David NirenbergRecensioni

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg traces Jew-hatred from Pharaoh's time to the present. David Nirenberg, the author of that excellent book, admittedly a slow read, believed that many who don't like Jews never met an actual Jew. To his mind the phenomena comes from dislike of a strict system of law with which Jews are associated. To my mind it is more dislike of a people who are perceived as successful and abide by each country's laws. Different minority groups live in slums, and have pathologies such as non-attendance at schools, high dropout rates and crime.

The Jews are successful but never quite blend in. I think that dislike of Jews translates into dislike of Israel. I refer to this book often, and thus have upgraded my "four" to a "five."

This is an absorbing study of the history of "anti-Judaism"--related to, but distinct from, antisemitism. Nirenberg isn't interested in the persecution of Jews as people as much as the ideas that have animated hatred of Jews and Judaism, even in the absence of Jews themselves. He examines the language surrounding Jews in the New Testament and the Quran, in medieval Spanish literature and modern philosophy. What Nirenberg shows is that anti-Judaism has been a continuous presence in western thought.

Platz 1 der SZ/NDR-Bestenliste Sachbücher im Mai 2015

Anti-Judaismus gilt als eine irrationale Abweichung vom westlichen Denkweg hin zu Freiheit, Toleranz und Fortschritt. David Nirenberg zeigt demgegenüber in seinem aufsehenerregenden Buch anhand zahlreicher – oft erschreckender – Belege von der Antike bis heute, dass die Distanzierung vom Judentum zum Kern des westlichen Denkens und Weltbilds gehört. Die Alten Ägypter verachteten ihre jüdischen Nachbarn als Fremde, die das Land angeblich im Dienste der Perser, Griechen oder Römer unterwanderten. Für die frühen Christen und Muslime waren die Juden Feinde der von Jesus oder Mohammed verkündeten Wahrheit. Spanische Inquisitoren strebten ebenso wie protestantische Reformatoren danach, ein heimliches Judentum aufzudecken und zu zerstören, von dem sie die Christenheit bedroht sahen. Die Aufklärung räumte mit diesem Feindbild keineswegs auf. Voltaire bekämpfte in Gestalt der Juden den Aberglauben, Kant die selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit und Marx das Privateigentum. Die Gegner mit Juden zu identifizieren hat auch ohne reale Juden funktioniert. Aber immer wieder waren Juden (und nicht nur sie) reale Opfer eines Anti-Judaismus, der die Geschichte des Westens wie ein roter Faden durchzieht.

The book presents the idea of thinking with Judaism as a major trope in Western thought. For me this was an enlightening and new perspective, particularly in regard to enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought.

I found this history truly rewarding, but it was a difficult read. The author has researched in the field of the history of ideas and produced an amazing analysis of how Western Civilization has used the idea of Judaism as a very productive tool of thought. This is history is not focused on Jewish people, history, or culture as much as it focuses on how Western Civilization has used the the idea of a people that are "other". He traces how Egyptians used anti-judaism as a means to bolster their self image especially after the Romans conquered them. There are chapters on the early Christians, on the Muslims, on Spain, and on toward modern times. One chapter discusses Shakespeare and "The Merchant of Venice" which is so interesting as there were effectively no Jews in England while Shakespeare lived. The chapters on the German philosophers is especially dense.

I remember reading Nietzsche in college and I completely blew off his remarks about Jews in the one book I had to write a paper on. Now I have a better idea why Nietzsche would have brought up the subject. Philosophers would use the concept of people who focus on literal truth as "Jewish" and would criticize one another using those terms. Spanish poets would do the same thing, even and especially after the Jews had been expelled from Spain!

I have not read such a history before. This is another gift of the Jews to Western Civilization - critical ideas for creating identity and conformity.

The subtitle is somewhat misleading—Nirenberg focuses not on the entire Middle Ages, but on a period of about two hundred years or so; his examination is not of all minorities but on Jews and Muslims (and to a lesser extent lepers); and his geographical concentration is not all of Europe, or even all of Western Europe, but rather southern France and Aragon. Though it doesn't quite accord with the expectations which its title raises, this is still a very fine book.

Nirenberg rejects the longue durée approach which sees incidents of violence against minorities as part of an inevitable, inescapable progression which can be directly linked to present day atrocities, and which ignores what may be long periods of stability between such incidents of violence (however horrifying those incidents may be). He argues for greater contextualisation of violent incidents by historians, and questions our assumptions that medieval people acted "irrationally" in response to unquestioned stereotypes—stereotypes and institutionalised bigotry, he argues, could be harnessed by people in order to achieve specific political or economic gains. The history of minorities also requires the unpacking of the history of the majority, as they are interdependent things. Nirenberg is careful to point to the horror of the events which he's describing, but there are times when his emphasis on violence against others as a means of identity formation skirts perilously close to that argument about the inevitability of violence which he refutes in others' work.½

Nirenberg particularizes and differentiates the forms of violence against various minorities in 14th-century Aragon. By recognizing immediate functions and motives, he calls into question received metanarratives on the topic of the persecution of religious minorities. He makes rich use of both Christian and Jewish archival resources, including correspondence, edicts, and judicial and financial records.

In his opening arguments, Nirenberg criticizes what he calls a “structuralist” approach to the topic of medieval persecutions, exemplified by Robert Moore (but also present in the works of Norman Cohn and Carlo Ginzburg). He recognizes and objects to both romanticized histories of Iberian convivencia (e.g. N. Roth) and lachrymose history (Ytzakh Baer).

He theorizes violence and aggression as “forms of association” which help to reify cultural and religious boundaries, and to facilitate forms of coexistence. As a result, he comes to assert the interdependence of violence and tolerance in the multi-religious environment of medieval Iberia (and by implication, throughout medieval Europe).

In the last chapter and epilogue, he presents his most intriguing efforts to problematize the approach to medieval persecutions as symptoms of mentalites evolved over a long duree. On the one hand, he provides a detailed account of the anti-Jewish riots of Holy Week, to emphasize the ritual and customary dimensions of persecuting violence. In this case, he tries to outline a somewhat symbiotic “marriage of enemies” being transacted between Christians and Jews. And then as something of a counterbalance, he discusses the pogroms of 1348 and their context. In this case, he addresses the sense of narrative discontinuity and transformation in exemplary violence, suggesting that on this basis it should not be considered a barometer of persistent changes.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are usually treated as autonomous religions, but in fact across the long course of their histories the three religions have developed in interaction with one another. In Neighboring Faiths, David Nirenberg examines how Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived with and thought about each other during the Middle Ages and what the medieval past can tell us about how they do so today. ~Amazon