User:Jaredscribe/Antijudaism: The Western Tradition

David Nirenberg's 2013 book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition focuses "on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Christian supercessionism and post-Christian thought—though it starts with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian polemics." Pulling on an array of sources from across the centuries, Nirenberg demonstrates the potency of "imaginary Jews" in "works of the imagination, profound treatises, and acts of political radicalism." This course presents primary sources referenced by Nirenberg's book, and is not intended to replace the latter. Please acquire his book and contribute to this draft. The Israel-Palestine_reader is also a draft course that may be of interest.

“Anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought,” Nirenberg observes in his introduction, as quoted and affirmed by Paula Frederiksen in her review. “It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.” And as he ominously concludes, hundreds of pages later, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel’.”

Described by reviewers "an extraordinary scholarly achievement," and as a "magisterial work of intellectual history," Anti-Judaism argues "that a certain view of Judaism lies deep in the structure of Western civilization and has helped its intellectuals and polemicists explain Christian heresies, political tyrannies, medieval plagues, capitalist crises, and revolutionary movements."

Introduction: Thinking about Judaism, or the Judaism of Thought
The Jewish Question, brought into circulation by young German philosophers who styled themselves pioneers of the "Critical critique"

Karl Marx "On The Jewish Question" (1964) On The Jewish Question, his first articulation of his theory of historical materialism

Marx and Engles "The Holy Family" (sarcastic reference to Edgar and Bruno Bauer, and the young Hegelians) "Critique of Critical criticalism"

By framing his revolutionary economic and political project as a liberation of the world from Judaism, Marx expressed a "messianic desire" that was itself "quite Christian," according to Nirenberg.

Antijudaism as a theoretical framework for making sense of the world and critically engaging with it.

Jean Paul Sartre's essay written at the end of WWII: "Reflections on the Jewish Question" (1945), "if the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him"

Summary
Arthur Schopenhauer complains that too many moderns "equate Judaism with Reason"

Three methodological deviations from professional history
Jules Michelet, one of the founders of professional history

Contemporary historians emphasis on liberty (or "agency" and "contingency") Interests, agency, strategic action. Minority history, subalterns can speak as well as conquerors. Risks blinding us to assymetries of power, to the power of ideas, and to the power of the past and its continuity.

Contemporary historians trinity seems the inverse of that articulated by Max Weber "Introduction to the "The Economic Ethics of the World Religions"

Foucault "history is for the cutting" Friedrich Nietzsche, "All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity." Nirenberg proposes to treat "anti-Judaism as a mask, that is, as a pedagogical fear that gives enduring form to some of the key concepts and questions in the history of thought", great ideas which "impress themselves upon generations of human memory in part by concealing their transformations behind the abiding terror of their masks" gospels characterize Pharisees as desiring empty wisdom, ".. hiding these things from the learned and clever and revealing them to little children" Joseph Goebbels proclaimed at the Nazis' "Burning of Un-German books", "The age of rampant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end". Is there a historical relation? Walter Benjamin

1: The Ancient World: Egypt, Exodus, Empire
Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, Against Apion

Elephantine papyri

Priests of Khnum lead Egyptians to destroy the Jewish temple at Elephantine, 410 BCE. pro-Egyptian version of the passover, told from an anti-Hebrew point of view?

Hecataeus of Abdera, Aegyptiaca 320 BCE, describes Jews as "aliens driven from the country" ... "cast ashare in greece and other regions .. But the greater number were driven into what is now called Judaea, which is not far distant from Egypt and was at that time utterly uninhabited. The colony was headed by a man called Moses, outstanding both for his wisdom and for his courage". Banned the use of images, "being of the opinion that God is not in human form; rather the heaven which surrounds the earth is alone divine, and rules the universe", "for as a result of their own expulsion from Egypt, he [Moses] introduced an unsocial and intolerant mode of life"

Egyptian priest of Heliopolis, Manetho, account: During the reign of Pharoah Amenophis, the lepers sent to labor in stone quarries, but for a society of their own under renegade priest Osarseph, "when he changed to this people, he changed his name and called himself Moses", ally with the Hyksos, and subdue Egypt, mutilating idols, sacrifices animals in the sanctuaries, and dispossessing priests. Many pagan writers of the period quoted or adapted some version of Manetho's story as historically accurate description of Jewish origins - Posidonius of Apamea, Lysimachus, Chaeremon, Apion, Tacitus.

12: Philosophical Struggles with Judaism, from Kant to Heine
Heinrich Heine

Fichte Characteristics of the Present Age (1804-5), assumes role of philosopher-prophet, "Addresses to the German Nation", invents a "science of hating Judaism and its followers", according to critic Saul Ascher in Eisenmenger the Second

Reviews and Scholarly Responsa
David A. Bell of Princeton University calls it "quite simply one of the most important pieces of humanities scholarship to appear in many years. Supremely learned, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, it takes on nothing less than the Western tradition itself. And it makes a case we cannot afford to ignore." Christopher Smith of King's College London notices that Anti-Judaism represents, "the culmination of a career volte-face in respects to his methodological approach. His 1996 work Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages rejected a longue duree history of anti-Semitism." Whereas, "in Anti-Judaism, Nirenberg allows for a continuation of trends in the development of a shared concept of anti-Judaism built on and progressed over" a period of three thousand years. Some historians, while praising Nirenberg's oeuvre, have expressed dissatisfaction with the parts concerning contemporary history.