THE PHILONIC DISTINCTION: GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH THOUGHT

Leon Roth's famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was (and is). With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” (E. Fackenheim). The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel's account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the one. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “mosaic distinction” (J. Assmann), the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity.     

Socio‐spatial mix and inter‐ethnic attitudes: Jewish newcomers and Arab‐Jewish issues in the Galilee

Urban and regional planners tend to recommend spatial mix of socially diverse populations as an appropriate strategy to achieve social equity and improve inter‐group relations. However, the actual impact of such a mix on social relations in general, and inter‐ethnic attitudes in particular, has been subject to on‐going, yet inconclusive, debates among social scientists. This paper adds to the study of these issues by examining the inter‐ethnic attitudes of residents in Jewish ‘new settlements’ (elsewhere termed ‘community settlements’, or ‘mitzpim'), which were established some 15 years ago among the Arab villages of Israel's central Galilee region. We found that despite certain strands of ethnocentrism, most Jewish settlers hold significantly more moderate views on Arab‐Jewish issues than: (a) the general (non‐Galilee) Jewish public in Israel; and (b) the region's Arab population. The influence of the socio‐spatial mix on the moderation of hostile attitudes, at least among the Jews, is analyzed and explained by comparing our data with the findings of previous research on the topic. On the basis of that comparison we conclude that the Arab — Jewish mix in the Galilee, along with socio‐economic characteristics of the Jewish population and the existence of a ‘penetrating group phenomenon’, have combined to moderate Jewish attitudes in the study region. Planners are called upon to use this knowledge.     

New York Yankees and Hollywood Anglos: The persistence of Anglo‐conformity in the American motion picture industry

Ideal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain over‐represented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity to the WASP ideal type persists despite the fact American actors are disproportionately born in Los Angeles, New York, and other large cities, where British ancestry is rare. Jewish actors are over‐represented, yet many have Anglo surnames. Compared to athletes and politicians, actors are significantly more likely to have Anglo surnames, especially those in genres depicting the nation. After declining among cohorts of stars born between the 1800s and 1961, the share of British Isles surnames has stabilised and remains in the majority. We argue that despite rising diversity, this reflects the continuing importance of the Anglo‐Protestant ethnic imago for American national identity.     

Jacob Talmon between Zionism and Cold War Liberalism

The paper focuses on the problematic relationship between Talmon's liberalism and Zionism. My argument is that Talmon's nationalism (Zionism included)—historicist, romantic, visionary—lived in permanent tension with his liberalism—empiricist, pluralist, pragmatic. His critique of totalitarian democracy, reflecting his British experience, emerged independently from his Zionism, grounded in Central European nationalism. The two represented different worlds. Talmon lived in both, serving as an ambassador in-between them, without ever bringing them together.

The essay's first section describes the political education of the young Jacob Talmon (née Flajszer) and the making of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. It demonstrates the independence of Talmon's Cold War liberal project from his Zionism. The second section places Talmon in the context of Cold War liberal discourse, showing how integral his critique of revolutionary politics was to contemporary liberalism. The third illustrates the tensions between Talmon's view of Jewish history and his liberalism, between his Zionism and his critique of revolutionary politics. Focusing on Talmon's analyses of nationalism, it highlights the ambiguity of his Zionism.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.     

HOW NINETEENTH‐CENTURY GERMAN CLASSICISTS WROTE THE JEWS OUT OF ANCIENT HISTORY

This essay considers why Jewish antiquity largely fell outside the purview of ancient historians in the Germanies for over half a century, between 1820 and 1880, and examines the nature of those portraits that did, in fact, arise. To do so, it interrogates discussions of Jewish antiquity in this half‐century against the background of those political and national values that were consolidating across the German states. Ultimately, the article claims that ancient Jewish history did not provide a compelling model for the dominant (Protestant) German scholars of the age, which then prompted the decline of antique Judaism as a field of interest. This investigation into the political and national dimensions of ancient history both supplements previous lines of inquiry and complicates accounts that assign too much explanatory power to a regnant anti‐Judaism or anti‐Semitism in the period and place. First, the analysis considers why so little attention was granted to Jewish history by ancient historians in the first place, as opposed to its relative prominence before ca. 1820. Second, the essay examines representations of ancient Judaism as fashioned by those historians who did consider the subject in this period. Surveying works composed not only for the upper echelons of scholarship but also for adolescents, women, and the laity, it scrutinizes a series of arguments advanced and assumptions embedded in universal histories, histories of the ancient world, textbooks of history, and histories dedicated to either Greece or Rome. Finally, the article asserts the Jewish past did not conform to the values of cultural ascendancy, political autonomy, national identity, and religious liberty increasingly hallowed across the Germanies of the nineteenth century, on the one hand, and inscribed into the very enterprise of historiography, on the other. The perceived national and political failures of ancient Jews—alongside the ethnic or religious ones discerned by others—thus made antique Judaism an unattractive object of study in this period.     

