Article

The Fairy Tale Jew

January 2009

Authors:

This essay examines the figure of the Jew in three fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and two by Clemens Brentano and argues that the surface antisemitism of these texts is reinforced by a series of rhetorical gestures that derive from an Enlightenment paradigm. This Enlightenment troping is both programmatic and political in nature. Written against the backdrop of the debate about the "Jewish question" – the debate about Jews' legal and civil status in Germany – these tales present a moral exemplar in which Enlightenment becomes synonymous with antisemitism. In these texts to be Enlightened is to be antisemitic.

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Article

Antisemitism (New and Old), Islamist Judeophobia, and the Defense of Israel: Remembering and Using t...

April 2018 · Antisemitism Studies

Frederick Krantz

The inner spring [of the leftist sycophancy towards communist and Islamist totalitarianism] is a deep self-alienation and loathing for real harmony, happiness, and success in this world. Such perverse feelings among some of the more privileged beneficiaries of Western society lead to a nihilistic hate for hate's sake, a morally twisted attraction for the most despicable mass murdering tyrannies ... [Show full abstract] and an increased disposition to hate America and Israel. Such feelings are, unfortunately, also to be found among some of the more militant “anti-Zionist” Jews who claim to speak in the name of universal justice.

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Jews, Roman Catholics, and Mass Politics in Western Galicia

July 2018

Daniel Unowsky

This chapter provides an overview of social, and economic relations in the small towns and villages where most of the 1898 attacks took place. What were the small towns of the region like? Who lived in them? How did Jews and Catholics interact and in what locations and contexts? In this period in Italy, France, and elsewhere, Catholic institutions propagated new and virulent forms of ... [Show full abstract] antisemitism. Galicia’s Catholic hierarchy and clergy translated and transferred this Catholic-inflected modern antisemitism into the Galician countryside. This took place at the very moment when mass politics arrived in Habsburg central Europe. New political parties competed for rural voters, bringing a strident, aggressive style of political action, rhetoric, and organization to the countryside. The new Catholic antisemitism played a central role in this competition as it did in two fiercely fought elections for parliamentary seats that took place in the first half of 1898.

Article

"An incessant army of demons": Wolf Meyer-Erlach, Luther, and "the Jews" in Nazi Germany

December 2009 · Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Christopher J. Probst

The role of “academic” scholarship as a tool for the Gleichschaltung (coordination) of the populace during the Third Reich has attracted recent scholarly attention. Wolf Meyer-Erlach was one Protestant theologian who devoted his limited academic skills to the service of the Nazi regime. This article examines his use of Martin Luther’s “Judenschriften” to affirm Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Bringing ... [Show full abstract] to bear Gavin Langmuir’s approach to the study of antisemitism, the following addresses the question of whether Meyer-Erlach’s “theological” rhetoric represented anti-Judaism, antisemitism, or both. It explores in microcosm the place of continuity and discontinuity in the early modern and modern hatred of Jews.

Article

Missionary Protestants as Defenders and Detractors of Judaism: Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Strack

January 2002 · The Jewish Quarterly Review

Alan Levenson

Franz Delitzsch (1812-1890) and Hermann Strack (1848-1922) were two missionary Protestants who were also leaders in the fight against antisemitism. Well-known figures in their own day, Strack and Delitzsch have been marginalized in studies of Protestant missionary efforts to convert Jews and also in the histories of anti-antisemitism in Imperial Germany. This essay argues that Jews and Judaism ... [Show full abstract] presented a difficult crux for both men, who were deeply involved in the world of Wissenschaft des Judenthums, personally and professionally. On the one hand, missionary Protestants upheld the physical and spiritual descent of Jesus from Judaism, rejected the antisemitic caricatures of Judaism found in both propagandists and scholarly literature of the period and evinced a genuine affection for rabbinic literature. Strack, in particular, played a unique role as someone who defended Judaism not from the secular Enlightenment perspective of universal tolerance, but from the perspective of a committed Christian who was also an expert on Jews and Judaism. On the other hand, Delitzsch and Strack held very conservative views regarding a wide range of Christian dogmas. They regarded Jewish (and Christian) scholarly speculation about the comparative truth-claims of Judaism and Christianity as offensive and were profoundly supersessionist in orientation. Strack's Einleitung in den Talmud offered an accurate and sympathetic characterization of rabbinic literature; his Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch offered a massive "demonstration" of the superiority of the New Testament material to the same. Both works became standards. Delitzsch and Strack represent a case study in ideational compartmentalization and constitute a parade example of what the sociologist Zygmunt Baumann has termed allosemitism.

