Amos Funkenstein

Amos Funkenstein (1937-1995) was an American-Jewish historian of Jewish history.^[1] Funkenstein's work encompassed several disciplines.^[2]

Amos Funkenstein
Born	9 March 1937  Jaffa
Died	11 November 1995  (aged 58)
Occupation	Philosopher, university teacher
Awards	Guggenheim Fellowship Israel Prize (1995)

Biography

Funkenstein was born into an Orthodox family in pre-state Israel and was childhood friends with Adin Steinsaltz.^[1] Funkenstein declared his atheism as a child in religious school in Jerusalem.^[3] Funkenstein, like Baruch Spinoza, was considered heretical.^[4][3][5]

In 1967, he started his career as a history professor at UCLA, where David Biale was among his graduate students and teaching assistants,^[1] and later taught at Tel Aviv University, Stanford and UC Berkeley.^[6] Biale recalled that Funkenstein favored originality, preferring to be "bold and wrong" than "boring and right."^[7]

Funkenstein wrote seven books in English, German, Hebrew and French, and over 50 articles, and was said to have a photographic memory, reciting lengthy passages memorized in Greek and Latin from books he had long ago read. He died of lung cancer in November 1995 at age 58, survived by his wife Esti and two children, Jakob and Daniela.^[1]

Publications

• Funkenstein, Amos (1965). Heilsplan und natürliche Entwicklung: Formen der Gegenwartsbestimmung im Geschichtsdenken des hohen Mittelalters (in German). Nymphenburger Verlanshandlung.
• Funkenstein, Amos (1989). Theology and the scientific imagination from the middle ages to the 17th century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02425-7.
• Funkenstein, Amos (1990). Intellectuals and Jews. Temple Emanu-El.
• Funkenstein, Amos; פונקנשטיין, עמוס (1991). תדמית ותודעה היסטורית ביהדות ובסביבתה התרבותית (in Hebrew). עם עובד. ISBN 978-965-13-0732-4.
• Funkenstein, Amos (1993). Perceptions of Jewish history. A centennial book. Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-07702-7.
• Funkenstein, Amos (1995). Jüdische Geschichte und ihre Deutungen (in German). Jüdischer Verlag. ISBN 978-3-633-54099-0.
• Steinsaltz, Adin; Функенштейн, Амос (1997). Социология невежества (in Russian). Институт изучения иудаизма в СНГ. ISBN 978-5-86676-006-0.
• Funkenstein, Amos (1997). Maimonides: nature, history, and messianic beliefs. Tel-Aviv: MOD Books. ISBN 978-965-05-0909-5.
• Funkenstein, Amos (2018-11-13). Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Second Edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-18426-5.