Double Displacement: Western Women's Return Home from Japanese Internment in the Second World War

This article examines the homecoming of Western women from Japanese internment camps at the end of the Second World War. It focuses on British women returning to the United Kingdom, but makes reference to women from other Allied nations such as the United States, Australia and the Netherlands. The paper argues that interned women posed contradictions to gendered understandings of wartime experience and that homecoming further exacerbated this ambiguity. Return from imprisonment exposed the dual meaning of home as the natural realm for women and a national space. Women internees had been away from both and were subjected to control by non‐white men; responses to their liberation reflected these tensions. Homecoming prompted questions about released women's femininity and sexual integrity, but they faced even more difficulty having their war experiences recognised as part of a national story about war.     

‘‘This Secret Town’: British Intelligence,the Special Relationship,and the Vietnam War’

This article seeks to revise our understanding of Cold War intelligence as a practice. The conventional view is that Britain's MI6 waged a battle in the shadows consisting of espionage and covert action. However, a number of MI6 officers operated as observers, conducting what we might call ‘intelligence without espionage’. The dual identity of these officers raises important questions about how intelligence operated in the blurred space between traditional diplomacy and human espionage using agents. Using the case of MI6 officers in the British Consulate-General in Hanoi between 1965 and 1972, this article explores how a dual identity provided alternative means of acquiring intelligence within a highly secure state that exhibited remarkable paranoia about foreign spies. Furthermore, the United States lacked diplomatic representation in Hanoi and so the British Consulate provided a remarkable window for Western intelligence on the effect of ‘Operation Rolling Thunder’, Lyndon Johnson's escalating air campaign against North Vietnam. Both Johnson and Harold Wilson were avid readers of this material. Accordingly, in the context of the Cold War intelligence partnership between the UK and US, the consulate in Hanoi was an example of the ‘inverse’ special relationship, in which Britain enjoyed unique value.     

Nationalism,Reform Judaism and the Hebrew Prayer Book

ABSTRACT. The Hebrew prayer book (siddur), the oldest of which dates from the ninth century, frequently expresses Jewish chosenness and hopes for the gathering of the exiles and the return to the Land of Israel. In nineteenth‐century German Reform prayer books, such references to Jewish nationalism were altered or eliminated. In an age of growing European nationalism, this attempt to ‘de‐nationalise’ Jewish identity was virtually unique. Responding to accusations that Jewish citizenship in the modern nation‐state was incompatible with Judaism, Reform rabbis, who were engaged in the struggle for Jewish emancipation, claimed that patriotic loyalty to the German fatherland must supersede Jewish national identity. This article discusses the offending nationalist content of the siddur and the historical context in which it was suppressed. It concludes that the German reformers, by drawing attention to the nationalist potential of traditional Judaism, indirectly prepared the way for the rise of Jewish nationalism in reaction to racial anti‐Semitism in the late nineteenth century.     

“马斯基尔”与犹太社会——以启蒙视阈下的德国为个案

欧洲启蒙运动发生之后,德国犹太思想家马斯基尔以自由理性为旗帜,批评传统犹太教、发展世俗教育、提倡现代生活方式,引领犹太人走出隔都,对犹太社会产生了极为深刻的影响,也留下了惨痛的教训,越来越多的犹太人背离了民族传统。从此以后,传统与现代性的关系成为犹太史上的核心命题。本文以启蒙视阈下的德国尤其是柏林为个案,探讨社会转型时期犹太思想家对传统社会的重创,分析犹太文化与现代主义、德国主流文化多重汇集之后,犹太知识阶层无所适从的精神困境,从而为研究现代化背景下少数族群的身份认同以及亚文化的存续与发展提供借鉴。     

魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同

魏玛共和国犹太人在政治、文化和宗教生活方式上都表现出高度的德国认同。德国犹太人的这种国家认同既有重要的历史基础,也是现实的需要和客观环境压力的结果。魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同突出表现在两个方面:一是将犹太教、犹太文化限定于宗教和文化的而非民族的层面,从而减少其与"德国国家认同"的冲突;二是强调犹太人与德国主流民族、语言、文化和历史的紧密关系。犹太人的德国认同对其族群产生了重要影响:犹太族群中发展出了对东方犹太人的歧视;排斥犹太复国主义;低估反犹主义的危害,以致对大规模地迫害、屠杀犹太人缺乏预见性等。     

From Berlin and Jerusalem: On the Germanness of Gershom Scholem

Although Gershom Scholem, one of the leading Judaic studies scholars of modern times, was born and raised in Germany, he consistently represented himself as an un‐German Jew. Rejection of Germany and Germanness was a leitmotif of Scholem's self‐presentation, particularly after immigrating to Jerusalem in 1923. Scholem became a central figure in the Jewish intelligentsia of mandate‐era Palestine and later the state of Israel, and he helped shape Jewish discourse around the world. However, a re‐examination of his unpublished and published correspondence, youthful journals, writings and interviews, and actual actions demonstrates that Scholem must also be seen as a German intellectual whose lifelong intellectual, political, social, and cultural predilections were the products of the German Jewish bourgeoisie and the German intelligentsia at the turn of the twentieth century. Long after emigrating from Germany, Scholem remained marked by Germanness and an ongoing relationship with Germany.     

Between the General and the Particular: Reminiscences of Plato's Timaeus in Piotr Rawicz's Le sang du ciel

Piotr Rawicz's novel Le sang du ciel depicts a Jewish protagonist, Boris, who manages to escape the Nazi genocide and, as a result, doubts his own legitimacy to bear witness to the other Jews' fate during that period. His difficult relationships with the Jewish community find expression in an intertextual construction, founded on the ontocosmology developed in Plato's Timaeus. Boris uses—and sometimes perverts—Plato's world vision both to measure his own inauthenticity and to define new ways of creating a state of "fusion" with the "beings" surrounding him. Another technique to overcome Boris's inability to testify is the use of a frame narrative, which, moreover, sheds new light on the protagonist's identity as a witness.     

Accepting Jewish roots for a pair of shoes: identity dilemmas of Jewish children in Poland during the Second World War and in the early post-war years

Jewish children who managed to survive Nazi attempts to exterminate them are a clear, yet still under-examined, example of a group who managed to resist the path to genocide. It was only by changing their individual social identity that they were able to survive. By more or less consciously breaking their ties with Judaism and converting to Catholicism, they abandoned membership of the group destined for extermination and strove to become unidentifiable as Jews. This article focuses on the issue of the identity of the Jewish children raised or born in Poland during the Nazi persecution and who survived the Shoah under an assumed non-Jewish identity. It will examine the war's impact on these Polish ‘hidden children’ and its consequences for their ethnic and religious identity. Many children were intentionally deprived of their Jewish identity by their parents or saviours since such a renunciation was the only way to survive. Therefore the role of non-Jewish rescuers and the attitude of the Jewish authorities towards these children's fate during and after the war is also discussed. The survival of these children hinged upon questions of identity and how successfully they were able to conceal their life-threatening origins and adopt the much safer disguise.     

‘If You Can't Pronounce My Name,You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro‐German Activism,Gender and Hip Hop

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany's racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro‐Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty‐first century, Afro‐Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti‐racist, explicitly Afro‐German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro‐ German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.     

An unlikely alliance: the 1907 Ukrainian–Jewish electoral coalition

This paper contextualises a political alliance between Ukrainian and Jewish national activists in Austrian Galicia during the 1907 parliamentary elections, Austria's first elections with universal manhood suffrage. This alliance represented a milestone in the making of a new paradigm of Ukrainian–Jewish relations. Ironically, the Ukrainian and Jewish nationalists, portrayed elsewhere as staunch enemies, were uniquely able to overcome the profound social, religious, political, and cultural barriers separating the two communities. Ukrainian nationalists recognised the potential of a nationalised Jewish community to undermine Polish hegemony in Galicia, while some Zionists saw the potential to elect Jewish parliamentary representatives in rural Ukrainian districts where Poles and Jews competed for the districts' second mandate. The alliance mobilised the Ukrainian and Jewish electorate around shared slogans and goals. It was a qualified success, leading to a more powerful national Ukrainian faction as well as the first Zionist faction in any European parliament. Although the two sides failed to repeat the alliance in the subsequent elections in 1911, the coalition sparked a new sense of history for both communities. It created a pro‐Ukrainian discourse in Jewish politics, and a pro‐Zionist one in Ukrainian politics. The alliance also exposes Zionism as a response to the European‐wide nationalist revivalism rather than a reaction to rampant turn‐of‐the‐century racial anti‐Semitism.     

