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)

There are certain remarks in Culture and Value in which Wittgenstein writes about Jews and about what he describes as their ‘Jewish mind’. In these remarks he appears to be trying to make a distinction between two different spiritual forces which operate in Western culture and which give rise to two different types of artists and works of art. On one side of the divide are Jews and works of art imbued with Jewish spirit. On the other side (...) are men of culture and works of art which exhibit a non-Jewish spirit. Among the various remarks made in this context, he offers the following thoughts about the spiritual nature of Jews, their mentality, character and artistic achievements: ‘You get tragedy when a tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish’ . Following Renan he writes: ‘The Semitic races have an unpoetic mentality, which heads straight for what is concrete’ . This, he explains, is because Jews are attracted by ‘pure intellectualism’. ‘I think it would be possible now to have a form of theatre played in masks. The characters would simply be stylized human types.’ ‘Masked theatre is anyway the expression of an intellectualistic character. And for the same reason perhaps it is a theatrical form that will attract only Jews’ . ‘The Jew is a desert region, but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect’ . ‘It is typical for a Jewish mind to understand somebody else's work better than that person understands it himself.’ But intellect, it seems, is not a mental attribute providing for genius and true creative powers. ‘Amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. … It might be said that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass; its way is rather to make a drawing of the flower or blade of grass which has grown in the soil of another's mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren't pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may. ’. (shrink)

Many pop culture pundits find characteristics of Jewish humor in their analysis of Jon Stewart's Jewish identity. Though no one has ever suggested that Stewart's a “good Jew,” Stewart still radiates a Jewish persona. This persona and Stewart's satiric treatment of Judaism echo Martin Buber's philosophy. What links the great humanist and the contemporary television satirist is that both point to the outside world and then explain to others what they should have seen. Our pursuit of Buber begins with Stewart's (...) life as a Jew. While it's impossible to watch The Daily Show without Stewart's Jewish persona being obvious, hearing an echo of Martin Buber's philosophy of engagement requires that we carefully review how Stewart's Jewish persona represents the great humanist. Buber insisted on political involvement and the seamless convergence of religion, ethics, politics, education, and art. (shrink)

The debate about "race" and "intelligence" seems to be never ending. The "special nature" of the intelligence ascribed to "Jews" has recently reappeared in an essay by one of the authors of the notorious study of race and intelligence - The Bell Curve . How this debate is constructed and what its implications are for the reappearance of "race" as a category in medical and biological science is at the core of this present essay.

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious (...) outcasts to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals -German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists- have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day."--Jacket. (shrink)

Despite the urgent need to rethink Christian theology in the light of the Holocaust, Asian theologians have been slow in taking up the challenge. As a contribution to the dialogue between Christians and Jews, the essay begins by examining the presence of Jews in East Asia, especially the community of Jews in Kaifeng, China, first discovered by Matteo Ricci. Next it reveals the latent anti-Jewish accents in past and contemporary theological writings. The final part explores how Asian (...) theology can enrich a post-Holocaust theology in four areas: God, the covenant, Christology, and reconciliation. (shrink)

Historians estimate that between 10 and 15 thousand Jews were hiding out in Warsaw before the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. One of the aid organizations, the Jewish National Committee received a larger amount of money in late July but managed to distribute only some of it. Then rest went for various forms of aid during the fighting and after the uprising fall—for those who survived. The Varsovians’ attitude towards the Jews varied. The civilian authorities tried to help (...) all who found themselves in extreme conditions, Poles and Jews. Many Jews bravely fought in many battles in the city along with their Polish compatriots and their fate is presented in the article. (shrink)

Jews and Islamic Law in Early 20th-Century Yemen. By Mark S. Wagner. Indiana Series in Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 208. $75 ; $29.

Who are the Jews? What do they believe? Why is Israel so important to them? What's all this about self-hating Jews? These are just some of the questions that engage a Reform rabbi and a Humanist philosopher in their lively and intriguing conversations. From Antisemitism to Zionism, from animal slaughter kosher-style to the Zeitgeist of Jewish disparaging humour, rabbi Dan Cohn-Sherbok gives us the flavours, traditions and 'feel' of Jewish life and identity enmeshed in the importance of the (...) Holy Land, while philosopher Peter Cave gets him to dig deeper, revealing philosophical perplexities, unsettling questions -- and even Wittgenstein. The book is unique for it challenges unconscious assumptions such as the Jewish conviction that Judaism must survive and that Hitler must not secure a posthumous victory -- as well as widening eyes to searching questions concerning a nation's identity and what justifies territorial rights. Because Jewish humour plays a crucial role in Jewish life, this wide-ranging and thought-provoking exploration includes Jewish jokes and Dan's Jewish cartoons, all designed to add some spice to the dish of what it is like to be a Jew in these modern times. The dialogues introduce the non-Jewish to the Jewish world of argument, anguish and identity -- and will lead Jews to discover some fresh approaches and challenges to their interests and worries. For both Jews and non-Jews, this book casts lights -- with an engaging and accessible tone -- for, clearly, this rabbi and philosopher enjoy the cut and the thrust. (shrink)