Article

Redemption and the merchant god: Dostoevsky's economy of salvation and antisemitism

January 2011

Shilpi McReynolds

Dostoevsky's Russian chauvinism and anti Semitism have long posed problems for his readers and critics. How could the author of The Brothers Karamazov also be the source of the slurs against Jews in Diary of a Writer? And where is the celebrated Christian humanist in the nationalist outbursts of The Idiot? These enigmas-the coexistence of humanism and hatred, faith and doubt-are linked, Susan ... [Show full abstract] McReynolds tells us in Redemption and the Merchant God. Her book analyzes Dostoevsky's novels and Diary to show how the author's anxieties about Christianity can help solve the riddle of his anti Semitism as well as that of his Russian messianism.

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Nationalism, Antisemitism, and the Decline of Jewish Anti-Catholicism

November 2013

Ari Joskowicz

This chapter describes the waning of Jewish anticlerical polemics in response to the rise of antisemitism in Germany and France in the final decades of the nineteenth century. While the 1870s witnessed the highpoint of Jewish anti-Catholicism in Germany, the rise of new suspicions against Jews by the end of that decade made such polemics increasingly less attractive for Jews in Germany from the ... [Show full abstract] 1880s on. Even in France, where anticlericalism remained prevalent during the early decades of the French Third Republic and throughout the Dreyfus affair, by World War I, aggressive anticlerical rhetoric had become an increasingly risky strategy for Jewish activists and authors. As new antisemitic movements gained strength and challenged Jews’ right to speak about Catholics and Catholicism—both in metropolitan France and French Algeria—such polemics offered fewer and fewer opportunities to Jews who sought to forge alliances across religious boundaries.

Article

Paradoxical ambiguity – D.F. Malan and the “Jewish Question”

December 2016 · Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa

Milton Shain

This paper explores D.F. Malan’s attitudes towards the Jews in the context of burgeoning Afrikaner nationalism and the challenge of the radical right in the 1930s and 1940s. Beginning with the Quota Act of 1930, Malan increasingly expressed hostility towards Jews. Fuelled by opposition towards German-Jewish immigration and subsequently calling for limitations on Jewish occupations and ... [Show full abstract] opportunities in South Africa, Malan denied any anti-Jewish animus. Yet his rhetoric was increasingly shrill through the 1930s. Was Malan simply an opportunist or was he genuinely hostile? While opportunism was a feature of his political style, and while some of his attacks were in all likelihood politically driven, too often he appeared consumed by imaginary Jewish machinations. Nevertheless, it needs to be acknowledged that Malan turned away from the “Jewish Question” soon after World War II and refused to kowtow to those wishing to maintain anti-Jewish policies.

Article

Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (review)

November 2001 · Modernism/modernity

Pericles Lewis

Modernism/Modernity 8.4 (2001) 696-698 Not long ago, the authoritarian opinions and flirtations with fascism of some important modernists were a cause for embarrassment. Sympathetic critics would sweep the more reprehensible views of their subjects under the carpet, apologize for them, or deny their importance to understanding the literary work of modernism. Since the rise of the new historicism ... [Show full abstract] and cultural studies, however, these formerly embarrassing associations seem to have given the "reactionary" modernists added sex appeal. The links between modernism and fascism give an apparent political urgency to modernist studies. The new fascist studies takes as its subjects not only propagandists like F. T. Marinetti, Gabriele d'Annunzio, or Ezra Pound, or collaborators like Robert Brasillach and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but also those sometime fellow travelers in England, Ireland, and America. Charles Ferrall's Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics discusses the political views of five significant modernists writing in English who, to varying degrees, expressed sympathy for the extreme right wing: W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham Lewis. Ferrall argues that these writers shared, paradoxically, both an attraction to rising fascism and an ideal of the autonomous work of art. They subordinated their political beliefs to their aesthetic ideals, which made for rather incoherent politics and also rescued them (except for Pound) from too great an involvement with fascism. Ferrall deliberately echoes Walter Benjamin's famous claim that fascism "aestheticizes politics" and suggests that "reactionary" modernism does the same (6). He draws a contrast between two aspects of modernity: "aesthetic" modernity, which he associates with the doctrine of the autonomy of the work of art, and "bourgeois" modernity, which he associates with the political ideals of the Enlightenment. The paradoxical tendency of the group he labels "reactionary modernists" was to reject "bourgeois" modernity while embracing "aesthetic" modernity. Although Benjamin associates the idea of aesthetic autonomy with the aestheticization of politics, Ferrall makes a crucial distinction: true fascism ultimately "conflates the autonomous spheres of art, morality and science," but the modernists who interest him generally maintain the autonomy of the work of art (ibid.). They see in "aesthetic modernity" an unrealizable model for the political realm, perhaps a goad to bourgeois society, and therefore maintain a tension between aesthetics and politics that fascism could not accept. On the other hand, Ferrall distinguishes the reactionary modernists from their "progressive" peers by pointing out that they rejected "even the emancipatory aspects of 'liberalism,' 'progress' and 'democracy' while at the same time, paradoxically, being drawn to various kinds of revolutionary politics" (13). Ferrall's contributions to theoretical debates over the relationship between avant-garde writers and politics are sensible, but his detailed treatment of the political engagements of his protagonists is what gives this book its force. While portraying the hostility of the journal The New Age toward British liberal democracy, for example, Ferrall touches on the opinions of such writers as Hilaire Belloc, T. E. Hulme, Georges Sorel, and A. R. Orage. Most of the book, however, is devoted to his five main figures. In each case, he gives an overview of an entire career, punctuated by readings of relevant texts that illuminate the influence of reactionary politics on the modernists' literary production. Ferrall focuses on what might be called the symbolic elements of politics in the literary works of the modernists, as exemplified by their use of sexual or anti- Semitic stereotypes. He examines the sexualized language with which the modernists wrote about politics: "the rape of Mother Ireland by the English Father" in Yeats's plays; the "homosocial" fantasies of Lawrence's "leadership novels" from Aaron's Rod to The Plumed Serpent. He describes the anti-Semitic elements of Pound's Cantos and Eliot's early poems. Quite correctly, he emphasizes the ambivalence of many such references to Jews or to women. Ferrall's approach is more biographical than broadly historical. Much of the evidence for the "reactionary" modernists' political views comes from letters and writings of the 1930s and 1940s on social problems: Yeats...

