By Cindy Mindell

David Nirenberg, PhD, is Jannotta Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is also director of the Neubauer

Prof. David Nirenberg

Family Collegium for Culture and Society. He has published widely on relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews, from the Middle Ages to the present, and also appears in less specialized venues such as The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The Nation, and Dissent.

Among his critically acclaimed books is Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, published this year by W.W. Norton.  His book, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism Medieval and Modern will appear next year from the University of Chicago Press.

Nirenberg will present “Anti-Judaism: Why the History of Idea Matters” on Monday, Sept. 9 at UConn. He spoke with the Ledger about how Judaism, and reactions to it, lie at the very heart of Western thought.

Q: How did you develop an interest in this huge topic and why did you decide to write the book?

A: Right after 9/11, I was traveling from Baltimore to NYU (New York University) to give a talk on Muslims, Christians, and Jews, one of my academic specialties. The train was full of politicians going to hear George W. Bush talk at Ground Zero. John McCain was behind me reading the Wall Street Journal; to my right was Richard Pearl, one of Bush’s advisors and a big advocate for the war against Iraq, on his phone trying to convince Lesley Stahl to interview Saddam Hussein and ask him why he bombed the Twin Towers. They were setting up in the public’s mind that Iraq had been behind the bombing of the Twin Towers. I got off the train thinking that I was watching a new fear in the country, a new vulnerability, being given a face, the face of Saddam Hussein or of Islam.

But I didn’t write a book about anti-Islam.

I got on a subway from Penn Station to NYU and the train was empty – because it was the red line that terminated under the World Trade Center – except for a welder going to Ground Zero for the clean-up, and his friend. They were talking about why this had happened, and one said that it had to do with the Jews: “It’s because Jewish greed has turned New York into a symbol of capitalism; and that’s why we’re hated,” and the other said, “No, it’s because the Jews killed Christ.”

I felt that the face being given to this new fear was Jewish, and that that was the explanation for why these bad things had happened. These were terms I was familiar with from my own work as a historian. I needed to try to understand what connected the way we make sense of radical transformation in our own world, how we make sense of things that make us feel that the world is out of control, and how people have tried to explain and make sense of transformation across history.

I wanted to understand why these kinds of explanations, so familiar to me from the Middle Ages, made sense today – and not necessarily in the same way or the same explanations – but I wanted to understand this continuity of the mask, the face, the figure of the Jew that has been used to explain and make sense of the unpredictability of the world.

I had to make sense of why this figure of the Jew keeps on getting used, and how is it that this fear, this system of thought, changes constantly so as to adapt to a world that is always being transformed. We’re not ancient Egypt, we’re not the early Christians, we’re not Medieval Europe, and yet, the Jew is still a key category for us in explaining our world.

People talk about antisemitism as the “timeless hatred,” but I’m talking about anti-Judaism – how our basic tools of thought, the concepts with which we make basic sense of the world, are connected to Judaism and transform themselves as the world changes, why both Jewishness and Judaism are at the center of how people make sense of their world.

Q: How does anti-Judaism differ from antisemitism?

A: One question we need to ask, and I do in the book, is: If we today live in a world in which millions and even billions of people make sense of the challenges of the world in terms of Judaism – including Israel and Zionism – does that owe anything to the long history of thinking about Judaism, or is it simply that today, all the challenges facing the world can in fact be blamed on Judaism and Zionism?

One thing the book is about is that anti-Judaism isn’t just about – or primarily about – real Jews; it’s not a critique of you in your Jewishness. Rather, it’s a system of thought that has decided that a series of things in the world are Jewish by definition – law, property – and then produces the “Jewishness” of the world by applying that logic to people and things. Throughout history, lots of people have died as “Jews.” Anwar Sadat was killed by Islamists who accused him of being a “Jew-lover” and a Zionist. Gamal Abdel Nasser had an attempt on his life by the Muslim Brotherhood, who accused him of being a “Jew.” Today, in Syria, rebels accuse Assad of being an “Israel-lover” and a “Jew-lover,” and he attacks them with the same accusations.

Numerically, anti-Judaism is much more often deployed against Christians and Muslims and people of no religion at all, and money-lenders, bankers, etc., than against Jews. So maybe some relief should come from that – not that things are going to be nice for Jews, necessarily, but that anti-Judaism isn’t about real Judaism, it’s not about how Jews believe and what they believe and how they live. Anti-Judaism thinks it’s about something real, something based in Talmud or the Pharisees, but in fact, it’s animated by and feeds on real Jews, turning real Jews into anti-Judaism.

In Germany in the 19th century, you had a society that had learned to think about the world in terms of overcoming Judaism, and this was a place in which there were almost no living Jews. There was a small community in Frankfurt, and all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of Jews began to appear, from the east. What happens when anti-Judaism meets real Jews? It becomes antisemitism, and you get race theories to apply to real people. In Germany, you had a system of thought in place before the arrival of the Jews: Luther’s writings and German philosophy. And then all these Jews show up.

Q: How did early Christianity think about Judaism, and how did that attitude contribute to anti-Judaism?

A: If you think about anti-Judaism as being produced by a very influential way of criticizing the world, St. Paul is the crucial figure here. He says to his followers, if you want to really test yourself as a Christian, if you want to know whether you are getting Jesus’s message and following the Gospel correctly, you need to ask yourself whether you are wrongly attached to this world. If so, you’re “Judaizing.” He turns Judaizing – a verb that Jews don’t do, but only something Christians do – into this basic concept by which every Christian can evaluate whether they are sufficiently Christian, by which every Christian can constantly critique themselves, their fellow Christians, and the world around them.

