Jesus the Jew is the primary signifier of Christianity's indebtedness to Judaism. This connection is both historical and continuous. In this book, Barbara Meyer shows how Christian memory, as largely intertwined with Jewish memory, provides a framework to examine the theological dimensions of historical Jesus research. She explores the topics that are central to the Jewishness of Jesus, such as the Christian relationship to law, and otherness as a Christological category. Through the lenses of the otherness of the Jewish Jesus (...) for contemporary Christians, she also discusses circumcision, natality, vulnerability, and suffering in dialogue with thinkers seldom drawn into Jewish-Christian discourse, notably Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Martha Nussbaum and Adi Ophir. Meyer demonstrates how the memory of Jesus' Jewishness is a key to reconfiguring contemporary challenges to Christian thought, such as particularity and otherness, law and ethics after the Shoah, human responsibility, and divine vulnerability. (shrink)

Freud completed his last book, on Moses and Monotheism, in 1939, while in his London exile. Its publication was deemed untimely, as its two main theses could be construed as a form of Jewish self-hatred. The first claim questions Moses’ Jewish origins and contends that the founder of the Jews was in fact an Egyptian; the second suggests that the Jews killed Moses and then created his myth as a coping mechanism for concealing their terrible deed. In this article, I (...) contend that Moses and Monotheism can be read as Freud’s intervention in debates on the ‘Jewish Question’. After revisiting Freud’s original argument (I), I assess its reception among leading Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century (II). I then use Freud’s arguments to look at the two key themes of the Jewish Question: understanding the defining features of Jewish identity (III) and the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Western culture (IV). (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the role the double plays in the constitution of identity, focusing on the movement between the individual and the collective level. Notably, the latter today is often considered through the lens of identity politics. The double, I argue, poses an alternative to this type of politics, by showing the interdependence of groups. As a case study, this paper focuses on the complex relationship between the anti-Semite and the Jew as depicted by Sartre. I begin with (...) a psychoanalytical examination of the figure of the double,follow on with an analysis of Sartre's work in the light of the double, and conclude with Girard's theory of mimetic desire. (shrink)

Manetti's Latin treatise Adversus Iudaeos et Gentes (Against the Jews and Gentiles) offers a polemical defense of the Christian religion. This volume, which includes the first four books,surveys human history from the Creation to the life,teaching, and resurrection of Christ. Book I begins with the creation and fall of man in the Biblical account. There follows a long digression adversus gentes (the Gentiles, i.e., pagans), which reviews central points of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and religion, and censures the ancients (...) for their senseless doctrines and bloody rites. Manetti then returns to the Jews, whose beliefs and practices are praised from Abraham to Moses. During their centuries of "true" piety, Manetti calls the chosen people "Hebrews." But from the time of the Exodus onwards, he censures them as "Jews" because they observe the absurd and cruel practices of Pentateuchal legislation, which he views as analogous to pagan rites. Manetti stresses several themes in Jewish history: the early development of the concept of righteousness, the Exodus, the Mosaic Law and its inadequacy--thus providing a "preparation for the Gospel" in Eusebius' sense. The next three books provide a synoptic biography of Jesus in three stages. Book II describes the life of Christ up to the raising of Lazarus; Book III relates his teaching, and Book IV offers an account of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection. (shrink)

Cornish suggests that, because they were in the same class at school, Wittgenstein was the specific target of Hitler's bile in Mein Kampf, and that Hitler's beliefs about Jews came from the experience of meeting Wittgenstein at this time.

S. Leyla Gürkan’s The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation is a bold attempt to trace the concept of the election of Israel from its Biblical and early Rabbinic development to the early modern and post-holocaust periods. Written as the history of an idea, the common thread tying the work together is the account and analysis of how this single, sometimes thorny, question of “chosenness” has animated Jewish conceptions of identity throughout its history. The author’s focus on this (...) idea serves as the motivation of the work to describe how “the idea of chosenness . . . is the raison d’être of the Jewish religion as well as the Jewish people” (p. 1). The author describes the question of .. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used (...) to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy. (shrink)

For the first time in any study of Friedrich Nietzsche, Siegfried Mandel persuasively argues that the controversial 19th-century philosopher was both "philosemitic" and anti-Semitic. Forceful, lively, and original, the book incorporates a wealth of evidence that opens Nietzsche's life and works to more careful study and reflection.

“Is it heretical to conclude that a noble rather than a base motive lay at the core of the Jewish unwillingness to join the apostolic church?”.

Marginalization has emerged as a powerful and central theme in the history of Germany in the later Middle Ages. In many ways, Jews appear to have been the quintessential marginalized people – the victims of restrictive legislation, theological demonization, expulsions, violent attacks, and pogroms. Recent scholarship suggests that the position of the Jews in late medieval and early modern Germany may be more complex, and at times more constructive, than once thought. This article, therefore, suggests that the notion of marginalization (...) can be usefully applied not only to the issue of Jewish and Christian relations but also to the internal dynamics of the late medieval German Jewish community itself. Considering who was marginalized, for what reasons, and in what ways can tell us a great deal about the needs and concerns of late medieval Jews and Jewish communities. (shrink)

The ArgumentIt is well known that theTractatusof Peter of Spain (later Pope John XXI) was one of the most popular logic textbooks in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Less known is theTractatus'sconsiderable reputation and diffusion among the Jews, as evidenced by five translations, two commentaries, and what appears to be anabbreviatio— if not of theTractatusitself, then of a similar work. The present article attempts to understand the phenomenon of theTractatus'spopularity and offers an analysis of the three translations whose authors (...) are known — those by Shemaryah ha-Ikriti (Greece, early to mid-fourteenth century), Abraham Abigdor (late fourteenth century), and Judah b. Samuel Shalom (either Italy or Spain, mid-fifteenth century) — and their subsequent fate. The more popular versions of Abraham Abidgor and Judah Shalom provided Jewish students, many of whom would likely become physicians, with a grounding in logic comparable to that of their Christian counterparts. (shrink)