Chapter

Interlude II: Civil Antisemitism and the Jewish Refugee Crisis of the 1930s

January 2012

Lara Trubowitz

In this interlude, I discuss the Jewish refugee crisis of 1933 through 1939, a period during which Britain contended with an influx of Jews leaving Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe; the crisis grew to critical proportions in 1938 and 1939. As I argue, this escalation becomes a major touchstone for the negotiation of civil antisemitism, which is to say, for the combination of the range of ... [Show full abstract] antisemitisms, of varying degrees of explicitness, that circulated in Britain throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and for the closely allied question of Britishness itself, as the final stages of the decline of Britain’s empire finally arrived at a semblance of inevitability. It is the Jewish refugee crisis, and the profusion of ambiguous and even tortuous public rhetoric that it spawns, that is the background for my reading of Wyndham Lewis in the following chapter.

Article

Full-text available

"The Best Pope the Jews Ever Had": Jewish Reactions to the Death of Pope John Paul II

May 2012 · Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations

Murray Watson

With the death of Pope John Paul II in April 2005, the world lost what was arguably the most prominent and respected voice in the Jewish-Christian relationship in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. John Paul was widely loved and appreciated by the Jewish community, for his life-long friendship with the Jewish people, and his consistent commitment to advancing Jewish-Catholic ... [Show full abstract] dialogue and uprooting antisemitism in all its forms. His death, therefore, sparked a torrent of eloquent tributes from Jewish leaders and spokespersons, both in Israel and throughout the Diaspora, highlighting his major accomplishments and historic gestures, and frankly acknowledging areas in which he had sometimes been at the center of disagreements, frictions and conflict with his “beloved elder brothers.” Through a re-visiting of a cross-section of published Jewish comments from the time of John Paul’s death, this article examines something of the complexity and challenges of the Jewish-Catholic relationship during his papacy, and discusses how, over the course of his nearly 27-year papacy, John Paul II became (at least for many people) “the best Pope the Jews ever had.”

Article

Secular Sermons and American Accents: The Nonfiction of Bellow, Ozick, and Roth

September 2001 · Shofar An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

Michael Greenstein

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Emma Lazarus's words affixed to the Statue of Liberty heralded an affinity between American and Jewish values and identities. At the same time, however, Henry James's negative comments about the Yiddish language of these immigrants at Ellis Island and on the Lower East Side of New York undermined the acceptance of Jews into the American mainstream. In ... [Show full abstract] their own essays Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth admire James but challenge his antisemitic sentiments by adopting a range of rhetorical strategies that combine elitism and egalitarianism to reaffirm the overlapping of American and Jewish identities. Their moral seriousness in conjunction with their ironic attitudes simultaneously questions rabbinic authority; their nonfictional jeremiads synthesize and reinvent a Jewish-American covenant. Their secular sermons remain true to American tradition while seeking new frontiers of thought.

Chapter

Introduction: Conspiring to Be Civil: Jews, Antisemitism, and British Civility, 1881–1939

January 2012

Lara Trubowitz

This book is about “civil antisemitism” in British literature and culture from the early twentieth century through the start of World War II, a period during which the British nation was renegotiating both its imperial legacy and its long-standing traditions of courtesy and manners. What makes antisemitism “civil” in these years are the social and political pressures of a public sphere in which ... [Show full abstract] overt bigotry is seen as objectionable, and in which expressions of prejudice therefore require extraordinary degrees of complexity and obliquity. Antisemitism becomes a “style” of speech or writing, best understood and criticized in rhetorical and narrative terms, an elaborate or even tortuous compromise between rival traditions of hatred and politesse.