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Lecturer(s)
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Visi Tamás, doc. Ph.D., M.A.
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Course content
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Topics to be discussed: 1. The Continuity Thesis and Its Critics. Terminology: antisemitism, anti-Judaism, Judeophobia. Peter Schäfer, "Judeophobia in antiquity," Gavin I. Langmuir, "nonrational hostility," Léon Poliakov, "antisemitism in antiquity" 2. Christianity and Antisemitism I. The idea that Judaism was "fossilized" after the emergence of Christianity. Challenging the "fossilization" thesis: Christian anti-Judaism as a response to a strong and vibrant Jewish community in Late Antiquity (Marcel Simon, "Verus Israel") Miriam S. Taylor: a penetrating criticism of Simon's thesis, although Judaism was not "fossilized," Christian antisemitism was not simply a reaction to Jewish successes. 3. Christianity and Antisemitsm II. The Passion narrative and its reception history. Who killed Jesus? Historical facts, collective memory and collective forgetting. The charge of deicide and its various manifestations. St. Augustine's statement on Roman and Jewish responsibility. Antisemitic retellings of the Passion narrative from the Diatessaron to Mel Gibson. 4. Christianity and Antisemitism III. Scholastic rationalism and antisemtism. "The Jew is the librarian of the Christian." The end of the Augustinian paradigm. Rational Christianity and irrational Judaism. Rationalizing Christian society by excluding the Jews. Pope John XXII and the new understanding of disbelief as a contract with the devil. The "synagogue of Satan:" the demonization of Jews. The "narrative assault on the Jews" (Miri Rubin): blood libel, ritual murder libel, host libel, etc. 5. The Gnostic agenda. Anti-Jewish mythologies. The Manichean psalms about the crucifixion. The wicked god and the wicked laws of the Jews. Christianity and Gnosticism. Modern reverberations of Gnosticism: Adolf Harnack's theology. Gnosticism and Nazi Christianity. Vilifying the Old Testament. 6. Secular Antisemitism. Blaming the Jews for the paradoxes of modernization. Hatred of Jews camouflaged as struggle for national independence or social justice. The Jew as capitalist. The Jew as communist. National characterology. The invention of racism. Reinventing the old fantasies: the modern forms of the blood libel. 7. Theories of Antisemitism. The projection theory. Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of "bad faith." Antisemitism and nationalism. Antisemitism and the failures of modernization. Linguistic approaches to antisemitism. The concept of "New Antisemitism." Competing definitions of antisemitism. 8. Old and New: Recurrences of old antisemtic stereotypes and arguments in trendy and fashionable garbs. Explaining away the crimes of the past. The Diary of Anna Frank de-judaized. The Holocaust de-judaized. Relativizing the Holocaust. Camouflaging antisemitism as struggle against colonization and racism. Mainstreaming anti-Israel narratives in mass media and in political discourses. Academic antisemitism at contemporary universities.
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Learning activities and teaching methods
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Dialogic Lecture (Discussion, Dialog, Brainstorming), Work with Text (with Book, Textbook)
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Learning outcomes
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The major philosophical and historical problems concerning the concept of antisemitism and the academic description of its various manifestations will be discussed in this class. Students will learn about debates between historians concerning the continuity of antisemitism (very briefly, whether the premodern hatred of Jews and anti-Jewish violence is the same kind of thing as the modern, secular and political, antisemitism, or not), concerning the definition of antisemitism (including the recent debates concerning the "IHRA definition of antisemitism"), concerning the comparibility of the Holocaust to other historical crimes, and concerning the methods legitimate criticism of Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel can be differentiated from antisemitism.
A student acquires an overview of basic facts but above all acquires deep knowledge regarding the question of Jewish philosophical-religious thinking in its different forms.
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Prerequisites
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unspecified
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Assessment methods and criteria
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Student performance, Systematic Observation of Student, Seminar Work
Students are obliged to prepare for every seminar (set reading list) and participate actively in discussions. They will obtain credits at the end of the seminar. Povinná literatura: Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, tr. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948) Doporučená literatura: Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, tr. Richard Howard (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus, Studia Post-Biblica, 46 (Leiden, New York, and Köln: E. J. Brill, 1995) Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, AD 135-425, tr. H. Mckeating, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1986) Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Jehuda Reinharz, Inside the Antisemitic Mind: The Language of Jew-Hatred in Contemporary Germany (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2017)
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Recommended literature
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+ V závislosti na tématu semináře/Depending on the topic of seminar.
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