_This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." _ Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hitler's Austria, dramatizes a dialogue between these four men in (...) which they discuss fraternity, religious identity, and legacy as well as reveal aspects of their lives-notably their relations with their wives-that many have ignored, underemphasized, or misrepresented. The desire for canonization and the process by which it is obtained are the underlying themes of this dialogue, with emphasis on Paul Klee's _Angelus Novus _(1920), a canonized work that resonated deeply with Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem (and for which Djerassi and Gabrielle Seethaler present a revisionist and richly illustrated interpretation). Basing his dialogue on extensive archival research and interviews, Djerassi concludes with a daring speculation on the putative contents of Benjamin's famous briefcase, which disappeared upon his suicide. (shrink)

_This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." _ Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hitler's Austria, dramatizes a dialogue between these four men in (...) which they discuss fraternity, religious identity, and legacy as well as reveal aspects of their lives-notably their relations with their wives-that many have ignored, underemphasized, or misrepresented. The desire for canonization and the process by which it is obtained are the underlying themes of this dialogue, with emphasis on Paul Klee's _Angelus Novus _, a canonized work that resonated deeply with Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem. Basing his dialogue on extensive archival research and interviews, Djerassi concludes with a daring speculation on the putative contents of Benjamin's famous briefcase, which disappeared upon his suicide. (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)

In Good Jew, Bad Jew Steven Friedman argues that the meaning of anti-Semitism favoured by the Israeli government and its allies prioritises loyalty to the Israeli state over identification with the Jewish people. On this view, ‘good Jews’ are those who support the Israeli state, and ‘bad Jews’ are those who criticise Zionism. This framing reflects a discursive transition over decades linked to the desire to make Israel part of Europe politically and culturally. Not only has the Zionist (...) version of anti-Semitism inverted traditional notions of Jewishness but it has transformed ‘Jewishness’ from the ‘other’ to whiteness, to an ally of white supremacists. This racial embrace goes hand in glove with the brutal practice of colonial violence evident in Gaza. Friedman makes his case drawing on the work African scholars such as Biko, Fanon and Mamdani, Southern scholars such as Ashis Nandy, as well as established scholars of the North. (shrink)

Irven Michael Resnick - Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 257-258 Book Review Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, editors. Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 380. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $24.95. This volume, a collection of conference papers presented at Notre Dame in 1996, draws (...) attention to the twelfth-century renaissance for the evolution of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. Rather than treating the anti-Jewish violence of the first Crusade as a decisive break leading directly to Jewish isolation and, finally, expulsion from medieval Christendom, the editors have selected papers that seek "to integrate the Jewish and Jewish-Christian stories into a larger European story" focusing.. (shrink)

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)

People of Jewish origin arrived in the American Continent as early as 15th century and have participated in shaping the states and societies on the continent. A fact little known in Poland, Jews and their culture are inherent in Latin American reality. The paper attempts to provide an insight into Ashkenazic Diaspora in its Latin American dimension.

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.

The history of Italian Jews from 1861 to 1938 is often viewed as the period in which they totally assimilated into the Italian nation. This article, however, argues that rather than their assimilation it was a period of their integration into Italian society. Various approaches to this question are presented, including a review of the literature, with a view to reconsidering the relationship between Jewish culture and Italian culture, or rather non-Jewish culture. Italian Jewish history is shown not to (...) be separated from, but to be “internal” to Italian social, cultural, and political history—part of the dynamic process of change that occurred during this period not only in Italy but throughout Europe. (shrink)

Responding to Gil Anidjar's “Jesus and Monotheism” and its posing of the “Christian Question,” in this paper I return to Freud's Moses and Monotheism and its narrative of Jewish self-division. In highlighting the retroactive formation of identity, I note both its temporal dimension and the force of exclusivity it generates. This reading suggests a contrast between such theo-political communities, with their legacies of affiliation, and Christian self-absolution (the refusal of constitutive self-division) with its image of a new man. I take (...) a brief detour through Marx and Schmitt to examine the founding structures of secular modernity and the entanglement of liberalism with Christianity. Pursuing a hint offered by Anidjar that Christianity is not quite a tradition, I conclude that for Freud, the “Christian question” emerges as a kind of enigma: the dream of a community divorced from human modes of transmission, unbound by legacies of filiation to the past, and replacing the collective memory of a people with the end of human collectivity. (shrink)

Introduction -- Roots, rootlessness, and fin de siècle France -- Stranger and self: Sartre's Jew -- Anti-Semite and Jew -- Dialectical history, unhappy consciousness, and the Messiah -- The ethics of uprootedness: Emmanuel Levinas's postwar project -- Literary unrest: Maurice Blanchot's rewriting of Levinas --"The Last of the Jews": Jacques Derrida and the case of the figure -- The cut -- The exemplar -- Conclusion.

