Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective最新文献

{"title":"The Jewish Response to Antisemitism in Austria Prior to the Anschluss","authors":"D. Rabinovici","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-013","url":null,"abstract":"In Austria, during the period of the monarchy as well as in the First Republic, from the late nineteenth century till 1933, antisemitism was not only part of the silent consensus but was loudly expressed by the bourgeois parties. Both Christian Socialists, the major conservative political faction, and German Nationalists, the movement which sought the creation of a Greater Germany, along with the implementation of antisemitic and anti-clerical policies, competed in their hatred of Jews. Even the Social Democrats were not immune to the enemy image of the Jud (Jew) and used anti-Jewish caricatures in their propaganda.1 In 1897 Karl Lueger, who launched the first antisemitic mass movement in the capital, won the mayoralty of Vienna on a radically anti-Jewish platform. His concept of success became Hitler’s populist model. It was in Austria that Hitler’s worldview had been shaped. He turned elements of two political trends of the middle class into his theory and practice: racial German nationalism found in the all-German movement of Georg Ritter von Schönerer and charismatic leadership of the masses and antisemitic populism, inspired by Karl Lueger.2 In order to understand Jewish responses to antisemitism, let us offer some details about the Jews in Austria at the time: Vienna was the German-speaking city with the largest portion of Jews in its population. In the bureaucratic and dynastic center of the reactionary Catholic Habsburg monarchy, the “Jew” was perceived as the leading representative of social change, a symbol of modern times as well as of old monotheism. In Vienna, the residential capital of a multinational state, Jews, who lived in a hub of various nationalisms and coerced assimilation, became the target of all prejudice.","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"159 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132058881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Early Christian Anti-Judaism","authors":"L. Rutgers","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-003","url":null,"abstract":"I would like to start my reflections with a quote from Isaac Asimov. In the first of his Foundation novels, this Russian-born American biochemist and science fiction writer has one of his characters remark that “violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”1 It is a keen observation—one that, I believe, can be of use when studying the anti-Jewish sentiments that surface frequently in early Christian literature of first few centuries of the Common Era.2 Now, of course, it goes without saying that it would be wrong generically to qualify the emergence of the advanced literary culture that accompanies the rise of Christianity and that, in fact, is one of its defining characteristics, as a sign of incompetence. Even so, there is no denying that there is something deeply unsettling about this literature all the same, specifically in the way it deals with others in general, and with Jews and Judaism in particular. Early Christian discussions in this area raise fundamental questions. Such questions do not just concern the rationale for the invectives that emerge over the course of early Christian discussions that deal with Jews and Judaism. They also prompt us to reflect on the larger mechanisms that underlie these debates, as well as on the social ramifications of the rhetoric strategies that characterize early Christian thinking on the Jews. Before trying to highlight what I believe to be the crucial features in all of this, let me begin by stating that in this paper my thinking on these matters","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131645901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Is the Holocaust a Unique Historical Event? A Debate between Two Pillars of Holocaust Research and its Impact on the Study of Antisemitism","authors":"D. Porat","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-015","url":null,"abstract":"compared with any other historical or with other attempts at contemporary outbreaks of mass killing. similar foundations … in other attempts at genocide, only in the Nazi attempt to murder the Jewish people, based on Nazi ideology, do we find these features playing a central, exclu-sive, and unadulterated role.Therefore, even if the Holocaust can be placed on a continuum of the execution of such plans, it is located at the end of the continuum, as the complete embodiment of the meaning of the concept of genocide — in terms of ideology, planning and execution — and must therefore also be characterized as exceptional and unique within it.²² of the generation of Holocaust survivors, beyond all evil be from against the backdrop of the People s of calamity.