COURSE DESCRIPTIONS (PAST & PRESENT)
Yom Tov Assis
Medieval
Jewish Life under the Cross and the Crescent
Shlomo Avineri
Israel:
Nation-Building, Political Development. War and Peace
Gisela Bock
Women
and/in the Holocaust: Europe in the 1930s and 1940s
Michael Brenner
German-Jewish
History from the Enlightenment to the Rise of National Socialism
Modern Jewish
Historiography
Zvi Gitelman
The Politics
and Culture of Modern East European Jewry
Victor Karády
Social
History of Central European Jewry
John Klier
The
Rise of Modern Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe
Russian, Poles
and Jews: An Imperial Triangle
András Kovács
Interpretations
of Modern Anti-Semitism
Michael Miller
Anti-Judaism
and Antisemitism in Historical Perspective
Culture, Society
and Religion of Eastern European Jewry
The Emergence
of Zionism
Messianism:
From the Age of Revelation to the Age of Revolution
Paths to Jewish
Emancipation
Russia and Poland
as Multi-National States: The Jews as Case Study, 1772-1917
Andrea Petõ
Holocaust,
Memory, Gender
Marsha Rozenblit
The
Struggle over Identity: The Dilemmas of Jews in Austria-Hungary
and Its Successor States
Ivan Sanders
Assimilation
and its Discontents: Central European Jewish Writers and Literature
Frank Stern
Being
Jewish in European and American Cinema 1914-2006
Yael Tamir
Can
Liberal Nationalism be Implemented? The Israeli Test-Case
Carsten Wilke
Advanced
Source Reading: Medieval Hebrew Text Seminar
Intensive
Reading Seminar: Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise
Introduction
to Medieval Jewish Civilization
Jewish
Thought in the Twentieth Century
Medieval
Iberian Jewry under Muslim and Christian Rule
Paths
to Jewish Emancipation
Problems and Paradigms in Jewish Studies: How to write on
Jewish Subjects
Sephardic Jewry
in Exile, 1492 to the present
Transnationalism
and the Jews of the Nineteenth Century
Medieval
Jewish Life under the Cross and the Crescent
Yom Tov Assis
The course examines
Jewish life in the Middle Ages in Christian Europe and in
the world of Islam and analyzes the legal and political position
of the Jews in both worlds to show the impact of the surrounding
society on the Jews. The course offers a comparative study
of the Jews under Christendom and under Islam in religious
practice, in cultural orientation, in communal organization,
in social structure and family life. The common features in
Jewish life in both the Christian and Muslim domains despite
the dispersion are studied and discussed.
Israel:
Nation-Building, Political Development. War and Peace
Shlomo Avineri
2 credits
This course aims at a comprehensive
overview of the main issues which have determined Israel's
political and ideological development.
The intellectual and political
origins of Zionism and Israel will be traced in the context
of 19th and 20th century European nationalism and the crisis
and failure of liberalism in Central and Eastern Europe. The
structure of the political institutions and political ideological
formations in Jewish community in British, pre-1948 Palestine
will be presented as the background out of which the political
structure and culture of contemporary Israel has emerged.
The changing political map of Israel will be discussed over
the period 1948-2009: political parties, state/religion, the
status of the Arab minority in Israel, the emergence of Sephardi
power and the impact of the recent Russian immigration. The
outcome of the 2009 elections will be analyzed in terms of
both internal and external factors.
The international context of the Arab-Israel conflict will
be related to these developments: from Soviet support for
Israel in the late 1940's to the growing importance of the
American connection in the Cold War and the post-l989 changes.
Further issues to be discussed will be the promise of Oslo,
the breakdown of the peace process following Camp David in
2000, the Gaza disengagement in 2005, the repercussions of
the 2006 Lebanon War, the Annapolis conference and the Gaza
war of 2009.