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.

In this article I discuss the history of Italian Jews from the Emancipation to the racial laws of 1938 and their present-day attitudes to Judaism and the State of Israel. My aim is to suggest how the policy of social integration enabled Italian Jews to construct a new identity without losing their ancestral heritage. The example of Italian Jewry is relevant to understanding the growing need in today‘s European Union—now comprising 27 countries with different languages, cultures, and values—of (...) revising the concept of national identity and of exploring ways of constructing a new European identity. (shrink)

Heather, Bede Review of: Neither jew nor Greek: A contested identity, by James D. G. Dunn, Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015, pp. 946, $62.19.

Discusses the encounter between German philosophy and Judaism in the 18th-19th centuries, focusing on the Hegelian and Kantian systems, and analyzes their negative evaluation of Judaism. Explores also the views of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and Jewish responses.

In 1903 Otto Weininger, A Viennese Jew who converted to Protestantism, published Geschiecht und Charakter, a book in which he set out to prove the moral inferiority and character deficiency of "the woman" and "the Jew." Almost immediately, he was acclaimed as a young genius for bringing these two elements together. Shortly thereafter, at the age of twenty-three, Weininger committed suicide in the room where Beethoven had died. Weininger's sensationalized death immortalized him as an intellectual who expressed the abject misogyny (...) and antisemitism.This collection of essays, many translated into English for the first time, examines Weininger's influence and reception in Western culture, particularly his impact on important writers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce. One essay considers the ways Weininger's ideas were used to further Nazi ideology, and several offer feminist approaches to interpreting the intersection of antisemitism and misogyny. The concluding essay explores Weininger's surprising role in Israel's ongoing sociopolitical self-definition through the bold production of Joshua Sobol's play, "The Soul of a Jew."This volume 's close examination of Weininger's ideas, and their subsequent appearance in other well-known texts, suggests how the legacies of prejudice affect Western culture today. Author note: Nancy A. Harrowitz is author of Antisemitism, Misogyny and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao and editor of Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes. >P>Barbara Hyams is Lecturer with the rank of Assistant Professor of German at Brandeis University. (shrink)

This review article presents and summarises my doctoral dissertation ‘Reading Romans, Constructing Paul(s): A Conversation between Messianic Jews in Jerusalem and Paul within Judaism Scholars’, defended on 24 September 2021 at Lund University. It is a highly interdisciplinary study between New Testament studies and the anthropology of Christianity. It focuses on Paul and readings of Romans 11, where the Messianic Jewish readings originate from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem through so-called Bible-reading interviews. This article summarises each chapter, provides examples (...) from the empirical chapters ‘Identity and Torah’, ‘Relations and Yeshua’ and ‘Time and Land’, and finishes by pointing out three major conclusions followed by three additional key contributions that the study makes. (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)

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

Jean-Francois Lyotard's contribution to the debate, Heidegger and 'the Jews, ' is a marked departure from the standard fare. In the first of the two interrelated essays, 'the Jews, ' Leotard quickly establishes the theme of the entire text, placing 'the Jews' in lower case, plural, and in quotation marks to represent the outsiders, the nonconformists: the artists, anarchists, blacks, homeless, Arabs, etc. --and the Jews; as an alien and dangerous disruption, they represent an 'other' to (...) be excised from the West's dream of unbounded fulfillment and development. (shrink)

Judaism and Christianity are religions whose theological epistemology is based on revelation. The primary source of revelation is Holy Scripture. However, history has also been recognised as a source of revelation, particularly the history of Israel and the Jewish people. Because they understood history as a source of revelation, many religious Jews altered their understanding of Jewish statehood in Eretz Israel during the twentieth century, from distinctly averse to increasingly supportive. On the same principles, the Catholic Church made arguably (...) the most profound change in its theology in the twentieth century, concerning its understanding of Jews and Judaism. This was prompted by an­­other major historical event, the Shoah. While in Judaism the historical phenom­enon of the State of Israel profoundly influenced theology, another historical phenomenon, the Shoah, was theologically approached with far more unease and ambiguity. In the Catholic Church, in contrast, the historical phenomenon of the Shoah prompted a serious reconsideration of certain tenets of theology, includ­ing soteriology, while the historical phenomenon of the State of Israel did not. This article addresses this apparent contradiction comparatively. (shrink)