³","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131608296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Israel Threatens to Defend Itself”: The Depiction of Israel in the Media","authors":"Florian Markl","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-023","url":null,"abstract":"In 2003, an opinion poll conducted on behalf of the EU Commission yielded one very remarkable result: 59 percent of Europeans saw Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Not North Korea, not Iran, not Russia, but Israel. The number in Germany was even higher: Here 65 percent, almost two thirds of those questioned, singled out Israel as the greatest threat to the world.1 In 2008, 40 percent of Germans approved of the statement: “What Israel today does to the Palestinians is not substantially different from what the Nazis during the Third Reich did to the Jews.” In an opinion poll two years later, 57 percent of Germans approved of the claim “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”2 And according to another opinion poll, conducted in 2016, 40 percent of Germans agreed with the statement: “Given how Israel treats the Palestinians, I can easily understand why one is against the Jews.”3 All these statements have one thing in common: They are grotesque distortions of what Israel is and what Israel does. If we want to understand how distorted opinions like these are formed, we have to take a close look at the way the media reports on Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Since most Europeans get all their information about the Jewish State from the media, the way Israel is depicted in the media’s reporting exerts a tremendous influence on Europeans’ attitude toward Israel. The analysis of Austrian media that Mena Watch has conducted since 2011 clearly shows that in their coverage of Israel, journalists time and again do not adhere to basic journalistic standards. They often draw a picture of Israel that is based on imbalanced and misleading reporting; the selective omission of facts; the application of double standards when judging Israeli behavior com-","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121450237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sholem Aleichem and Qumran: Jewish-Related Scholarship in the Soviet Union, 1953–1967","authors":"G. Estraikh","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-017","url":null,"abstract":"The Jewish academic centers established in the early Soviet state functioned almost exclusively in Yiddish and had eclipsed or subdued the remnants of Jewish studies pursued at academic and independent organizations of the pre-1917 period. In Kiev, the most vigorous of the new centers developed ultimately into the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture (IJPC), a structural unit of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. By 1934, the IJPC had on its payroll over seventy people in academic and administrative roles. Two years later, however, the Stalinist purges of the time had consumed the IJPC and sent many of its employees to prison to be later sentenced to death or gulag.1 In Minsk, the authorities similarly destroyed the academic Institute of National Minorities, which mainly dealt with Jewish-related research.2 By this time, all Jewish (in fact, Yiddish-language) educational institutions, including university departments, ceased to exist. Some scholars moved to other fields of research or left academia entirely. Soviet school instruction and cultural activity in Yiddish emerged in the territories of Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states, forcibly acquired in 1939 and 1940, but after June 22, 1941, all these disappeared in the smoke of World War II. However, the IJPC had an afterlife: in the fall of 1936, the authorities permitted the formation of a small academic unit named the Bureau (kabinet) for Research on Jewish Literature, Language, and Folklore. The Bureau endured until 1949, when it fell victim to a campaign that targeted the remaining Jewish institutions. In the same year, the authorities closed the Lithuanian Jewish Museum,","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"195 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121849498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Defense against Antisemitism: Minor Victories, Major Defeats, 1890–1939","authors":"R. Levy","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-012","url":null,"abstract":"Since I wrote this paper in the summer of 2018, I have found myself wondering if its title constitutes a just judgment on nearly 130 years of struggle by Jews and non-Jews to eliminate organized antisemitism. Surely, if I had subtitled it “Major Victories, Minor Defeats,” we would have to ask ourselves about the purpose of this great conference. Antisemitism, ever-changing, ever-threatening, is still very much with us. What I was wondering about instead was whether we can speak of even minor victories, and, more generally, whether the history of the fight against organized antisemitism during many decades has anything useful to teach us today. I believe that this history and both the victories and defeats are still instructive. First some clarifications, beginning with the coining of the term: I have not been able to find the use of the word antisemitism before 1860, when it was employed in a cultural rather than a political sense. By late 1879, the German journalist and political activist Wilhelm Marr seized upon the word antisemite as a way of distinguishing his political agenda from traditional Christian Judeophobia and from the commonplace prejudices of his day, thus hoping to give his views the aura of a scientifically derived truth, the product of his personal experience and historical research. Important to note about the early history of antisemitism is how rapidly what was essentially a neologism achieved the broadest currency. There must have existed a perceived need for a new word to describe the resurgence of conflicts between Jews and the peoples among whom they lived, fondly thought to be nearly overcome in this age of progress but which in fact were becoming ever more openly expressed. The need for a new word affected not just self-identified antisemites but Jews, non-Jewish critics, and neutral bystanders throughout Europe and wherever Europeans settled in the world. The word appeared in titles of books and pamphlets and on the mastheads of newspapers in English, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, and Russian—all by 1894 and in places where no organized