Women
and/in the Holocaust: Europe in the 1930s and 1940s
Gisela Bock
2 credits
In the Second World War,
National Socialism embarked on a politics of mass murder -
called genocide since 1944 and today called “Holocaust” -
by killing many millions of men and women throughout Eastern
and Western Europe. Those who survived have been affected
in many ways by the “hell” of Nazi concentration camps and
extermination. There were “many circles of hell” and at their
center was the Shoah, the massacre of the Jews, about half
of whom were women. The course will deal with the questions
as to why and how this happened and with the character and
meaning of this “break with civilisation” (Zivilisa-tionsbruch).
The questions will be placed in four major frameworks: the
place of women in National Socialism and the Holocaust, both
as victims and as agents; discourses and practices of racism;
the relations between gender and race or, racism and gender
policies; a comparative and transnational approach (similarities
and differences between “authoritarian”, “fascist”, “National
Socialist” and “totalitarian” politics, the issue of collaboration).
German-Jewish
History from the Enlightenment to the Rise of National Socialism
Michael Brenner
2 credits
This course will
provide a broad overview of German-Jewish history in modern
times, from the period of Enlightenment until the rise of
National Socialism. Beginning with the Berlin Haskala
(Jewish Enlightenment), the course will examine the drawn-out
struggle for legal, political and civic emancipation; transformations
in religious life and practice; the question of social integration
vs. exclusion in Imperial Germany; World War I and its aftermath;
and aspects of Jewish culture, politics and society in the
Weimar Republic.
Major
Issues and Debates in Modern Jewish Historiography
Michael Brenner
This course wants
to introduce the major texts and debates in Jewish history
writing during the 19th and 20th centuries. We will start
with a discussion of some relevant texts of 19th century German-Jewish
scholars like Leopold Zunz, Isaac Marcus Jost and Heinrich
Graetz, then turn to Eastern Europe and review Simon Dubnow's
work. In the 20th century Zionist critics like Gershom Scholem,
Itzchak Baer and Benzion Dinur challenged the traditional
Wissenschaft des Judentums ideology. While they accused their
forerunners of apologetics, they created themselves a Palestinocentric
worldview. On the other side of the Atlantic, meanwhile Salo
Baron drew a more friendly picture of Jewish existence in
the diaspora. We will end with a discussion of modern Jewish
historical writings by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Amos Funkenstein
and some insights into contemporary debates about "Post-Zionist"
Israeli historiography and the place of the Shoah in Jewish
history.
download the syllabus
The
Politics and Culture of Modern East European Jewry
Zvi Gitelman
2 credits
This course focuses
on the interplay of ethnicity, politics and culture, with
specific reference to the Jews of Eastern Europe since the
latter part of the nineteenth century. Students should gain
an appreciation of both the history and culture of East European
Jewry as well as of the interplay of ethnicity and politics.
For our purpose, “Eastern Europe” means, in the main, present
day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.
Reference will also be made to Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
download the syllabus
Social
History of Central European Jewry
Victor Karády
4 credits
The course deals
with long term processes of social, demographic, institutional
and political transformations related to Jews and Jewish communities
in East Central European societies (especially in the Habsburg
Empire) since the Enlightenment. A theoretical introduction
concerning the unique nature and multiple patterns of modern
Jewish collective identity leads to an outline of the establishment
of Jews in this part of the world since the Middle Ages. The
main foci of the course are organized around the following
topical areas: community structure, internal power relations
and inter-state community networks in traditional Jewry; professional
and economic stratification and social mobility since the
19 th century; Jews and the emerging nation states (East and
West compared); demographic modernization; cultural heritage
and ‘educational capital' problems of acculturation and language
switch; social assimilation, integration and status mobility
(mixed marriages, conversion, 'nationalization' of surnames);
pathologies of modern Jewish identity; political responses
to the crisis of assimilation: Zionism, autonomism, Bund,
socialism and communism.
go
to the syllabus
The
Rise of Modern Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe
John Klier
The events surrounding
the anti-Jewish riots, or pogroms, which erupted against the
Jews in the Russian Empire between 1881-2 have widely been
seen as a turning point in modern Jewish history. Indeed,
the Jewish responses to the pogroms, it is argued, gave rise
to modern Jewish politics, especially in the form of Zionism
and Jewish varieties of socialism. While this picture has
been modified somewhat--scholarship has demonstrated the growth
of forms of Jewish nationalism well before the pogroms, and
also that not all Jews abandoned either traditional responses
to crises or liberal beliefs in democratic change--these assumptions
still dominate the historical literature.
