Editors’ Introduction David N. Myers and Benjamin C. I. Ravid 1. On the Scope and Motives of this Volume The man whose thought stands at the center of this volume is one of the most original, though underappreciated, thinkers in twentieth-century Jewish intellectual life. Simon Rawidowicz (1896–1957) was distinctive in several regards: He was a wide-ranging student of Jewish thought, with expertise in the leading medieval and modern philosophers from Saadia Gaon, Yehuda Halevi, and Moses Maimonides to Moses Mendelssohn and Nachman Krochmal. Alongside his interest in these Jewish thinkers, Rawidowicz was familiar with the range of modern European thought. His dissertation on the Young Hegelian philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, became a chapter of a book that is still considered to be foundational today. Moreover, throughout his life Rawidowicz retained his youthful interest in Hebrew literature, ending his career as Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Hebrew Literature at Brandeis University. In addition to these domains of pursuit, Rawidowicz was consistently engaged in the articulation of a very particular vision of Jewish cultural nationalism. In fact, this vision was one of the last concerted expressions in what one might call the golden age of modern Jewish ideology. Nationalists of various stripes, socialists, religious traditionalists, and even assimila- tionists debated with intense passion and conviction the nature of Jewish collective identity in the early decades of the twentieth century. They were prompted to do so as a result of the rapid change and dramatic upheaval that confronted the Jewish people: the erosion of traditional ways of life and authority, urbanization, the First World War, and the devastating displacement and mass murder that occurred during and after it. Rawidowicz’s own contribution to this impassioned debate was a persistent, and rather intuitive, call to acknowledge that there was a Jewish nation with two equal centers, the Diaspora, which he termed “Babylon,” and the homeland, which he termed “Jerusalem.” He advocated this prop- osition of a dual-centered Jewish nation in innumerable written and oral expositions throughout much of his adult life. The summa summarum of his entire oeuvre was a nine-hundred-page, two volume Hebrew tome that