Europe's Jewish Problem: Antisemitism & Jewish-Christian Confrontation in European History

3 units

The so-called Jewish Question was a product of European modernity. It emerged in conjunction with the formation of modern states, Enlightenment projects for political reform, the decline of religious influence in society, and struggles over Jewish emancipation. In this seminar, students will examine the unusual career of this obsession from the sixteenth through the twentieth century by focusing selectively on a number of illustrative episodes: Christian Hebraism and the Reformation; the Enlightenment assault on religious power; European debates on Jewish emancipation; the emergence of the Jewish Question in the nineteenth century; antisemitism as a modern political phenomenon; the renewed discourse of Jewish ritual murder at the turn of the 20th century; Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism; and the question of anti-Zionism in the reformulation of the Jewish Question during the past half-century.