The course will
explore the historiography of the rise of modern Jewish politics,
focusing on responses to the crisis of 1881-2. It will also
explore a number of recent revisionist studies--some of then
not yet published--which raise serious questions about the
validity of aspects the dominant interpretation. The Jews
of Eastern Europe will serve as the focus of this study. The
political traditions and activities which characterised the
Jews of Poland-Lithuania before the first partition of 1772,
and which they brought into their respective new states, will
be examined. With this background, the crisis of 1881-2 and
its aftermath, will be reconsidered. The course will conclude
with an examination of the various forms of Jewish politics
in Eastern Europe after 1881-2.
download the syllabus
Russians,
Poles and Jews: An Imperial Triangle
John Klier
2 credits
There is an extensive
historical literature devoted to the history of the Poles
and the Jews under Russian imperial rule. These histories
are usually recounted as two distinct and separate narratives,
"The Polish Question" and "The Jewish Question."
While some attention has been devoted to Polish-Jewish relations,
it is usually viewed as a two-sided relationship, and primarily
within the context of the so-called Kingdom of Poland. Only
a few scholars have tried to view this relationship in a broader
context, or outside the Kingdom of Poland. In particular,
the Polish-Jewish relationship appears in a very different
light if placed in the context of the disputed Polish-Russian
borderlands, a territory that was co-terminous with the Pale
of Jewish Settlement. The borderlands as a cockpit of struggle
between dominant and emergent national groups have featured
prominently in the work of Edward Thaden and Theodore Weeks.
I have tried to explore this three-cornered relationship in
a number of articles and a book, Imperial Russia's Jewish
Question, 1855-1881 (Cambridge, UK, 1996).
This course will
explore the three-sided relationship between Poles, Russians
and Jews, both in the Kingdom of Poland and the Pale of Settlement.
It will examine the process through which Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth were transformed into "Polish Jews"
and "Russian Jews." The role of Jews in the Polish
national movement in the Russian Empire that culminated in
the Polish uprising of 1863 will be explored, as well as the
gradual estrangement that culminated in outright hostility
on the eve of World War I. Attention will be devoted to the
Polish-Jewish relationship in the Pale of Settlement against
the background of the anti-Polish campaign known as "Russification,"
which some historians have seen as anti-Jewish in intent.
The over-riding perspective will be that of the dilemma of
Jews caught in the midst of the conflict between two dominant
and antipathetic national groups.
Interpretations
of Modern Antisemitism
András Kovács
4 credits
This course provides
students with an overview of psychological, sociological,
political and historical theories of modern antisemitism.
After considering key concepts such as anti-Judaism, antisemitism,
modern antisemitism, it gives an introduction into the most
influential scholarly explanations of the investigated subject.
The course concentrates on the theological explanations of
the persistence of antisemitic prejudices, the psychoanalytically
oriented personality theory, the projective theories of prejudice,
the group conflict theories, and the political explanations
of antisemitic movements and ideologies. Special attention
will be given to the methods of empirical sociological investigation
of the subject.
Anti-Judaism
and Antisemitism in Historical Perspective
Michael Miller
Anti-Jewish sentiment
goes by many names, including anti-Judaism, Jew-hatred, Judeophobia,
and, of course, Antisemitism - a term that was coined in 1879
to give scientific legitimacy to the "longest hatred."
This course will explore the ancient origins of Jew-hatred,
examining its development and transformation in the course
of the past two millennia, paying particular attention to
the shifting theological, ideological, cultural, political
and scientific trends that impacted the perception of Jews
and Judaism in the modern period.
