Abstract
Setting the agenda for the volume as a whole, the introduction integrates some of the established preoccupations of Jewish historiography, which have traditionally been studied in national, local and primarily European contexts, with the new perspectives opened up by transnational history and the global and imperial turn. Drawing inspiration from the new, more critical historiography of liberalism helps us to see that religion was one of liberalism’s formative exclusions, and consequently to understand antisemitism as intertwined with liberalism from the first. Rather than privileging European history, or adopting a structure that reflects conventional East/West or metropole/colony distinctions, the volume approaches Jewish history as that of a global minority and proposes a chronology that reflects that global framework, with 1848, 1919 and 1948 as turning points.
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Notes
- 1.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Rabinbach, “Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?,” 49–64; Porter, “Odysseus and the Wandering Jew,” 200–13.
- 2.
Funkenstein, “Dialectics of Jewish Assimilation,” 1–14.
- 3.
For a thoughtful discussion of inclusion/exclusion see van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans, especially 6–8.
- 4.
Exemplary: Hertzberg, The French Enlightenment and the Jews; Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction, 119–38; Lang, Converting a Nation; Brustein and Roberts, The Socialism of Fools?; Hoffman, Bergmann, and Walser Smith, eds. Exclusionary Violence, 23–65.
- 5.
See the agenda-setting Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. For context, Chatterjee, ‘Brief History’. Relevant for the Jewish world int his context are Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora.
- 6.
Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism, 29.
- 7.
Werner E. Mosse, “The Conflict of Liberalism and Nationalism,” 125. Shulamit Volkov later nuanced this approach, see most recently Germans, Jews and Antisemites.
- 8.
Frankel and Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community; Birnbaum and Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation.
- 9.
Exemplary Mehta, Liberalism and Empire; Sartori, Liberalism in Empire; Bell, Reordering the World.
- 10.
Pateman, Sexual Contract; Losurdo, Liberalism; Pitts, Turn to Empire.
- 11.
Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries.
- 12.
For instance Cheyette and Valman ed., Image of the Jew.
- 13.
Exemplary: Katz, Leff, and Mandel, eds., Colonialism and the Jews; Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews; Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten noch Orientalen; Green, “Old Networks, New Connections”; Granick, International Jewish Humanitarianism.
- 14.
See Kalmar and Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews.
- 15.
Bunzl, “Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” 499–508; Katz, Burdens of Brotherhood; Gidley and Renton, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia.
- 16.
See Judaken, Introduction to “Rethinking Anti-Semitism.”
- 17.
Novak, Jewish Social Contract.
- 18.
See for example Katz et al., Colonialism and the Jews, Part 3.
- 19.
Neither volume includes a chapter on antisemitism. Frankel’s introduction to Assimilation and Community only mentions antisemitism in passing; Birnbaum and Katznelson only discuss antisemitism in two paragraphs on the final page of their introduction.
- 20.
Rosenblatt, Liberalism; Leonhard, Liberalismus. See also Kahan, Liberalism.
- 21.
Bell, “What is Liberalism?”
- 22.
See also Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism.
- 23.
Following also Wallerstein, Centrist Liberalism.
- 24.
Williams, Keywords.
- 25.
Battini, Socialism of Fools.
- 26.
Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism; Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism. Freeden, “European Liberalisms,” 9–30 attempts a broader approach. Bayly and Biagini eds., Giuseppe Mazzini, and Bayly, Recovering Liberties, attempt a more properly global understanding of the liberal tradition.
- 27.
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 7.
- 28.
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 17.
- 29.
Ozan Ozavci, “A Jewish ‘Liberal’ in Istanbul,” infra.
- 30.
See Colonialism and the Jews, Part 3; also Robinson, Citizen Strangers.
- 31.
See for instance Birnbaum and Katznelson, “Emancipation and the Liberal Offer.”
- 32.
Sorkin, Jewish Emancipation, 5.
- 33.
See Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. On the emergence of a specifically Jewish public sphere see Sorkin, Transformation of German Jewry; Berkovitz, Rites and Passages; Brenner, Renaissance of Jewish Culture.
- 34.
Wallerstein, Centrist Liberalism.
- 35.
Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans.
- 36.
See for instance Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews; Karp, The Politics of Jewish Commerce; Penslar, Shylock’s Children.
- 37.
Sternhell, La droite révolutionnaire; Stoetzler, The State, the Nation and the Jews.
- 38.
For context see Case, The Age of Questions.
- 39.
See Okamura, “Situational Ethnicity,” 452–65, as interpreted in the German-Jewish case by van Rahden, Jews and other Germans, 8–9.
- 40.
Most obviously Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics, and Frankel, Prophecy and Politics.
- 41.
Hyman, “Was there a ‘Jewish Politics’ in Western and Central Europe?” Recent work on Russia has qualified this assessment: Nathans, Beyond the Pale, and Horowitz, Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment. On the USA see Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion.
- 42.
We recognise, however, the central importance of new interpretations of religion, and religiously inflected secularism, for both Jewish and non-Jewish liberals. See Joskowicz and Katz, eds., Secularism in Question, Asad, Formations of the Secular.
- 43.
Hart and Michels, eds., The Modern World, 1815–2000.
- 44.
See Kurz, Jewish Internationalism; Samuel Moyn, “René Cassin,”; Loeffler, Rooted Cosmopolitans.
- 45.
Fawcett, Liberalism.
- 46.
Michael Freeden, Liberalism.
- 47.
Sheehan, German Liberalism; Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany.
- 48.
See for instance Häusler, “Demokratie und Emanzipation 1848,” 92–111; Häusler, “Konfesssionelle Probleme in der Wiener Revolution von 1848,” 64–77. Hamburger, Juden Im Öffentlichen Leben Deutschlands.
- 49.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 3.
- 50.
See the introductory reflections in Hacohen, Jacob & Esau.
- 51.
Pulzer, Rise of Political Anti-Semitism; Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction; Almog, Nationalism & Antisemitism.
- 52.
Emphasis on continuity still emerges in the otherwise sophisticated Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, in contrast to Judaken, Introduction to “Rethinking Anti-Semitism.”
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Green, A., Levis Sullam, S. (2020). Introduction: Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: Towards a Twenty-First-Century History. In: Green, A., Levis Sullam, S. (eds) Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48240-4_1
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