Cover -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Sins and Doubts -- Suspicions Arise -- Religion under Attack -- Early Jewish Skepticism -- Acculturation and Rebellion -- Secularization Terminology -- PART I: LIBERTY AND HERESY, 1700-1760 -- 1 Pleasures and Liberation from Religious Supervision -- Insulting the Angels of God -- Physical Gratifications -- 2 Temptations of Fashion and Passion -- Life à la Mode: Temptations of the City -- Temptations of Eros -- Hedonism and Abandoning God -- 3 The Mystical Sect: Subversive Sabbateans -- A New Torah to Permit the Forbidden: From Hayon to Eybeschütz -- ''I Will Trample on All the Laws'': Antinomianism and Libertinism -- 4 The Rationalist Sect: Neo-Karaites and Deists -- Freethinkers and the Threat of Reason -- The Fool Says in His Heart That There Is No God: Skepticism and Jewish Identity -- PART II: A NEW WORLD, 1760-80 -- 5 Providence Is Tested: Secularization on the Rise in the 1760s -- Warning Bells Toll in Europe -- To Remove the Shackles of the Commandments: Indifference and Laxity -- Counterreaction: The Early Maskilim -- 6 The Supremacy of Nature: Deists on the Margins -- A Generation without Religion: The 1770s -- From the Second Spinoza to the Biological Epicurean -- Religious Skeptics: The ''Primitive Ebrew'' and the Blasphemer -- 7 The Emergence of the New World -- For We Are All Made of Flesh: Fashionable Jews in Amsterdam and Hamburg -- The Autonomous Individual: Fanny's and Henriette's Hairstyles -- PART III: THE OVERTURNED WORLD, 1780-90 -- 8 Scandals and Rebellions -- Religious Tolerance and Skepticism in Europe -- The Sect of the Wicked Reveals Its Face -- Trash Heap of the Ceremonial Laws: The Heterodox in Breslau and Berlin -- 9 Replacing Mosaic Laws with Laws of Freedom -- The Sect of Germans Grows Stronger in Prussia -- A Peep into Jewish Life in London.

How to Reply to an Epicurean: Fears of Conservatives from Virginia to Lithuania -- PART IV: ANXIETIES AND CONFRONTATIONS, 1790-1800 -- 10 On the Decline of Judaism: The Last Decade -- Between Linitz and London: Irreligion and the Mysteries of Religion -- Between Observance and Laxity: Rifts and Tensions -- Epicureans on the Offensive: Provocations and Conflicts -- 11 Soon Our Faith Will Be Lost: Deists and Believers -- Falsifications of the Rabbis: Deistic Texts -- Transgressions Have Become Permissible: The Counter-War of the Congregation of Believers -- Summary: Free Jews and the Origins of Secularization -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z -- Acknowledgments.