The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume One: Revelation and Apocalypse

The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, Volume One: Revelation and Apocalypse is the first volume, fully annotated, of a major, previously unpublished, two-part work by Erich Neumann (1905-1960).It was written between 1934 and 1940, after Neumann, then a young philosopher and physician and freshly trained as a disciple of Jung, fled Berlin to settle in Tel Aviv.He finished the second volume of this work at the end of World War II.Although he never published either volume, he kept them the rest of his life. The challenge of Jewish survival frames Neumann’s work existentially.This survival, he insists, must be psychological and spiritual as much as physical.In Volume One, Revelation and Apocalypse, he argues that modern Jews must relearn what ancient Jews once understood but lost during the Babylonian Exile: that is, the individual capacity to meet the sacred directly, to receive revelation, and to prophesy.Neumann interprets scriptural and intertestamental (apocalyptic) literature through th