Riding the Dialectical Waves of Gay Political Economy: A Story from Birmingham's Commercial Gay Scene

In this paper I aim to contribute to work addressing the relationship between dissident sexuality and gay political economy by providing a reconfigured Marxist exploration into the ambivalence of commercial gay space. Through the application of a central theme from Marx's Grundrisse—the civilising influence of capital—I propose a means to move beyond an Althusserian view of commercial gay space as a contained ideological incorporation of capitalist hegemony, to that of a capitalist embodiment of constraints and radical possibilities. Focusing on the commercial gay scene of the UK's second largest city, Birmingham, and the survival of a monthly British Asian gay club night therein, I explore the dialectical waves of capitalism. These waves drive conditions which both differentiate identity‐based production/consumption to the assimilative relations of exchange value, and accommodate moments of cultural creativity that feed off this continual differentiation and escape its economic relations in the formation of radically new use‐values.     

Sacred,but not surveyed: Nineteenth‐century surveys of Palestine

Abstract

Nineteenth‐century Palestine mapping projects based on systematic land surveying reached a peak with the Ordnance Survey of Western Palestine between 1871 and 1877, conducted on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund by officers of the British Royal Engineering Corps. Various other nineteenth‐century proposals for an organized survey of the country—some of which bore partial results while others were never implemented—are also presented. The surveying of one region, Mesopotamia, during the 1830s and 1840s, forms the basis for the discussion of the reasons for the relative lateness of the topographical survey. The sacredness of the region seems not to have been a sufficiently convincing motive for entrepreneurs to organize and finance such a survey. The main reason for the delay in mapping the country as a whole was that it was not especially important, either strategically or geo‐politically, for the European nations engaged in the international struggles in the Middle East until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.     

Subjects,citizens and others: the handling of ethnic differences in the British and the Habsburg Empires (late nineteenth and early twentieth century)

This article focuses on the role of ethnic inclusions and exclusions in administering citizenship and nationality within the British and the Habsburg Empires. The analysis discerns three ways of dealing with ethnically heterogenous populations. One follows the nation-state model and aims for internal ethnic homogeneity and legal equality. This model coined developments in Canada and Hungary. The second obeys an imperialistic pattern and implements legal discrimination between different ethnic groups. It played a decisive role in East Africa and in Bosnia to a certain degree. The third model follows a statist logic and enforces either supra-ethnic neutrality or a politics of recognition. It was most influential in Austria and India. In the British as well as in the Habsburg context ethnic differences gained significance around 1900. This ethnicising of law and administrative practice produced different results, though, in both cases, mainly due to the empires' divergent political structures. Whereas within the Habsburg Empire the three models were juxtaposed, British law and administration came to be dominated by the imperialistic pattern of ethnic discrimination against ‘non-white’ subjects. Thus, the customary distinction between a politically inclusive nationalism in Western Europe and an ethnically exclusive one in the continent's Eastern half – sometimes linked with the difference between ius soli and ius sanguinis – cannot be upheld.     

Claiming the nation for the people: the dynamics of representation in German public discourse about immigrant integration

Against the backdrop of the current trend to criticise elite‐centred approaches to the study of nationalism, this article sheds light on ways in which elite and popular notions of nationhood are mediated. Thus, public discourse on national identity is explored as a discourse that ordinary people can influence and in which elites make claims to represent the people. To illustrate the dynamics of representative claim‐making and reception, the article uses a case study from German public discourse; the debate about Thilo Sarrazin's 2010 book Germany Does Away With Itself. It finds that, although Sarrazin clearly breaches well‐established rules in national identity discourse, his ideas gain traction from the moment he becomes accepted as representing ordinary Germans. The findings are discussed against the backdrop of the history of German national identity discourse and anti‐essentialist approaches treating nationhood as a political claim.