Culture,
Society and Religion of Eastern European Jewry
Michael Miller
This course examines the
“Eastern European era in Jewish history,” with particular
focus on religious and cultural trends that shaped (or were
shaped by) the Jewish experience in the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth – up until the Partitions of Poland (1772-1795)
– and in the Russian Empire up until the Bolshevik Revolution.
After exploring the origins of Eastern European Jewry, the
course will examine Jewish institutions of self-government,
social and economic relations with the surrounding Gentile
population, and the flourishing religious and educational
life that was temporarily disrupted by the Cossack Uprising
of 1648-49. It will also examine the eighteenth-century emergence
of Hasidism, a mystical religious movement that attracted
a mass following – and precipitated a vociferous opposition
– among the Jews of Eastern Europe.
After the Partitions of Poland,
Jews were incorporated into the Russian, Prussian and Habsburg
states, each of which aimed to transform the Jews into useful
citizens – or at least “productive” subjects – in accordance
with the regnant Enlightenment discourse. This course will
briefly examine the developments in Prussia and the Habsburg
Empire, but the focus will be on the Russian Empire, which
acquired its Jewish population with the Partitions of Poland.
Particular attention will be paid to the Russian Jewish Enlightenment
(Haskalah), changing attitudes towards religion and “Jewishness,”
shifting roles of women and the family, the emergence of modern
Jewish literature, and ideological responses to economic and
physical insecurity. In addition, the transfer, adaptation
and rupture of Eastern European Jewish patterns of life will
be examined in the context of mass emigration to the New World.
download the syllabus
The
Emergence of Zionism
Michael Miller
4 credits
Zionism, in its
various forms, set out to transform the Jewish people by creating
a territorial homeland for a dispersed minority, by replacing
(or supplementing) a religious-ethnic identity with a national
one. Though influenced by other nineteenth-century national
movements, Zionism differed in several key respects. The Jews
lacked not only a common language and land, but, arguably,
even a common history. As the Jews were gradually emancipated
throughout Western Europe, they often repudiated all ‘national’
elements of Judaism, preferring to view other Jews as ‘coreligionists’
and other Frenchmen, Germans, etc. as fellow countrymen.
Zionism emerged,
in large part, as a response to the failed promises of emancipation.
As faith in full emancipation and social acceptance was belied
by a resurgence of pogroms, the emergence of modern anti-Semitism,
and the rise of nationalist movements, some European Jews
began to reevaluate the Enlightenment view that the Jews could
become full and equal members of society after a process of
moral, religious and occupational ‘regeneration.’
This course will
explore the wide range of responses to this crisis through
an examination of selected Zionist thinkers and their writings.
Beginning with the Zionist "precursors" of the mid-nineteenth
century, the course will analyze seminal texts that reflect
the basic diversity of the Zionist idea up until the establishment
of the State of Israel in 1948. These texts provide not only
dissenting critiques of the Jewish plight in the diaspora,
but also shed light on the competing conceptualizations of
the Jewish future. The Zionist thinkers envisioned Zion as
a purely political entity, as a Jewish state grounded in socialist
ideas, as a site for the regeneration of the Jewish people,
as the cultural center for Diaspora Jewry, as the locus of
messianic redemption.
download the syllabus
download
the bibliography
Messianism:
From the Age of Revelation to the Age of Revolution
Michael Miller & Matthias Riedl
4 credits
This course will explore
the ancient messianic idea, its spatial expansion, and its
ideational development up to the present. The topic will be
approached from a wide variety of disciplines (Political Science,
History, Philosophy, Anthropology), sharing a common focus
on the messiah as a central and enduring symbol of Jewish
and Christian societies and their interconnected eschatological
expectations.
The course is divided into two parts. The first part covers
the ancient oriental origins of the messianic idea and its
articulation in Judaism and Christianity up to the Late Middle
Ages. The second part focuses on the messianic symbolisms
in modern Christian and Jewish societies but also in the political
visions of liberalism and socialism, in Romantic literature,
as well as in idealist and existential philosophy.
go
to the syllabus
Paths
to Jewish Emancipation
Michael Miller
4 credits
This course will examine
the processes leading to the civic and political emancipation
of the Jews in nineteenth-century Europe. It will focus on
aspects of the legal, social and cultural history of the Jews
from the sixteenth century onward in an effort to understand
the different paths to emancipation in England, Western Europe,
and Central Europe. It will also look at various trends -
including religious reform, racial antisemitism, Jewish assimilation
and Jewish nationalism - whose development was part and parcel
of the struggle for emancipation.
