Much of Western civilization is suffused with disdain for, and opposition to, Judaism. So contends University of Chicago medieval history professor David Nirenberg in his new book, “Anti-Judaism:The Western Tradition.”
In his talk about the book at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee on June 13 to an audience of about 70, Nirenberg tried to demonstrate that anti-Judaism has long and deep roots going back to before the beginnings of Christian Europe. He referred to Muslim hostility toward Judaism, but emphasized Europe.
Nirenberg distinguished anti-Judaism from anti-Semitism in the former’s focus on ideas rather than Jewish people. In fact, the phenomenon dates to a time when few Jews lived in much of Europe, and almost no Jews appear in the book, he said.
Nirenberg said he remembers the exact day that inspired the book. In September 2001, when he was teaching at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, he took a train to New York University to speak there.
Because flights were grounded after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the train was full of politicians going to “Ground Zero” to hear President George W. Bush’s remarks.
“I really left the train feeling the excitement of watching history being made,” he said. “In this case I was watching the fear of a whole country being given a face, and that face was [then-Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein.”
After arriving in New York, he got on a train for downtown, and in his car were two men going to work on the Twin Towers clean-up effort. And Nirenberg heard them say, “It’s the Jews who made New York an emblem of greed. That’s why they hate us.”
“And I realized that again I was watching fear be given a face, and this time that face looked a lot like mine,” he said. “Not just my face, but the face of Jews in the Middle Ages.”
“I wanted to understand how these ways of thinking had lasted for so long,” he said. “So I decided to write a book not about anti-Semitism or bad things happening to Jews, but how a mostly a non-Jewish world learned to think about Judaism to explain its fears to itself, and [learned] to see itself locked in a struggle to overcome Judaism.”
A way of thinking
Christianity grew out of Judaism and its founders undertook to persuade people they needed to abandon the older religion and adopt the new one.
The continued refusal of Jews to convert challenged the legitimacy of the new church, which taught people to see Jews as excessively legalistic and materialistic, insufficiently spiritual and shackled to a false religion that Christianity superseded, Nirenberg said.
Yet Nirenberg found that anti-Judaism goes back even farther. The ancient Romans objected to Jewish “non-belief.”
Ancient Egyptians under Roman rule complained about things afflicting them (disease, drought, invaders, external rulers, tyrants, tax changes) in terms of Jews and Judaism. Some Egyptians went to Rome and charged, “You raised our taxes because you’re a Jew,” Nirenberg said.
During the Middle Ages, Nirenberg said, Christians would criticize each other as “Judaizers,” people who didn’t break with Judaism decisively enough.
In the early modern period, people saw the economic transformation and growth of the money-lending industry as a Jewish plot, even though most lenders were not Jews.
Nirenberg also said that supporters of the French Revolution called it a victory over Judaism, while the revolution’s British foe Edmund Burke condemned it as the triumph of Judaism. Post-Revolution French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was also attacked as a Judaizer, Nirenberg said.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant saw his philosophy as the first true overcoming of Jewish superstition and the creation of modernity, while rival philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel called Kant’s philosophy “Jewish,” Nirenberg said. Yet another rival philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, according to Nirenberg, then called Hegel “the great Judaizer.”
“Remember, none of these philosophers was Jewish,” Nirenberg said. In fact, “Hegel would not have encountered any [Jews]. Kant encountered one that we know of.”
Still later, in the 20th century, “We should remember that many of the people the [German] Nazis were targeting as Jews were not Jews,” Nirenberg continued. “At the famous ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition [in 1937 in Munich], 112 artists were condemned as ‘Judaizers,’ but only six were Jews even by the Nazis’ definition.
“When [the Nazis] said ‘Jew,’ they meant a way of thinking that they had to overcome. There was no area of culture that they couldn’t represent as Jewish.”
The book ends in the 1950s, but Nirenberg said this way of thinking about Judaism persists in today’s world.
“We live in an age when hundreds of millions of people across the world are taught to explain the trials, the tribulations, the challenges they face every day in terms of Judaism [and] Israel,” he said.
“The fact that so many people learned to think about the world in terms of Judaism, even when there were no Jews around, had effects on how they could think thereafter,” he said.
“If our thinking is shaped by, conditioned by, influenced by what’s been thought in the past then we need to become aware of those habits of thought. Otherwise, just like it happened in the mid-20th century, we can become convinced en masse that the greatest threat facing us is Judaism,” he said.
During the question session, an audience member asked if there was ever any parallel case of another culture or group or religion so demonized.
“The intensity of the hatred is not unique; what’s different is the productiveness and persistence,” he said. “Thinking about those oppositions between flesh and spirit, law and spirit, letter and spirit is the way Western thought built itself.
“They were usually not thinking about Jews at all but because of all those oppositions in code, and they thought in terms of Pharisees and Jews, that category became critical for thinking. That I think is unique, but I say that not knowing very well the very long traditions of China.”
Nirenberg’s talk was sponsored by the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the bookstore.
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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