BOOK REVIEWS 297 to and 21o), Receuil ~ l'usage des prkdicateurs in an Auxerre manuscript , and a Latin-Arabic Glossary preserved in a single Leiden manuscript . The estimate to be made of this Work must be all but totally positive. The complex organization of the volume can make difficulties, despite a useful index; Tolan's refer- ence to "five" authentic works perhaps includes the De Machometo since only four, Dialogi, Zij al-Sindhind, Epistola ad peripateticos and Disciplina clericalis have survived his (...) scrutiny. Tolan has conveyed deftly the fluid quality of a mediaeval book. Copied and recopied for readers whose varied interests might inspire additions and omissions, a mediaeval treatise might be reworked by the author himself and no longer be the book that it was. Alfonsian studies have been advanced by Tolan's urbane estimate of these works and of their reception by Latin Europe in the twelfth-century struggle to share the scientific and cultural achievements of Judaism and Islam. EDWARD A. SYNAN Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and University of Toronto Raymond B. Waddington and Arthur H. Williamson, editors. The Expulsion of the Jews: r492 andAfler. Garland Studies in the Renaissance, Volume 2. New York: Garland Publishing, t994. Pp. x + ~96. Cloth, $48.oo. In t992 there were many conferences commemorating the expulsion of the Jews from Spain five.. (shrink)

Canarsie is a lower middle class neighborhood on the eastern edge of Brooklyn. For generations a district of junk yards, refuse dumps and marsh land, its name has long been used by New Yorkers to epitomize everything that is isolated, grimy and parochial about the outer rim of the metropolis (“Go to Canarsie” serves as a polite substitute for “Go to Hell” for Bronx natives of a certain age). In the mid 1970s, when most of the marshes had been filled (...) in and covered with block after block of small single family houses, Canarsie's unsavory reputation took on another dimension. (shrink)

This research study examined what dialogues, methods of communication and mechanisms were employed by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) to teach, guide and advise His opponents, particularly the Jews of Medina. This study took the opportunity to understand the characteristics of such dialogues and communication methods and extrapolate the jurisprudential rulings and the legitimate objectives of such dialogues. The study used a historical and heuristic approach to unearth the dialogic communication, and data was retrieved from the Prophet’s biographies, religious writings, archives (...) and documents. The study premised that the dialogic discourse adopted by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) could be relevant in the modern times as well for predicting a peaceful coexistence between Muslims and believers of other religions. Such a coexistence established through dialogues in world conferences and religious gatherings could be the real foundations to foster a common understanding among people of different religions. (shrink)

In _German Idealism and the Jew_, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the fundamental thinkers in the (...) German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it. (shrink)

The first conceptual history of the development and evolution of the image of Jews and Jewish participation in modern German-speaking cosmopolitanist thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche is as often misunderstood as the Jews. Ben Moshe highlights Nietzsches admiration for the Jews of the Bible, and looks into the remarkable similarity between many of Nietzsche's writings and Jewish sacred texts.

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)’s relationship with the Jews is explored in this article. The history of this relationship can be divided into two different periods. The first begins during his formative years in South Africa from 1893 to 1914, and the second, during his political activism in India thereafter. The article points out that Gandhi’s close Jewish associates in South Africa, although coming primarily from a Theosophist background, considered their support of Gandhi and his struggle to represent their core Jewish (...) values. Still, Gandhi’s close Jewish supporters did not successfully influence Gandhi regarding Zionism. In retrospect, Gandhi’s objection to Zionism enormously impacted the Indian Congress Party’s position regarding Palestine. The article notes that although Gandhi opposed political Zionism, he supported Zionism as a spiritual movement that could be best realized “within.” Somewhat surprising and little-known fact was a desire on Gandhi’s part to mediate between the Arabs and the Jews in direct talks. Gandhi hoped the Zionist leaders would respond positively to his offer to mediate so that he could advance his teachings of nonviolence while also claiming to represent the Indian Muslims. The article discusses Gandhi’s call to German and European Jews to resist the Nazi regime by adopting Satyagraha, the consequent rift with Jewry that followed, and his silence after the Holocaust. Finally, the article also briefly explores B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956)’s views on the Jews and the Indian pariahs. (shrink)

“Is X good for the Jews?” This is the formula Bruno Chaouat borrows for the title of his recent book. It’s a cliché of a question, one that suggests notes of antisemitic caricature as well as Jewish self-parody. The formula may be imagined in the voice of the antisemite, whose perennial accusation against the Jews is that they are insular and parochial, exclusively concerned for their own, tribal welfare. Alternatively, it may be imagined in the voice of the shlemiehl, the (...) Jewish version of the fool archetype, scripted to say such things by a self-reflective and self-parodic Jewish comedy writer. So, it’s a question that antisemites may imagine Jews to ask, and one that Jews may imagine antisemites imagine Jews to... (shrink)

Análisis historiográfico del relato de las vicisitudes del alfaquí Ṭālūt, elaborado por Ibn al-Qūṭiyya y reproducido por numerosas fuentes andalusíes y orientales. De dicho análisis se desprende que la supuesta versión amplia de la crónica de Ibn al-Qūṭiyya nunca existió y que la coincidencia entre varias obras en presentar una versión extensa del relato es debida a su común dependencia de un subarquetipo que amplificó retóricamente el texto original de Ibn al- Qūṭiyya.