Russia
and Poland as Multi-National States: The Jews as Case Study,
1772-1917
Michael Miller
This course examines
the history of the Jews in Russia and Poland, placing particular
emphasis on social, economic and religious transformations
in the period framed by the Partitions of Poland – when the
Russian Empire first acquired its Jews – and the Russian Revolution
– when Russia’s Jews finally received equal political and
legal rights. Imperial Russia’s policies towards the Jews
reflected the semi-feudal structure of the state, the exigencies
of a multi-national empire, and the enduring legacy of the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. On this backdrop, the course
seeks to understand the inordinate attention paid to the ‘Jewish
Question’ by the imperial government as well as the myriad
ideological and demographic responses by the empire’s Jews.
The course also introduces a comparative perspective, examining
Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), religious and educational
movements, economic and gender stratification, urbanization
and politicization – in comparison to other populations within
the Russian Empire and other Jewish communities in Central
and Western Europe.
download the syllabus
Holocaust,
Memory, Gender
Andrea Petõ
2 credits
The course aims to interrogate
the emerging field created by the intersection of Jewish Studies
and Memory to study the literary and artistic representation
of the Holocaust. The course covers the topics of how memory
of Holocaust is inscribed, framed, mediated and performed.
The course also includes field trips to the Jewish monuments
of Hungary. It consists of two parts: an overview and theoretical
introduction is followed by the analyses of the different
forms of representation: literature, ego documents, films,
internet, textbooks, statues, monuments, photos, oral histories,
youtube videos.
The
Struggle over Identity: The Dilemmas of Jews in Austria-Hungary
and Its Successor States
Marsha Rozenblit
The course investigates
the nature of Jewish identity in Central Europe from the late
eighteenth century, when the Habsburg authorities first urged
Jews to obtain modern, secular, German education, through
the middle of the twentieth century.
download the syllabus
Assimilation
and its Discontents. Central European Jewish Writers and Literature
Ivan Sanders
This course examines
prose and poetry by writers generally less accessible to English-speaking
students, written in the major Central European languages:
German, Hungarian, Czech and Polish. Here, too, the problematics
of assimilation, the search for identity, political commitment
and disillusionment are major themes, along with the defining
experience of the century: the Holocaust; but because these
writers are often more removed from their Jewishness, their
perspective on these events and issues may be different. Specific
topics will also include the influence of Franz Kafka on Central
European writers, the post-Communist Jewish revival, as well
as the difficult question of what constitutes the “Jewish
voice” in an otherwise disparate body of works.
download the syllabus
Being
Jewish in European and American Cinema 1914-2006
Frank Stern
The 20th century
of film, the development of cinema as art and as the most
important medium in visual culture has created an immense
body of imaginative representations of Jewish topics, of Jewish
women and men. Film has reflected Jewish history and culture,
religion and secularization. Film itself became a sphere of
acculturation in the first two decades of film. Since then,
cinema in Europe and in America has dealt with questions of
Jewish identity, of Jewish modernism, antisemitism, Zionism,
and, above all with the challenges for Jewish life after the
Shoah. The course will discuss a broad variety of fiction
films, styles, aesthetics, directors, actresses and actors
with an impact on the visual representation of things Jewish.
The discussion is based on mandatory reading and the screening
of film clips. The participants will keep a film journal based
on the screenings.
