Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

<b>Christian Anti-Semitic Identity</b><br /><br />Christians have perennially defined themselves as those not wanting to be mistaken for Jews. As Nirenberg points out: "If Paul had converted to Christianity during the second century rather than the first he would have been declared a heretic" simply because he never denied his Judaism. <br /><br />Christians, since the first gospel-writer called Mark, have developed the term 'Jew' quite independently of what actual Jews are, believe and do. The fewer Jews there are around - after the English expulsion and the Spanish Inquisition for example - the more the caricature of The Jew becomes an independent Christian cultural archetype that can be used on both sides of any political argument against the other:<br /><br />Jews are Capitalists, Jews are Communists; Jews have no culture, Jewish culture is permanently threatening to Christianity; Jews are weak, Jews are incredibly obstinate and resilient; Judaism is legalistic ritual, Judaism has no ethical content. Jews, in short, represent whatever social problem happens to be current, for whatever faction proposing a solution. <br /><br />Largely this is a consequence of the persistent promulgation by the (Catholic) Church of a theology of alienation. Unable to fundamentally distinguish itself from Judaism, except through its rejection by Judaism, Christianity has needed Judaism as a unifying symbol. <br /><br />Not until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), with the recognition of its role in the Holocaust, did the church formally reject this theological symbol. One wonders to what degree this move rather than other liturgical changes contributes to the subsequent decline in institutional church participation. <br /><br />Of greater social relevance perhaps, one also wonders to what degree the recent rise in European anti-Semitism is a cultural attempt to re-establish this lost symbol of Christian unity. Isn't it the Jews in Israel after all who are ultimately responsible for Muslim unrest, while they are simultaneously responsible for so much disruptively liberal social policy? The seeds need only a little watering by populist wannabes to sprout another round of good Christian hate.<br /><br /> Nirenberg’s message is that the The Jew is not a person; he is not a member of an ethnic or religious group; he is not even a ‘type’. The Jew is a perennial trope, a figure of speech, created and institutionalised in European Christianity. The Jew is what ‘we’ are not. This trope gets used, inserted into conversation and debate, in any number of situations to promote unrest and misdirect popular anger. Language has power. The semiotic linguistic process which the church began almost 2000 years ago is much harder to stop than it was to start.<br /><br />Postscript 13May19: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/284689/the-bloody-history-of-americas-christian-identity-movement">https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news...</a>

Erudite yet readable for the nonspecialist, and sparkling with wit despite the depressing topic. The aim is to show how anti-Judaism isn't some marginal phenomenon, but a foundational platform of Western (and Islamic) thought. Since St. Paul's epistles, Jews have been cast in the role of "vessels of wrath," into which all of the troubling features of cultural life could be quarantined. And this othering has remained constant, even as those troubling features change in response to new ideological needs.<br /><br />Thus, for the earliest Christian thinkers, Judaism became synonymous with law and narrow literalism, as opposed to the spiritual freedom of Christianity. When Martin Luther wanted to reintroduce the verbatim biblical text during the Reformation, Jews were cast as interlopers in the biblical story, whose protagonists were actually to be regarded as Christian. When commercial activity became crucial to new European states, parasitic "Jewish" speculation was made to stand against productive Christian economic develoment. And when rationalism became fashionable during the Enlightenment, Judaism putatively became the preserve of unreasonable hatred and fanaticism. Critical thinkers abjectly failed to question their received prejudices about Jews and Judaism, even when the thinkers themselves were of recent Jewish descent: e.g., Spinoza, Marx, Hannah Arendt. Indeed, modern thinkers even mined the pre-Christian past for evidence of Jewish iniquity.<br /><br />Jews didn't have to be present for this kind of thinking to occur, and when scholars throughout the ages write about Jews, they often mean non-Jews with "Jewish traits". But when Jews were nearby, the prevailing images of Judaism had profound consequences for them. In the background, we can see antisemitism rising alongside anti-Judaism, which culminated in the Holocaust. And Nirenberg sees the post-war discourse as more of the same, with "Israel" replacing "Jew". He is cautious to rule out determinism when considering how trends in thought impact behavior, but he does assert that these trends can smooth the way for particular outcomes while making others harder to imagine.<br /><br />The dismal synopsis is that negative stereotypes can be highly functional for ideological requirements and we can't always rely upon critical scholars to question them. And this is particularly true for figures of Judaism, which form a major pillar of Western culture.

Am reading this in bites because almost every page requires me to go and read something else to understand the discourse. An over-arching book which dives into the history of thought and its construction. Staggering and painfully revealing. More to follow.

