![]() ![]() Yet the passion for scholarship, the commitment to human realization in the world, and, in Radin’s case, the fascinated concern with religion and ethics, maintained a distinctively Jewish cast. The skepticism and rationalism, however, were largely reactive protests against the cramping social and intellectual orthodoxy of the patriarchal and theocratic past. For the Radins these secular professions, which refocused the traditional Jewish concern with ritual learning but which did not abandon learning as a ritual, were ideologically correlated with a humane, if skeptical, liberalism. Herman, his oldest brother, became a physician, and Max, next in line, was a distinguished legal scholar. His father was a rabbi of the reform movement, a Hebrew scholar, and a linguist. ![]() ![]() He came from a German-Russian Jewish family that had become secularized in the mode of the haskalah, the Jewish strand in the western European Enlightenment. Radin’s personal and social background was complex. Despite the fact that he was brought to the United States in infancy, he never severed his European roots, and he could never bring himself to accept the New World completely, except, ironically, for his association of nearly fifty years with the Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin. Paul Radin, American anthropologist, was born in Lodz, Russian Poland, in 1883 and died in New York City in 1959. ![]()
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