be present at a performance at all, to the “liseuses de feuilleton” and to those who enjoyed being able to observe the dancers through the eyes of a critic who might even allow glimpses into the secret spaces behind the stage, the green rooms of Europe's theatres to which only the lucky few were admitted.

The ballet de cour is a type of composite theatre performance, made up of instrumental and vocal music, texts declaimed in verse and prose, stage design, scenic accessories, costumes, masks and, not least, dance. Its “potentially chaotic” structure includes a series of successive entries, variable in number and type, divided into acts and culminating in a final grand ballet. The term “ballet” is used, therefore, to indicate both the whole piece as an entity as well as the danced portions of it. The definition ballet de cour was coined only in the nineteenth-century historiography in order to legitimate – although that was not explicitly expressed – classical ballet by associating it with the noble context in which it had allegedly been born.

The ballet de cour was born and developed at the French court in the last decades of the sixteenth century and lasted – with a variety of ups and downs, among which was a crisis of popularity during the regency of Anne of Austria – right to the end of the seventeenth century. Its evolution tracked the parallel consolidation of the French monarchy from the first Valois king, Henry III, through the Bourbons Henry IV and Louis XIII. It reached its apogee at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV (1638–1715) in the years after 1643 when he became king. Louis, who until 1670 regularly danced leading roles himself, attracted the attention of his courtiers, both French and those from foreign courts, to the ballet de cour. The progressive decline of the form began when the king retired from active performance but also as a consequence of altered conditions in court politics and in the relations between the crown and society as a whole.

The ballet d'action, a narrative ballet, was an invention of the eighteenth century. It replaced the pompous grands ballets of baroque absolutism that had evolved out of the Italian Renaissance intermedii. Both court entertainments, grands ballets and intermedii or divertissements, had primarily represented and glorified the sovereign; the ballet d'action, on the other hand, was supposed to tell stories that followed their own narrative logic and lay beyond princely power fantasies.

The emergence of the ballet d'action relied on three factors: first, enlightenment ideas had spread to dance theory. Hence it became possible to introduce the notion that dance could and should be independent from the other arts. Secondly, the academic ballet of the eighteenth century strove towards a technical refinement that aristocratic amateurs practising dance could no longer fulfil. Thirdly, theatre as a cultural institution underwent a process of professionalisation in which the performer and the observer began to be separated from each other.

Critical contributions for a ballet reform came from France and the French danse d'école. Paris, the Mecca of the art of dance, housed the Académie Royale de la Danse, founded by Louis XIV in 1661, the institution that had overseen dance and had created a style that reached far beyond Paris or France into Europe. Students of the Académie had been celebrated as virtuosi. Increasingly, though, the empty pompousness of the absolutist court ballets and the rococo divertissements aroused more and more criticism.

Emil Fackenheim’s intellectual career, if we date its origin with his entrance into the Hochschule in Berlin in 1935, spanned sixty-eight years (b. 1917-d. 2003). Looking back over his career, it is probably not inaccurate to take the Holocaust to be its core and to assess his post- Holocaust writings as his most important contribution and legacy. But for Fackenheim, the Holocaust was not solely a rupture in Jewish history and Jewish thought; it was also a rupture in world history and philosophical thought. Yet too little attention has been paid to the way in which for Fackenheim the Holocaust can be understood as a rupture in the philosophical tradition itself.

During Purim 1967, March 26, Steven Schwarzschild, then editor of Judaism, convened a symposium in New York at the annual meeting of the board of the journal and under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee, on the theme “Jewish Values in the Post- Holocaust Future.” Schwarzschild chaired a panel of four speakers, each of whom was invited to make a short statement; discussion followed. The four participants were George Steiner, Richard Popkin, Elie Wiesel, and Emil Fackenheim. This was the first public occasion on which Fackenheim presented his formulation of the 614th commandment. It was an invitation, Fackenheim later said, that he could not refuse, although it took an extreme emotional and moral toll on him.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, no non-Jewish philosopher has been more central to Jewish philosophy than Kant. The major Jewish philosophers of late modernity have worked out their positions in relation to Kant, sometimes through the mediation of post-Kantians such as Hegel, Schelling, and Schopenhauer - just as the major ancient and medieval Jewish philosophers worked out their positions in relation to Plato, sometimes through the mediation of post-Platonists such as Aristotle, Plotinus and Alfarabi. What is the cause of Jewish philosophy’s intimate relation to Kant?

One explanation is that Kant’s career coincided with the entry of Jews into German academic and intellectual life, a development to which Kant was openly sympathetic and for which justification could be found in his philosophy, with its doctrine of equal respect for each rational being. When Moses Mendelssohn visited Kant’s lectures in Königsberg, Kant is said to have silenced the students' anti-Semitic jeers by greeting the great Jewish philosopher with a show of respect. Kant had several Jewish students, including Markus Herz, whom he chose to defend his (Kant’s) inaugural dissertation in 1770. These students, to whom an academic career was open only if they converted to Christianity, chose instead to promote Kantianism from within the Jewish community.