Painful reading. I am glad I forced myself to finish it. David Nirenberg will not let us draw a causal line from the scapegoating of Judaism and Jewish people (even when Jews were a tiny minority through forced conversions to Christianity or expulsions) to their extermination in the Holocaust. It's more complicated than that, he says. As a Christian I found shocking his documentation of the anti-Judaism writings of the early fathers and saints -- Justin Martyr, Sts. John Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine. <br /><br />I'd wondered if the book would reference the Catholic Church's 1965 declaration <i>Nostra Aetate</i> ("In our age" or "in our time") of its relationship to non-Christian religions. In the brief Vatican II document "the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone." <i>Nostra Aetate</i> has had a major impact on Catholicism, quietly producing positive changes in the language of the Mass and teaching the faith to children and adults. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html">http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_co...</a>. Nirenberg's book does not refer to it. That is for another book or article such as the Feb. 10, 2014 issue of Commonweal magazine, which calls on much more to be done to repair the damage from the now-rejected belief that the Christian church replaced God's covenant with Israel and the people of Israel. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/getting-past-supersessionism">https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ge...</a>.<br /><br />Nirenberg says that the way we have thought about Judaism through the ages and used socially accepted ideas about Judaism against factions we oppose in our own religion, Christian, Moslem or secular, bears hauling into the open. "How could untold millions of Europeans (and not only Germans) come to believe — or act as if they believed — the claims of the Nazis (and not only the Nazis) that Jews and their conspiracies so threatened the security of the world that they needed to be excluded, expelled, or exterminated?...The liquidation of the Jews of Europe was not grounded in 'reality.' It took place in the vast gap between an explanatory framework ('anti-Semitism') that made satisfying sense of the world to a significant portion of its citizens, and the complexity of the world itself...What gave anti-Semitic ideas their power was...their exemption from reality checks — that is, from the critical testing to which so many other concepts were subjected." What is pathological about anti-Semitism is the absence of reflection about the evils the Nazis, among others through the millennia, were painting onto Judaism. <br /><br />"We need a point from which we can reflect on our own habits of thought." If we are to achieve "never again," he is saying, we must pay attention.

Literalism, legalism, materialism, xenophobia, unforgiving--these are some of the behaviors ascribed to Judaism and to philosophical and theological opponents, whether Jewish or not for over 2,000 years. The author conducts the reader on a masterful tour of the history of anti-Jewish thought in western civilization. Nirenberg re-states his thesis in almost every chapter, making it easier for the lay reader to follow his argument. Is the argument valid? I am not qualified to answer, but I appreciate David Nirenberg's arguments for his claim that Judaism provided the lens through which Christian and Muslim thinkers sought to make sense of their worlds.

I'm not going to pretend that I understood every nuance of this book; some of the material (particularly latter chapters that delve into 19th century philosophy) is incredibly complex, but Nirenberg makes a strong case for his thesis. He is not writing about anti-Semitism, which he makes clear from the outset. Rather, he is interested in the ways in which western culture has defined itself in opposition to Judaism, even in times and places where very few Jews lived. Nirenberg argues that theologians, historians, philosophers, and many others made the charge of "Judaizing" against those their ideological opponents, leading Judaism to have a much greater presence in western society than Jews actually did. <br /><br />Nirenberg certain acknowledged that thinking about Jews may not have been central at all times (like the Enlightenment, for instance), but Judaism was still there, lurking in the background as the "other" against which much new thought needed to be defined. The accusations against Judaism were wildly inconsistent, ranging from too "materialistic" to not concerned enough with earthly matters, demonstrating that the charges were more about the society producing them (and the argument being made) than anything inherent in Judaism.<br /><br />Nirenberg is also very careful not to say that anti-Judaism caused the Holocaust (yet the reader is, of course, aware that the road must lead to Auschwitz), as it existed in France, Britain, even America, as well as Germany, but notes that the deeply ingrained beliefs about Judaism were likely a necessary (if not sufficient) precondition to the genocide of Europe's Jews. This is a complicated and difficult read, but ultimately a worthwhile one.

This is an extremely important book! Nirinberg argues that enmity towards Jews is intrinsic to the Western tradition, in which Jews have historically functioned as the proximate other--simultaneously the necessary and legitimating principle of the dominate power and the object of hatred and violence. His argument is compelling and the evidence from Christian, Islamic, and secular sources is startling. This is a must read for anyone interested in the Western intellectual tradition.

A truly impressive piece of scholarship. Basically a history of philosophy. Traces "figures of Judiasm" – Jews as metaphors, not the actual human beings – through 2 thousand years of Western thought &amp; how those metaphors collided with actual human Jews with typically lethal results.

