Download or read book Judeophobia written by Peter Schfer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking a fresh look at what the Greeks and Romans thought about Jews and Judaism, Peter Schafer locates the origin of anti-Semitism in the ancient world. Judeophobia firmly establishes Hellenistic Egypt as the generating source of anti-Semitism, with roots extending back into Egypt's pre-Hellenistic history. A pattern of ingrained hostility toward an alien culture emerges when Schafer surveys an illuminating spectrum of comments on Jews and their religion in Greek and Roman writings, focusing on the topics that most interested the pagan classical world: the exodus or, as it was widely interpreted, expulsion from Egypt; the nature of the Jewish god; food restrictions, in particular abstinence from pork; laws relating to the sabbath; the practice of circumcision; and Jewish proselytism. He then probes key incidents, two fierce outbursts of hostility in Egypt: the destruction of a Jewish temple in Elephantine in 410 B.C.E. and the riots in Alexandria in 38 C.E. Asking what fueled these attacks on Jewish communities, the author discovers deep-seated ethnic resentments. It was from Egypt that hatred of Jews, based on allegations of impiety, xenophobia, and misanthropy, was transported first to Syria-Palestine and then to Rome, where it acquired a new element: fear of this small but distinctive community. To the hatred and fear, ingredients of Christian theology were soon added--a mix all too familiar in Western history.
Download or read book History of an Obsession written by Klaus P. Fischer and published by Continuum. This book was released on 2001-04-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Klaus Fischer charts the tortured history of German-Jewish relations over a millennium, from migration and ghettoization in the Middle Ages to enlightenment and emancipation in the eighteenth century to varieties of anti-Jewish prejudices in the Second Reich to the rise of pathological Judeophobia in the years 1918 to 1933. The aim of the book is to provide a historical explanation for this change in consciousness that began with a religious prejudice, moved to social and political discrimination, and ended up in annihilatory rage.
Download or read book Echoes of Contempt written by Bruce D. Thompson and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-10-17 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Echoes of Contempt is an engaging and vivid account of the tragic history of the church’s relationship with Jewish communities over two millennia. Beginning with the Jerusalem house church, the book traces that history through medieval pogroms and the Parisian salons of the Enlightenment, right up to the present-day focus on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Drawing on a wide range of sources and his own extensive knowledge, the author shows that, far from being something new, Judeophobia is a recycling of misinformation, prejudice, and hatred. The old lies are echoed in the present at political rallies, church conferences, and in classrooms. While the book is accessible to those who have very little previous knowledge of the subject, it is well-researched and retains a sophisticated approach. It is more than a reminder of the church’s complicity in the centuries of contempt that led to Auschwitz—it is a call to action. It will challenge many to think again.
Download or read book The History of an Obsession written by Klaus P. Fischer and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1998 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The state-sponsored genocide known as the Holocaust was the greatest crime of this century and a seminal event of modern times. In this major work, Klaus Fischer unravels the complex history of Judeophobia in its four essential forms: Christian, nationalistic, social-discriminatory, and biological-racial. He argues that German defeat in World War I cleared the way for the pathological Judeophobia that formed the core of Nazism. When Hitler turned Germany into a racist totalitarian state, Jews changed from "Christ-killers" or alien outsiders to racial subhumans, or deadly bacilli. Fischer carefully explores the German-Jewish relationship in modern times in all its dimensions. He reveals how the Nazis' anti-Jewish prejudices became public policy in the Third Reich, and traces the interaction between ideological obsession and bureaucratic decisions that led to the Final Solution. Finally, Fischer shows the global implications of the Holocaust by exploring how collectivized and aberrant thinking, when it becomes institutionalized in a modern technological state, can cause even greater horrors in the future.
Download or read book The New Antisemitism written by Paul Iganski and published by Profile Books Limited. This book was released on 2003 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antisemitism has always been with us - but its current vigour and forms may be expressions of something quite new. This perceptive collection identifies the issues and analyses what is behind this Europe-wide antagonism.
Download or read book The Construct of Identity in Hellenistic Judaism written by Erich S. Gruen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.
Download or read book The Darker Side of Genius written by Jacob Katz and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism considered in the context of his time, place, and aspirations rather than in relation to his later appropriation by the Nazis.