Can
Liberal Nationalism be implemented? The Israeli Test-Case
Yael Tamir
Nationalism and
liberalism are commonly viewed as antithetical ideologies,
incapable of synthesis in today's world. At the end
of
the twentieth century, there was a widespread assumption that
the age of nationalism was over, thus obviating the need to
reconcile nationalism
and liberalism. With the recognition that this assumption
was wrong,
it is now necessary to reevaluate nationalism and introduce
national
values to the liberal discourse. This course will examine
the case of Israel - a twentieth-century attempt to
create a liberal democracy while
simultaneously promoting and safeguarding national values
- in an
effort to understand whether liberal nationalism can transcend
theoretical
discussion and actually be implemented.
Advanced
Source Reading: Medieval Hebrew Text Seminar
Carsten Wilke
2 credits
This course will
provide a practical introduction to the study of Hebrew primary
sources from the 9th-16th centuries. In order to allow students
of different levels to profit from the class, our weekly readings
will be very short extracts (each one around 250 words, or
less than a page), but will extend over a wide range of literary
genres, styles, periods, and geographical environments. Students
will thus acquire a first hand knowledge of the basic linguistic
and generic conventions and experience the various literary
styles and linguistic textures present in medieval Hebrew
literature.
go
to the syllabus
Intensive
Reading Seminar: Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise
Matthias Riedl & Carsten Wilke
2 credits
Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza
(1632-1677) is without doubt one of the most interesting,
influential, but also ambiguous philosophical thinkers of
early modern Europe. A son of Portuguese Jewish immigrants
in the liberal environment of the Dutch republic, he was expulsed
from his synagogue at the age of twenty-three and became the
first European to live avowedly outside any religious community.
Educated in the intellectual universe of the Scriptures and
medieval Jewish rationalism, he radically questioned this
legacy, but at the same time read it in a new way and brought
it to bear upon the central questions of religious authority,
political justice, and civil liberty. The "Theological-Political
Treatise" (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, henceforth
TTP), which Spinoza published anonymously in 1670, is widely
considered to be the founding document of modern Biblical
criticism and the scientific study of religion. It has been
read as a philosophical pamphlet vindicating freedom of thought,
but also as the project of a secular state inheriting quasi-religious
claims of obedience.
The seminar will be based
on a complete and cautious reading of the TTP, accompanied
by secondary literature and short extracts from Spinoza's
sources in medieval and contemporary philosophy, mainly Moses
Maimonides and Thomas Hobbes. Each weekly session will be
dedicated simultaneously to a section from the text and to
one of the various interrelated themes of the book: Biblical
and Jewish history, the political deconstruction of religion,
the project of a universal natural faith, the foundations
of political power, and the philosophical apology of democratic
pluralism. Spinoza's pantheist metaphysics, that are alluded
to in the TTP, shall be reviewed in its impact on later idealistic
philosophies. Spinoza's analysis of the Biblical and medieval
ideas of divine rule will be read as a classical conceptualization
of the "theological-political problem": the antagonistic
and yet inseparable historic conjunction of politics and religion.
go
to the syllabus
Introduction
to Medieval Jewish Civilization
Carsten Wilke & Hanna Zaremska
2 credits
This course will follow a
global approach to medieval Jewry by describing the latter
as a civilization (in the sense of Mordecai M. Kaplan) characterized
by features of social organization, cultural creativity, and
symbolic worldview. We will focus on the internal developments
and on interactions with the non-Jewish environment; but the
evolution of the Christian and Islamic attitudes towards the
Jewish minority shall also be resumed. The course is co-taught,
its last two sessions being held by visiting professor Hanna
Zaremska from the Polish Academy of Sciences.
The chronology of the Jewish
Middle Ages is framed by migration movements: Byzantine, Sephardi
and Ashkenazi Jewries emerged in the course of a westward
shift of Jewish settlement from the late antique centers in
Palestine and Babylonia, and declined by outside pressure
and expulsions at the end of the period. West European and
North African Jews of the 10th-15th century developed a pattern
of decentralized diaspora existence, based upon the legal
and cultural autonomy of each local community within the wide
network of traders and scholars. The "vertical alliance"
with the monarchy and an economic specialization implied constant
social interaction with non-Jews, but also an increasing socio-political
vulnerability. In correspondence between the centers under
Christian and Islamic rule, a system of Biblical and Talmudic
exegesis took shape; and its flexible conception of religious
law, the halakha, aspired at an ideal cohesion between the
sources of learned culture, internal government, and popular
custom. New social groups and intellectual movements based
on as philosophy, mystic piety or messianic expectation at
various moments challenged the halakhic framework of authority.
