[Judaica]. Joseph, M, Steckelmacher, M. — Zur Sittenlehre des Judenthums. - BOUND BEFORE: M. Steckelmacher - Das Princip der Ethik: vom philosophischen und judisch theologischen Standpunkte aus betrachtet.

Ad 1: Berlin, M. Poppelauer, 1902, 1st ed., 56 pag., printed by Rudolph Mosse, contemporary gilt halfcloth. - Ad 2: Mainz, Jos. Wirth'schen Hofbuchdruckerei, 1904, (6), 255,(1) pag. = With owner's name in ink on title of "Sakale Horovitz [?]. Lacks probably the French title. Ad 1. Rare treatise by Rabbi Rabbi Max Joseph (1868-1950), who had demonstrated in 1901 decisively that despite his Zionism, he still belonged to the camp of liberal Judaism and its elaborate philosophical essay in five installments in the weekly Allgemeine Zeitung des udentums that reads like the summarized epitome of the main-stream liberal theology to which he subscribed. Entitled “Die Sittenlehre des Judentums” (Ethics of Judaism), the lengthy article appears to be a somewhat apologetic newspaper version of Moritz Lazarus’ Ethik des Judentums, the first volume of which had appeared in 1898. “Judaism was the first to combine reli-gion and morality with a truly idealistic consistency,” he wrote, very much in the spirit of the Reform Movement’s theory of the decisive contributions of the Jewish religion to the development of human culture. The rejection of mysticism as immoral, the reverence for the Hebrew prophets as the first teachers of universal ethics (“whose teachings have today become the common good of all civilized nations of the West”), the assertion that there are Jewish roots to all that is moral in Christianity-all these classical elements are discussed one after the other in Joseph’s essay, whereas Jewish nationalism is not even mentioned once." (G.Y. Kohler, Rabbi Max Joseph: Between Reform and Zionism ((2016)/.