Download or read book The Politics of Unreason written by Lars Rensmann and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic analysis of the Frankfurt Schools research and theorizing on modern antisemitism. Although the Frankfurt School represents one of the most influential intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, its multifaceted work on modern antisemitism has so far largely been neglected. The Politics of Unreason fills this gap, providing the first systematic study of the Frankfurt Schools philosophical, psychological, political, and social research and theorizing on the problem of antisemitism. Examining the full range of these critical theorists contributions, from major studies and prominent essays to seemingly marginal pieces and aphorisms, Lars Rensmann reconstructs how the Frankfurt School, faced with the catastrophe of the genocide against the European Jews, explains forms and causes of anti-Jewish politics of hate. The book also pays special attention to research on coded and secondary antisemitism after the Holocaust, and how resentments are politically mobilized under conditions of democracy. By revisiting and rereading the Frankfurt Schools original work, this book challenges several misperceptions about critical theorys research, making the case that it provides an important source to better understand the social origins and politics of antisemitism, racism, and hate speech in the modern world. The Frankfurt Schools analysis of antisemitism, pathbreaking in so many respects, has been a curiously neglected aspect of its legacy. In his lucid and insightful book, Lars Rensmann helps to remedy this gap in critical theorys reception history. Thereby, he has produced a pioneering study, demonstrating convincingly how the theoretical and methodological framework developed by Adorno, Horkheimer, et al., remains, in many respects, more relevant than ever. Richard Wolin, author of The Frankfurt School Revisited: And Other Essays on Politics and Society The Politics of Unreason is fascinating and richly written. Rensmann digs deeply into critical theory and its arguments. These arguments are spelled out in detail and with precision. He gives real insights into how critical theory approaches the whole issue of hate and unreason, and what critical theory develops as a critique of unreason and its pathological consequences. James M. Glass, coeditor of Re-Imagining Public Space: The Frankfurt School in the 21st Century
Download or read book How I Stopped Being a Jew written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person’s camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a “secular Jew.” With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the “chosen people” myth and its “holocaust industry.” Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what “Jewish” means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.
Download or read book Nietzsche s Jewish Problem written by Robert C. Holub and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive account of Nietzsche's views of Jews and Judaism For more than a century, Nietzsche's views about Jews and Judaism have been subject to countless polemics. The Nazis infamously fashioned the philosopher as their anti-Semitic precursor, while in the past thirty years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. The increasingly popular view today is that Nietzsche was not only completely free of racist tendencies but also was a principled adversary of anti-Jewish thought. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem offers a definitive reappraisal of the controversy, taking the full historical, intellectual, and biographical context into account. As Robert Holub shows, a careful consideration of all the evidence from Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings and letters reveals that he harbored anti-Jewish prejudices throughout his life. Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem demonstrates how this is so despite the apparent paradox of the philosopher’s well-documented opposition to the crude political anti-Semitism of the Germany of his day. As Holub explains, Nietzsche’s "anti-anti-Semitism" was motivated more by distaste for vulgar nationalism than by any objection to anti-Jewish prejudice. A richly detailed account of a controversy that goes to the heart of Nietzsche’s reputation and reception, Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem will fascinate anyone interested in philosophy, intellectual history, or the history of anti-Semitism.
Download or read book The End of Jewish Modernity written by Enzo Traverso and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative take on Jewish history, explaining the metamorphoses ofmainstream Jewish culture and politics.
Download or read book Key Concepts in the Study of Antisemitism written by Sol Goldberg and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is designed to assist university faculty and students studying and teaching about antisemitism, racism, and other forms of prejudice. In contrast with similar volumes, it is organized around specific concepts instead of chronology or geography. It promotes conversation about antisemitism across disciplinary, geographic, and thematic lines rather than privileging a single methodological paradigm, a specific academic field, or an overarching narrative. Its twenty-one chapters by leading scholars in diverse fields address the relationship to antisemitism of concepts ranging from Anti-Judaism to Zionism. Each chapter not only traces the history and major scholarly debates around a key concept; it also presents an original argument, points to avenues for further research, and exemplifies a method of investigation.
Download or read book Comprehending and Confronting Antisemitism written by Armin Lange and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a compendium of the history of and discourse about antisemitism - both as a unique cultural and religious category. Antisemitic stereotypes function as religious symbols that express and transmit a belief system of Jew-hatred, which are stored in the cultural and religious memories of the Western and Muslim worlds, migrating freely between Christian, Muslim and other religious symbolic systems.
