As the 20th century progressed, Nordau seemed increasingly irrelevant as a cultural critic.

The term Entartung ( or " degeneracy ") had gained currency in Germany by the late 19th century when the critic and author Max Nordau devised the theory presented in his 1892 book, Entartung.

This approach received a boost in the 19th century from the physical culture campaign of Max Nordau, and in the early 20th century when the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook, declared that the body serves the soul, and only a healthy body can ensure a healthy soul.

* January 23 – Max Nordau, Hungarian author, philosopher, and Zionist leader ( b. 1849 )

* July 29 – Max Nordau, Austrian author, philosopher, and Zionist leader ( d. 1923 )

Nordau drew upon the writings of the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose The Criminal Man, published in 1876, attempted to prove that there were " born criminals " whose atavistic personality traits could be detected by scientifically measuring abnormal physical characteristics.

Nordau developed from this premise a critique of modern art, explained as the work of those so corrupted and enfeebled by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works.

Despite the fact that Nordau was Jewish and a key figure in the Zionist movement ( Lombroso was also Jewish ), his theory of artistic degeneracy would be seized upon by German National Socialists during the Weimar Republic as a rallying point for their anti-Semitic and racist demand for Aryan purity in art.

Max Simon Nordau ( July 29, 1849 – January 23, 1923 ), born Simon Maximilian Südfeld in Pest, Hungary, was a Zionist leader, physician, author, and social critic.

Nordau was born Simon Maximilian, or Simcha Südfeld on 29 July 1849 in Budapest, then part of the Austrian Empire.

Nordau was an example of a fully assimilated and acculturated European Jew.

Nordau went on to play a major role in the World Zionist Organisation ; indeed Nordau's relative fame certainly helped bring attention to the Zionist movement.

James mocks the author on the grounds that he exemplifies the then current school of medical materialism, stating that Nordau " has striven to impugn the value of works of genius in a wholesale way ( such works of contemporary art, namely, as he himself is unable to enjoy, and they are many ) by using medical arguments.

Nordau saw in Jewish Emancipation the result of ' a regular equation: Every man is born with certain rights ; the Jews are human beings, consequently the Jews are born to own the rights of man.

Nordau cited England as an exception to this continental anti-Semitism that proved the rule.

Nordau also, at the 1898 Zionist Congress, coined the term " muscular Judaism " ( muskel-Judenthum ) as a descriptor of a Jewish culture and religion which directed its adherents to reach for certain moral and corporeal ideals which, through discipline, agility and strength, would result in a stronger, more physically assured Jew who would outshine the long-held stereotype of the weak, intellectually sustained Jew.

Nordau was central to the Zionist Congresses which played such a vital part in shaping what Zionism would become.

It was Nordau, convinced that Zionism had to at least appear democratic, despite the impossibility of representing all Jewish groups, who persuaded Herzl of the need for an assembly.

" There would be eleven such Congresses in all, the first, which Nordau organised, was in Basle, 29 – 31 August 1897.

Indeed the fact that Max Nordau, the trenchant essayist and journalist, was a Jew came as a revelation for many.

Herzl obviously took centre stage, making the first speech at the Congress ; Nordau followed him with an assessment of the Jewish condition in Europe.

Nordau used statistics to paint a portrait of the dire straits of Eastern Jewry and also expressed his belief in the destiny of Jewish people as a democratic nation state, free of what he saw as the constraints of Emancipation.

Whereas Herzl favoured the idea of an elite forming policy, Nordau insisted the Congress have a democratic nature of some sort, calling for votes on key topics.

Nordau was also a staunch eugenicist.

Nordau died in Paris, France in 1923.

The casual seduction of a seventeen-year-old bluestocking seemed tame by comparison.

It is as follows: `` The usual sensitivity tests showed that the specific qualities of skin-perceptiveness ( pressure, pain, temperature ), as well as the kinesthetic sensations ( muscular feelings, feelings in the tendons and joints ), were, as such, essentially intact, although they seemed, in comparison with normal reactions, to be somewhat diminished over the entire body.

The buildings were clad in white stucco, which, in comparison to the tenements of Chicago, seemed illuminated.

His spectacles, too, in comparison with the experimental methods of Poel and other producers, seemed outdated, although Tree responded to his critics by noting that his productions remained profitable and well attended.

Some hold them to be marks of erasure ; others believe them to indicate that in some collated manuscripts the stigmatized words were missing, hence that the reading is doubtful ; still others contend that they are merely a mnemonic device to indicate homiletical explanations which the ancients had connected with those words ; finally, some maintain that the dots were designed to guard against the omission by copyists of text-elements which, at first glance or after comparison with parallel passages, seemed to be superfluous.

Even the three great towers near Herod's palace seemed small in comparison.

Indeed, the play's situation was almost bound to be better than its resolution, which by comparison seemed trite and anticlimactic.

In comparison, the pre-war changes seemed tame.

He may have just seemed bald in comparison with Weebl and Bob's mullets, which were inexplicably destroyed near the end of the episode.

However, his performance on the campaign trail sometimes seemed lackluster, especially in comparison to the dynamic Arkansas Governor, Bill Clinton.

In a social sense, the party presented an older and more traditional image in comparison to the Alberta Progressive Conservatives, who, given the predominance of Social Credit, seemed fairly liberal.

Astruc's methods were adopted by German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn ( 1752 – 1827 ) and Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette ( 1780 – 1849 ) in a movement which became known as the higher criticism ( to distinguish it from the far longer-established close examination and comparison of individual manuscripts, called the lower criticism ); this school reached its apogee with the influential synthesis of Julius Wellhausen ( 1844 – 1918 ) in the 1870s, at which point it seemed to many that the Bible had at last been fully explained as a human document.

As humans progressively increased their understanding of nature, the previous " realm " of God seemed to many persons and religions to be getting smaller and smaller by comparison.

Limbaugh explained the comparison as Calderón seemed to be a puppet, articulating US President Barack Obama's philosophies during the State visit press conference on May 19, 2010.

In comparison, Poiret's elaborate designs seemed dowdy and poorly manufactured.

In a year when Van Morrison and Patti Smith released their own spiritual works in Into the Music and Wave, respectively, Dylan's album seemed vitriolic and bitter in comparison.

To Edith, the youthful Bywaters represented her romantic ideal ; by comparison, 29-year-old Percy seemed staid and conventional.

I shall review this exhibition soon, but upon my first glance his pictures and collages seemed to contain a very gentle beauty that made “ my rebel ” Dellert appear as a Titan by comparison.

Aside from the praise, Erlewine voiced a common criticism of the album: Carey's voice seemed " damaged " in comparison with her " glory years " in the 1990s.

After giving Charlie a hard time about his chores, he seemed to grasp Charlie's situation more fully after a comparison to Einstein's.

In comparison, Country Standard Time reviewer Jeffrey B. Remz thought that many of the duo's songs lacked distinctiveness, saying that they seemed to be derivative of Daniels and Travis Tritt.

Emanuel Margoliash's first publication of sequence data for cytochrome c allowed comparison of the rates of molecular evolution for different proteins ( cytochrome c seemed to evolve faster than hemoglobin ), which Zuckerkandl discussed at a 1964 conference in Bruges.

To some, interpretive semantics seemed rather " clunky " and ad-hoc in comparison.

Later philosophers, either by insisting too exclusively on the uncertainty of the senses ( in order like Arcesilaus to exaggerate by comparison the value of speculative truth ), or like Carneades and Philo, by extending the same fallibility to reason, had fallen into a degree of scepticism that seemed to strike at the root of all truth, theoretical and practical.