antisemitism existed, as well as where it was developing into fullfledged political movements. Even to outsiders, something new seemed to be agitating the vexed relations between Jews and others.1","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121375634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-fm","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-fm","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"136 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123209669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Divinity, Ethnicity, Identity: “Religion” as a Political Category in Christian Antiquity","authors":"P. Fredriksen","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-006","url":null,"abstract":"In the mid-fifth century, ruling a rump Roman Empire from Constantinople, the emperor Theodosius II decided to collect and to catalogue into one body the earlier and very varied records of Roman legal rulings. The fruits of his initiative, the Codex Theodosianus, embodies Late Roman culture’s concerns with ordering specialist knowledge, politics, and power.1 This is especially true for Book 16 of the Codex, “On Religion.” Like many of the legal archives upon which it draws, Book 16 is concerned with regulating relations between heaven and earth in order to ensure the wellbeing of the empire. Heaven’s denomination might have changed after 312 C.E., but the goal of religion remained the same: to secure divine patronage for the common weal. Thus, when Theodosius II, convening the Third Ecumenical Council in 429, expressed the hope that “the condition of the church might honor God and contribute to the safety of the Empire,”2 he echoed the kind of practical piety expressed almost half a millennium earlier by Cicero, who likewise opined that proper cult “is not only of concern to religion, but also to the well-being of the state.”3 In other words,","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130022794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“All the World’s a Stage”: Imagined Jewish Rituals in Medieval Christian Art and Drama","authors":"Sara Offenberg","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-009","url":null,"abstract":"In many written and artistic Christian sources,we find an anti-Jewish portrayal of an alleged Jewish costume of desecrating the Host or blood libels. The stories and images are so common that we find, for example, the story of Simon of Trent being used as a joke in a Facebook post from April 3, 2015, wishing a “Happy Passover.” Following Miri Rubin’s methodology,1 where she ties together blood libels and accusations of host desecration in texts, images, and drama, in this paper I wish to further discuss the issue of “staging” or the public sphere of the accusations, with a focus on images and texts written in the vernacular language.","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124986349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Antisemitism in Today’s America","authors":"A. Rosenfeld","doi":"10.1515/9783110671995-019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-019","url":null,"abstract":"Leonard Dinnerstein’s Antisemitism in America, published in 1994, remains the most comprehensive and authoritative study of its subject to date. In his book’s final sentence, however, Dinnerstein steps out of his role as a reliable guide to the past and ventures a prediction about the future that has proven to be seriously wrong. Antisemitism, he concludes, “has declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”1 In the years since he formulated this optimistic view, antisemitism in America, far from declining, has been on the rise, as I will aim to demonstrate. I begin with a personal anecdote. During a lecture visit to Boca Raton, Florida, in January 2017, I attended religious services at one of the city’s large synagogues and was surprised to see heavy security outside and inside the building. “What’s going on?” I asked a fellow worshipper. “Nothing special,” he replied, “having these guys here is just normal these days.” It didn’t strike me as normal, especially in America. From visits to synagogues in Europe, I am used to seeing security guards in place—mostly policemen but, in France, sometimes also soldiers. As targets of ongoing threats, Europe’s Jews need such protection and have come to rely on it. Why such need exists is clear: Europe has a long history of antisemitism, and, in recent years, it has become resurgent—in many cases, violently so. European Jews are doing, then, what they can and must do to defend themselves against the threats they face. Some, fearing still worse to come, have left their home countries for residence elsewhere; others are thinking about doing the same. Most remain, but apprehensively, and some have adopted ways to mute their Jewish identities to avert attention from themselves. For instance, they may feel it no longer prudent to wear Jewish skullcaps or other Jewish markers, like jewelry with the Magen David, in public. Some have removed the mezuzot (the markers of a Jewish home that contain biblical verses) from their outside doorposts. It’s a nervous, edgy way to live, but for many, that’s Jewish life in today’s Europe. America, we have longed believed, is different—even exceptional—for being largely free of ongoing, serious anti-Jewish hostility. The great majority of American Jews go about their daily lives without encountering overt antagonism. Unlike Jews over the centuries who often suffered from intolerance and persecu-","PeriodicalId":219982,"journal":{"name":"Confronting Antisemitism through the Ages: A Historical Perspective","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125460862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}