Was Leo Strauss a modern Jewish thinker? Was this even a category that Strauss recognized? The question is not an idle one. It is not self-evident that Strauss belongs to the canon of modern Jewish thinkers in which one might expect to find names like Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, and Emmanuel Levinas. His work dealt characteristically with the philosophical tradition rather than the Jewish tradition. His studies on Jewish thinkers and themes occupy a relatively small portion of his total corpus of writing. And his most important (or at any rate, his most widely read) book, Natural Right and History, contains scarcely a word about any Jewish topic. Given these considerations, what has Strauss contributed to modern Jewish thought?

Before trying to answer these questions, some biography. Leo Strauss was born in the Hessian village of Kirchhain in 1899. He was brought up in an observant household, where he remarked later that the Jewish laws “were rather strictly observed.” After graduating from a humanistic Gymnasium and a brief service in World War I, Strauss attended the university at Marburg that was then the center of the neo-Kantian revival inspired by Hermann Cohen. Strauss received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1921, where he prepared a dissertation under the direction of Ernst Cassirer.

What is modern Jewish philosophy, and is there such a thing at all? If there is, what makes it modern? What makes it Jewish? And what makes it philosophy? Indeed, who asks such a question and for what reason? Do such questions convey a challenge to the very existence of a species of philosophy that is genuinely Jewish and modern as well? Do they call upon one to respond, perhaps in order to be an advocate on behalf of modern Jewish philosophy and to defend it against its detractors? These questions are puzzling. While they may seem simple in content and easily dispatched, even a moment’s scrutiny will expose how difficult they are to answer, and even to understand.

A skeptic might argue that there is no such thing as Jewish philosophy. For philosophy (our bold interlocutor might explain) is the pursuit of universal questions. And the methods we use when posing such questions can display no particular identities and can be bound by no particular commitments other than the devotion to philosophy itself. Julius Guttmann, one of the twentieth century’s greatest scholars on this debate, accordingly entitled his 1933 survey The Philosophy of Judaism (Die Philosophie des Judentums). The title seems to have implied that notwithstanding the particular object in view, the method remained nonetheless universal and purely rational: a philosophy of Judaism, but not a Jewish philosophy. So our imaginary skeptic may well have a point. If philosophy is simply a human impulse, then “Jewish philosophy” would have to be understood as the application of a general philosophical approach to specific themes (Judaism, Jewish existence, and so forth). But matters are hardly that straightforward.

[Translated by John Denton]

Was Hermann Cohen a Jewish thinker or a German philosopher? Did he belong chiefly to the tradition of Jewish philosophy or instead to the classical tradition of critical idealism, of which Kant is the paradigmatic figure and fundamental reference point? Contemporary opinion of Cohen was marked by controversy. In Jewish circles, although he was respected and acknowledged as an authoritative voice, he was also criticized and accused of denying his Jewish identity. Meanwhile, his philosophical works, notwithstanding respectful attentions, were not always successful in the academic world, where he more than once encountered problems because of his Jewish origins. In this chapter, I shall address the question of Cohen’s status as a Jewish philosopher chiefly by examining Cohen’s occasional texts on Jewish topics and contemporary controversies that affected the Jewish community in his day.

COHEN’s LIFE: A BRIEF SKETCH

Hermann Cohen was born in Coswig (Anhalt) on 4 July 1842, the son of Gerson Cohen and Friederike Salomon. At the age of eleven, he was sent to the grammar school in Dessau. At the age of fifteen, though still enrolled in the grammar school as an external student, Hermann entered the theological seminary in Breslau, where he commenced his rabbinical training. As soon as he had received his school certificate, he also left the seminary, as he was now drawn to philosophy and philology. In 1861, he enrolled in the University of Breslau, and in 1864, he moved to Berlin to study at the University there.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) occupies a somewhat awkward position in the historiography of Jewish philosophy. In the standard story - or at least those versions of it that move beyond the simplistic description of how his philosophy represents a radical and heretical break from what comes before - he is presented either as the culmination of the Jewish medieval rationalist tradition (especially Maimonides and Gersonides) or as the father of modern Jewish thought, and sometimes as both. These are important (but still all too infrequently studied) perspectives for understanding Spinoza’s metaphysical, moral, and political ideas, and not just their antecedents and their legacies, but their substantive content as well. While most scholarly attention has been devoted to the seventeenth-century Cartesian background of Spinoza’s philosophy, his system also needs to be situated (as Harry Wolfson and others have recognized) in a Jewish philosophical context. But is this enough to give him a rightful place in a “Companion” to Jewish philosophy? After all, Thomas Aquinas was strongly influenced by Maimonides, and our understanding of the Summa Theologiae is deepened by a familiarity with the Guide for the Perplexed, but no one of course has ever suggested that St. Thomas is a Jewish philosopher. Does the additional fact that Spinoza, unlike Thomas, is Jewish alone qualify him for membership in the canon of “Jewish philosophers”?