<blockquote>"The righteous Law of Moses<br />The Jews here misapplied,<br />Which their deceit exposes,<br />Their hatred and their pride.<br />The judgement is the Lord's.<br />When by falsification<br />The foe makes accusation,<br />It's His to make awards."<br />-Hallgrim Pétursson, Hymn 25, translated</blockquote>This was probably the hardest book to get through I've read in the last couple years.<br /><br />The basic thesis of <em>Anti-Judaism</em> is that antisemitism is not a weird pathology or a bigotry that flares up occasionally and then dies down, it is a fundamental building block of European civilization, as impossible to separate from European history and intellectual thought as the Roman Empire or Christianity itself. The reason that the book is entitled "Anti-Judaism" rather than "Anti-Semitism" is because Judaism is, for Europe, a kind of category that doesn't actually require any association with real Jews or our religious practices. Even from the earliest moments of Christian civilization, Judaism was being used as an intellectual category into which everything undesirable or unseemly was placed.<br /><br />For example, early on in Christian history, there was a conflict between various factions over what Christianity was, and one of the major ways it defined itself was as "not Judaism." After all, Jews and Christians drew on the same scriptures but interpret them in very different ways, and Christians needed a way to distinguish themselves from those who went even further afield such as Marcion, and they settled on Jews as deceitful snakes. Judaism, in its devotion to the "Law" rather than the "Spirit," had misinterpreted G-d's messages through his prophets, leading to their rejection and murder of Jesus. We could be kept alive, but in misery, as an abject lesson of the proper state of the non-Christian word and as a punishment for our murder of Jesus. <br /><br />Over time, this reduced contact between most Christians and Jews, but it didn't reduce the place of Judaism in Christian thought. Because Christianity defined itself in opposition to Judaism, Judaism became whatever was necessary to smear one's opponents. In early religious arguments, "Judaism" was a devotion to the letter of the law rather than the spirit, a care for this world rather than the next, empty ritual rather than faith, and greed rather than Christian charity, and Christians who had never met one of us would freely call their fellow Christians "Judaizers" based on their perceived lack of Christian characteristics. And then after centuries of this, during the European Enlightenment, everything flipped on its head--since the Enlightenment valued the power of reason and human rationality, "Judaism" was a devotion to priests and G-d rather than natural reason and Enlightenment writers accused others of "Judaism" to indicate they were too devoted to their traditional Christian faith rather than what reason could reveal. <br /><br />I use Judaism in quotes here because at this point, most of the Jews in Western Europe had either been forcibly converted, expelled, or murdered, so the comparisons to Judaism had nothing to do with living Jews. It drew on the ancient European traditional of Judaism as the eternal outsider, the rebel, the liar and deceiver, the obstinate and blind fool, scorned by all. The French Revolution took up the question of "can Jews be citizens of the Republic?" thirty-two times even though barely any Jews lived in Revolutionary France, because "Jews" here were a stand-in for everything that wasn't French or, more broadly, Christian European.<br /><br />Because of all this, <em>Anti-Judaism</em> barely touches on the Holocaust. <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/347521.David_Nirenberg" title="David Nirenberg" rel="noopener">Nirenberg</a>'s contention is that it wasn't a uniquely German or modern or industrial phenomenon--after all, the Pogroms of 1391 in Spain killed or forcibly converted between half and three-quarters of the Jews there, and some of the first racist legislation in European history was written to prevent formerly Jewish converts to Christianity from holding positions of power over "natural Christians"--but rather a particularly strong expression of the traditional European opposition to the Jews. As he writes, a German soldier who fell into a coma in 1915 and awoke thirty years later, on being told that a European power had fallen to totalitarianism, attempted to conquer the continent, and tried to exterminate the Jews, could reasonably have exclaimed, "Aha! I knew those French dogs could not be trusted!"<br /><br />As the Holocaust ramped up in Europe, the vast majority of Americans thought that America should keep Jewish refugees out. Even after Kristallnacht, these numbers held. The tradition of Judaism as the opposite, the other, all that was undesirable, still held in the new world. <br /><br />In a way, <em>Anti-Judaism: the Western Tradition</em> read to me as another <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1105156914" rel="nofollow noopener">Capital in the Twenty-First Century</a>. The latter book makes the argument that the modern economic conditions of a strong middle class, a widespread consumer culture, and high class mobility are all the product of very particular circumstances and, absent government policy to maintain them, the usual state of human history--a tiny elite owning everything, a small artisan and managerial class below them, and everyone else in abject poverty--will reassert itself. Similarly, when I read this book I couldn't help but think about the spike in antisemitism lately as the natural state of European civilization reasserting itself as the memories of the Holocaust slowly fade. <br /><br />In this context, it's a little harder to dismiss the comments from some of the people I've heard say, "Who cares about [non-Jews]? They've always hated us and they always will."

This is a brilliant work of scholarship, and after reading this book, I now understand how and why antisemitism is a fact of modern life and deeply embedded in the DNA of Western and Muslim society. <br /><br />I have learned so much I previously was unaware of, that it feels like a before and after.