David Nirenberg - Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

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A  powerful history that shows anti-Judaism to be a central way of thinking in the Western tradition.

This incisive history upends the complacency that confines anti-Judaism to the ideological extremes in the Western tradition. With deep learning and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to the history of the West.

Questions of how we are Jewish and, more critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world. The thrust of this tradition construes Judaism as an opposition, a danger often from within, to be criticized, attacked, and eliminated. The intersections of these ideas with the world of power—the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, the German Holocaust—are well known. The ways of thought underlying these tragedies can be found at the very foundation of Western history.

Wikipedia:

David Nirenberg (born 1964) is an American medievalist and intellectual historian. He is the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Divinity School, and Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and the Committee on Social Thought, as well as the former Executive Vice Provost of the University, Dean of the Social Sciences Division, and the founding Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. He is also appointed to the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies.

He is notable for his landmark analysis in 2013 of antijudaism as a constitutive principle of the Western tradition, and his argument for a longue durée approach to historical understanding, a career about-face from the methodological approach taken in his 1996 work, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. He has a particular interest in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought in medieval Europe.

In 2024, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Video Title: Anti-Judaism. Source: Yad Vashem. Date Published: March 14, 2018.

Prof. David Nirenberg presents the concept of “anti-Judaism” and explores what separates it from “antisemitism”.

Video Title: Anti-Judaism, Past and Present – How do our Faiths Shape our Prejudices and Ideals? Source: Kaufman Interfaith Institute. Date Published: April 18, 2022. Description:

From their earliest origins to the present moment, Christians and Muslims have given shape to their faiths by interacting with and thinking about Jews and Judaism. How has that long history of thought contributed to anti-Semitism in the past and present? And what can the study of that history offer the future?