Paul places inside the head of every Christian a potential Jew: if you have the wrong attitude toward the Bible, foreskin, law, the world, you become that potential Jew inside of you. That is the system of thought; it gets created there and turns every Christian and every Muslim into a kind of critic of Judaism. Paul wrote in Greek – “Judaize” comes from the Greek verb ioudaïzō; it’s used in the Septuagint, where friends of Jews are called Judaizers. It also appears in the Latin Vulgate. The English translation of Galatians does not use the word, but reads “to impel Christians to live as Jews.”

I don’t say that anti-Judaism originates with Paul; he creates the idea of Judaizing for a very specific purpose to deal with a very specific problem in his community – how to deal with circumcision, kashrut, etc. – and his attitude isn’t one of anti-Judaism, but of telling gentile converts that if they act this way, they’re misunderstanding Christianity.

Q: And how does that relate to anti-Judaism today?

A: As a historian and an academic, my work is about looking at origins and making distinctions. For me, what’s really important is to not give the impression that anti-Judaism is always the same, has been there since the beginning and that “they’ll always hate us.” But I resist those people who say that anti-Judaism doesn’t exist, that it is only specific to the past. Anti-Judaism is a very basic way of making sense of and critically engaging the world and just like all of our thinking – mathematics, physics, philosophy – it has changed a huge amount from its origins. But there are really important continuities to keep in mind or we become blind to the fact that our conviction about the world today is informed by anti-Jewish thought.

The fact that this form of thinking doesn’t depend on real Jews doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a devastating effect on real Jews; it does, and that’s why I wrote the book. I don’t think the way the world looks at Jews is either an object or product of these habits of thought. If it’s the latter – the sense that Israel is the most pressing danger to the world – that is the product of the way we’ve learned to make sense of the world, and it has real impact on real Jews. The Palestinians have suffered a real and irretrievable loss, but why does that loss become the most significant injustice in the world for millions of Muslims and others? Is it because it’s indeed the greatest injustice since World War II, or because we’ve learned to make sense of the world in terms of the dangers posed by what we’ve learned to think of as Judaism?

Q: How did attitudes toward Judaism develop in Islam, and how are they different from Christian attitudes?

A: Islamic anti-Judaism has a different historic effect than in Christian societies, but shares a similar logic because it grows out of a shared scriptural history. I treat Islam as part of the Western tradition because it’s one of the religions of the Mediterranean, shaped by the Hellenistic world made by Alexander the Great and then Rome and its successors, including the Persian Empire – the great imperial forces of the Mediterranean that were all interrelated, both communicating with and fighting with each other. Islam is part of that world; it participated in the Athens side of the equation, engaging in philosophy, and in the Jerusalem side of the equation, engaging in a monotheistic religion. We fantasize that Islam is very different from us, but we forget, for example, that the Muslim teaching of jihad – holy war – owes a great deal and grew up in a Christian concept of holy war against Persia. Many early Muslim communities had fought against the Persians and come up against the Christian teaching of holy war. We shouldn’t separate the early Islamic community from the early Western tradition, because it was influenced by Greek, Roman, Christian, and Jewish traditions.

What I try to show in the book is that all potential logic and a system of thought are present in the early Islamic community but it has very different effects. Medieval Islam doesn’t focus on Jews the way medieval Christianity does. But today, the kind of work Judaism and Zionism do in the Islamic imagination is possible because the logic is there in early Islamic tradition and in Islamic scriptures.

Q: This week, the Ledger looks at how Connecticut schools confront incidents of anti-Jewish language and behavior. Based on your work, what perspective would you bring to these situations?

A: On occasion, I have been called on to talk on campuses and in communities about those things. I wrote the book because I believe that having some sense of why we might think the way we think can help us think differently, become aware of why we do some of the things we do, and fight prejudice – in its original definition, of pre-judging. I believe that teaching can make a difference.

One of the things I read as I was preparing the book were writings by intellectuals in the ‘30s who were attempting to explain why the world was seeing Jews the way it was seeing them. They failed, but what they wrote remains a very important resource for us to understand how that system of thought developed then became so convincing to so many people. It’s hard to know whether your attempt to educate and intervene at a moment of danger and prejudice will have an effect, and on whom. It may not be immediate but you never know whom and how you will make a difference in the future.

I would distinguish between the kinds of differences people invent and insist on and maintain in society – and for kids often that’s an extension of the playground mentality: you’re in, you’re out. But that’s different from ideology, in which all our vital interests are contained in that thought and when we feel that they are in danger, we are justified in waging a war to defend them, for example. We can’t understand how antisemitism even arose as an ideology without understanding anti-Judaism, the total system of thought that made these really convincing ways to understand the world. Are these school incidents antisemitism or kids knowing the power of words but not their meaning, and not necessarily building out of those words an ideology to live by? I tend not to worry as much about the absurd things people do or say as I do about these deep convictions people hold about the world which are more capable of animating powerful action. I don’t always know how anxious to get about some of the things that happen.

“Anti-Judaism: Why the History of Idea Matters” with Dr. David Nirenberg: Monday, Sept. 9, 5 p.m., Doris and Simon Konover Auditorium, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, UConn Storrs. For information (860) 486-2271, or contact  judaicstudies@uconn.edu.

Comments? Email cindym@jewishledger.com.