go
to the syllabus
Jewish
Thought in the Twentieth Century
Carsten Wilke
2 credits
Based on selected primary
texts, this course will survey the questions, styles and contexts
of the contemporary conceptualizations of Judaism, exploring
a surprisingly eventful chapter in the age-old encounter between
philosophy and religion. Although Historicism and pragmatic
social engineering seemed to have marginalized speculative
reasoning by the end of the Nineteenth Century, the philosophic
quest for Judaism's message and meaning revived forcefully
after the First World War. The downfall of the liberal paradigm
that had interpreted Jewish practical monotheism in the light
of Kantian ethics called for attempts at a radical reorientation,
which returned to the heteronomy of tradition or embraced
secular modes of existentialist, nationalist or revolutionary
thought. Directly or indirectly, the Holocaust inspired a
far-reaching cultural criticism, but has also intensified
the search for minimal certainties in the field of ethics
and politics. More than in any other period, Jewish thought
has became intertwined with mainstream philosophy. Not only
did Jewish thought share most intellectual movements of the
past century, from existentialism and Marxism to deconstruction,
feminism and the post-modern linguistic turn; it has also
injected to mainstream philosophy the resources and responses
of its own. In particular, the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel
Levinas became influential for the philosophical discovery
of otherness and the intercultural encounter. Throughout the
class, we will explore the diversity of approaches to the
classical theological problems as well as to the distinctive
contemporary issues of language, history, politics, gender,
cultural diversity and identity. We will not try to define
Jewish thought by an ideal type of the Jewish philosopher,
but consider texts of different literary styles and of various
origins in the Jewish collectivity (even some from outside
it), as far as they have endeavored to fulfill the central
task of Jewish thought: to give an expression in universal
terms to the scriptural and historical memory of Judaism.
go
to the syllabus
Medieval
Iberian Jewry under Muslim and Christian Rule
Carsten Wilke
2 credits
Being an introduction to
one of Europe's main Jewish cultures, this course spans more
than a millennium of Jewish presence on Iberian soil, from
its beginnings under the Roman Empire until the expulsions
from Spain, Portugal, and Navarra during the years 1492-1498.
It will point out how ethnic and religious pluralization following
the Muslim conquest of 711 relieved the minority of pressure
and created social niches for inter-communal and inter-cultural
intermediaries, and how this favorable position was progressively
eroded by the race towards religious homogenization engaged
by Muslim and Christian rulers alike. While focusing on Sephardi
Jewry's political, economical, and social history, the course
will also study its intellectual creativity, its legal and
liturgical traditions, its internal organization, and its
influential elitist self-image. It will present the complex
evolution of community interaction and de-pluralization while
deconstructing a still popular narrative inherited from 19th
century liberal historiography, which hinges on the commonplaces
of Moorish tolerance, inquisitorial Christianity, and Jewish
diaspora's proverbial golden age.
go
to the syllabus
Paths
to Jewish Emancipation
Carsten Wilke
4 credits
The course will study the
radical transformation in the political status and the self-definition
of European Jews during the 18th and 19th centuries. The transition
between the two antagonistic social conditions commonly labelled
"ghetto" and "emancipation" will be analyzed
in its various dimensions: civic inclusion, legal equality,
social acceptance, adaptation to middle class economy and
culture, religious reform, and historical self-consciousness.
