Content area
Full text
Jewish History (2014) 28: 187213 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 DOI: 10.1007/s10835-014-9211-4
F O RU M
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. By David Nirenberg.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2013. Pp. 624. $35.00. ISBN: 9780393058246.
MAURICE SAMUELS
Department of French and Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USAE-mail: mailto:[email protected]
Web End [email protected]
On November 7, 2013, the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism and the Judaic Studies Program at Yale University were honored to host a panel devoted to David Nirenbergs important book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, published by W. W. Norton in 2013. Four Yale faculty members offered some reections on the book, which are reprinted below. Included here is also a response by Nirenberg.
Nirenbergs Anti-Judaism is less a history of prejudice and persecution than an examination of the persistence of a way of thinking. Why, Nirenberg asks, did so many diverse cultures think so much about Judaism? And what work did thinking about Judaism do for them in their efforts to make sense of the world? The book explores the different ways that people have asked the so-called Jewish question from ancient to modern times and tries to understand what other types of questionsabout authority, about esh versus spirit, about money and capitalism, about the possibility of change, to name but a fewthe Jewish question has both masked and enabled.
According to Nirenberg, anti-Judaism offers Western culture a heuristic toolwhat he calls a pedagogical fear that gives enduring form to some of the key concepts and questions in the history of thought (10). This book, therefore, offers a window onto the whole of the Western philosophical tradition. Nirenbergs goal is to get us to see anti-Judaism in a new light, as having very little to do with the Jews themselves and everything to do with how Western culture frames questions about its own identity in ways that change but nevertheless remain identiable and traceable through time. His real goal, then, is to get us to think critically about what he calls our own habits of thought and the history of our ideas (12).
The scholars on this panel come from different disciplineshistory, philosophy, and religious studiesand work on periods spanning ancient and modern times. Their...