Download or read book Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe written by James Renton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-05 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Crusades until the twenty-first century in the principal flashpoints of the two racisms. With case studies ranging from the Balkans to the UK, the contributors take the debate away from politicised polemics about whether or not Muslims are the new Jews. Much previous scholarship and public discussion has focused on comparing European ideas about Jews and Judaism in the past with contemporary attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. This volume rejects this approach. Instead, it interrogates how the dynamic relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia has evolved over time and space. The result is the uncovering of a previously unknown story in which European ideas about Jews and Muslims were indeed connected, but were also ripped apart. Religion, empire, nation-building, and war, all played their part in the complex evolution of this relationship. As well as a study of prejudice, this book also opens up a new area of inquiry: how Muslims, Jews, and others have responded to these historically connected racisms. The volume brings together leading scholars in the emerging field of antisemitism-Islamophobia studies who work in a diverse range of disciplines: anthropology, history, sociology, critical theory, and literature. Together, they help us to understand a Europe in which Jews and Arabs were once called Semites, and today are widely thought to be on two different sides of the War on Terror.
Download or read book Mirror of His Beauty written by Peter Schäfer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-17 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this beautifully realized study, Peter Schäfer investigates the origins of a female manifestation of God in Jewish mysticism. The search itself is a fascinating exploration of the idea of a feminine divinity. And Schäfer's surprising but persuasive conclusions yield deeper understanding of the complex but frequently intimate relationship between Christianity and Judaism--and of the development of religious concepts more generally. Toward the end of the twelfth century, a small book titled the Bahir (Light) appeared in Provence. The first document of Judaism's emerging kabbalistic movement, it introduced a completely new view of God, one that included a divine potency that was essentially female. This female divinity was portrayed both as a mediator between Jews and God and as part of the Godhead itself. Examining Judaic history from the biblical Wisdom tradition to the Middle Ages, Schäfer finds some precedents for the Kabbalah's feminine divinity. But he cannot account for her forceful appearance in twelfth-century southern France without reference to the immediate Christian environment, particularly the flourishing veneration of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, twelfth-century Jews and Christians were simultaneously rediscovering the feminine as an aspect of the Godhead after having abandoned it in favor of either an abstract, disembodied God or an exclusively male one. In proposing that the medieval cult of Mary--rather than eastern Gnosticism--is the appropriate framework for understanding the feminine elements in Jewish mysticism, Mirror of His Beauty represents a sea change in Kabbalah and Jewish-Christian cultural studies. It shifts our attention from the Byzantine East to the Latin Christian West. And in contrast to histories that treat the development of Judaism and Christianity in isolation, it leads us to a fuller understanding of Jews and Christians living in proximity, aware of each other.
Download or read book A Lethal Obsession written by Robert S. Wistrich and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 1200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented work two decades in the making, leading historian Robert S. Wistrich examines the long and ugly history of anti-Semitism, from the first recorded pogrom in 38 BCE to its shocking and widespread resurgence in the present day. As no other book has done before it, A Lethal Obsession reveals the causes behind this shameful and persistent form of hatred and offers a sobering look at how it may shake and reshape the world in years to come. Here are the fascinating and long-forgotten roots of the “Jewish difference”–the violence that greeted the Jewish Diaspora in first-century Alexandria. Wistrich suggests that the idea of a formless God who passed down a universal moral law to a chosen few deeply disconcerted the pagan world. The early leaders of Christianity increased their strength by painting these “superior” Jews as a cosmic and satanic evil, and by the time of the Crusades, murdering a “Christ killer” had become an act of conscience. Moving seamlessly through centuries of war and dissidence, A Lethal Obsession powerfully portrays the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fateful anti-Semitic tract commissioned by Russia’s tsarist secret police at the end of the nineteenth century–and the prediction by Theodor Herzl, Austrian founder of political Zionism, of eventual disaster for the Jews in Europe. The twentieth century fulfilled this dark prophecy, with the horrifying ascent of Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet, as Wistrich disturbingly suggests, the end of World War II failed to neutralize the “Judeophobic virus”: Pogroms and prejudice continued in Soviet-controlled territories and in the Arab-Muslim world that would fan flames for new decades of distrust, malice, and violence. Here, in pointed and devastating detail, is our own world, one in which jihadi terrorists and the radical left blame Israel for all global ills. In his concluding chapters, Wistrich warns of a possible nuclear “Final Solution” at the hands of Iran, a land in which a formerly prosperous Jewish community has declined in both fortunes and freedoms. Dazzling in scope and erudition, A Lethal Obsession is a riveting masterwork of investigative nonfiction, the definitive work on this unsettling yet essential subject. It is destined to become an indispensable source for any student of world affairs.
Download or read book Critical Theories of Anti Semitism written by Jonathan Judaken and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between medieval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, this book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.