Starting with an appraisal of pre-modern Jewish society, the
course will distinguish the various patterns of sociocultural
change realized by the Western, Central and Eastern European
Jewries within their peculiar political frameworks. It will
show how the emancipation era affected rural and urban Jews,
men and women differently, and how cultural and religious
pluralism was generalized as one of the main challenges to
Jewish life. We will finally place the emancipation process
in the long-term evolution of Jewish society since the Middle
Ages and discuss the meta-narratives that either extol or
blame its impact on modern Jewish history.
go
to the syllabus
Problems
and Paradigms in Jewish Studies: How to write on Jewish Subjects
Carsten Wilke
2 credits
The seminar will
provide students in the Jewish Studies Specialization with
the necessary complement to the methodological classes and
thesis workshops offered by their departments. Its leading
idea is that analytical categories such as modernity, spatio-temporal
continuity, cultural embeddedness, social and symbolic power
are essential for research on Jewish topics, but have to be
critically appropriated in order to encompass the conditions
of a diaspora collectivity with its dialectics of text and
custom and its peculiar (in)distinction between the religious
and the secular. The main part of the class, consisting of
ten sessions held during the winter term, will survey past
and present historiography reflecting upon some of these problematics
and discuss their practical implications for research. The
remaining sessions, held by appointment during the spring
term, will have the form of individual discussions about the
students' ongoing research, based on a previously submitted
outline of their thesis. Approaches to Jewish Studies are
indebted to conceptions of Jewishness inherited from religious
tradition, from acculturated ideas of a spiritual mission,
or from national categories of self-definition. Post-modernist
currents, dismissing any "master narratives" based
upon essentialist preconceptions of this sort, have defended
the inherently multicultural character of Jewish history and
decribed it in relation to its existential conditions such
as diaspora or subalternity. Recent research has thus reformulated
the question of modernity, the dialectics of gender and power
in Jewish minority history.
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to the syllabus
Sephardic
Jewry in Exile, 1492 - present
Carsten Wilke
4 credits
After the Iberian Jewish
center collapsed in the late middle ages due to expulsion
and forced baptism, Sephardic Jewry became one of Europe's
most vibrant diaspora groups. This course will follow the
various reincarnations of Spanish Judaism in its (either geographic
or religious) exile, distinguishing three neatly divided branches.
A majority group among Spanish Jews, victims of mass conversions
since 1391, underwent a difficult but ultimately complete
integration into the Christian fold. A second group left the
Peninsula in 1492, integrating the Islamic monarchies of the
Mediterranean while linguistic conservatism, cultural memories
and economic contacts often linked it to the West. The third
group, Jews of various Iberian origins forcibly baptized in
Portugal in 1497, lived under the Inquisition for generations
until many of them, in search of security, economic opportunity,
and religious freedom, trickled out into early modern Europe
and America as the harbingers of a reinvented Judaism. The
course will reflect upon the contrasting presence of religious
dynamics and historical memory among these three groups, upon
its minority functions of economic and cultural brokerage
inherited from medieval Spain, and finally upon the paradigmatic
value their diaspora identity obtained in modern Jewish consciousness.
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to the syllabus
Transnationalism
and the Jews of the Nineteenth Century
Carsten Wilke
2 credits
This course highlights the
trans-national counter-current that emerged in the patterns
of modern Jewish thought and communal organization at the
very time when all the efforts of European Jewry into its
progressive integration into the respective nation-states.
It will detect the social and cultural motivations that counteracted
to the national fragmentation of Jewish identities: the unabated
demographic realities of Jewish migration and dispersion,
the age-old religious ideas of Jewish solidarity and messianic
mission, the involvement of many Western Jews in global commerce
and liberal cosmopolitan consciousness, and finally the return
of anti-Jewish prejudice, with exclusion and persecution pressing
for joint action by Jewish communities. The course will focus,
among others, upon the selected contexts of Jewish political
universalism during the European revolutions of 1848, internationally
coordinated pressure in favor of the Jews of the Balkans and
the Islamic world, and the institutionalization of liberal
utopism and trans-national organization by the Alliance Israélite
Universelle in 1860. By studying the parallel evolution of
anti-Semitic myths about Jewish world conspiracy and Jewish
ideals regarding the trans-national defense of civil rights,
the course will expound the dilemma any form of Jewish cosmopolitanism
presented to its adherents in an age of nation-building and
the efforts that were made to resolve it.
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to the syllabus
