Abstract
The Introduction to the volume The Jew as Legitimation, Jewish-Gentile Relations Beyond Antisemitism and Philosemitism discusses how, from early Christianity up until the present day, references to Jews and Judaism legitimized non-Jewish ideas, values, decisions and exploits. It introduces and analyses the notion of “the Jew as legitimation” and argues that this notion offers a counter-perspective to more traditional understandings on Jewish-Gentile relations explained by concepts such as antisemitism, philosemitism, assimilation, acculturation, and to a lesser degree, mimicry and hybridity. It also argues that the topic is relevant for Jewish history as the usage of the Jew accounts for important dilemmas Jews faced in their relation with their non-Jewish environment.
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Notes
- 1.
After the wedding, rumors surfaced that there was some Jewish ancestry in Madden’s bloodline.
- 2.
Benedictus de Spinoza, Complete Works, transl. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianaoplis, 2002), 425.
- 3.
While this thesis may be found in many (mostly popular) varieties, it has found an academic defense in Bernard Wasserstein’s Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945 (Cambridge, 1996) and On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War (New York, 2012).
- 4.
Gerson D. Cohen, The Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish History (Boston, 1966).
- 5.
David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002), x.
- 6.
Maud Mandel, “Assimilation and Cultural Exchange in Modern Jewish History,” in Rethinking European Jewish History (Oxford, 2009), 85.
- 7.
Menachem Mor, ed., Jewish Assimilation, Acculturation, and Accommodation: Past Traditions, Current Issues, and Future Prospects(Lanham, 1992); Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, 2006), 256–76.
- 8.
Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek Jonathan Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham, 2005); Steven E. Aschheim, The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism (Amsterdam, 2010); Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler, Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses (Berlin, 2015); Cheyette and Marcus, Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew” (Stanford, 1998); Judith Frishman et al., Borders and Boundaries in and around Dutch Jewish History (Amsterdam, 2011).
- 9.
Kalmar and Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews; Aschheim, The Modern Jewish Experience; Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews; Cheyette and Marcus, eds, Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew”; Frishman et al., Borders and Boundaries.
- 10.
We see this for example in Jewish humor, or in the phenomenon of self-orientalization: Homi K. Bhabha, “Joking Aside: the Idea of a Self-Critical Community,” in Cheyette and Marcus, eds, Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew”, xv–xx; Brunotte, Ludewig, and Stähler, Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews, 221.
- 11.
The concept of the Jew as Legitimation obviously also refers to Max Weber’s theories on legitimation as expressed in his ‘Die drei reinen Typen der legitimen Herrschaft’ Preussische Jahrbücher 187 (1922) 1–2. Legitimation through Judaism could be seen as a contribution to legal, traditional and charismatic legitimation, but it should be noted that where Weber discusses the legitimation of power, the examples in this book mostly discuss the legitimation of worldviews that legitimize power.
- 12.
In particular, Romans 11:28.
- 13.
see: p. 241.
- 14.
Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York, 2008), xvii; for an extensive investigation of Augustine’s witness theory, see also Kristine T. Utterback and Merrall Llewelyn Price, Jews in Medieval Christendom: Slay Them Not (Leiden, 2013).
- 15.
Solomon Rappaport, Jew and Gentile: The Philo-Semitic Aspect (New York, 1980), 1; W. D. Rubinstein and Hilary L. Rubinstein, Philosemitism: Admiration and Support in the English-Speaking World for Jews, 1840–1939 (New York, 1999), ix; Alan Edelstein, An Unacknowledged Harmony, Philo-Semitism and the Survival of European Jewry (Westport, 1982); Jonathan Sutcliffe Adam Karp, Philosemitism in History (New York, 2011), 3.
- 16.
Karp, Philosemitism in History, 3.
- 17.
Rappaport, Jew and Gentile, 2–3; Samuel Moyn, “Antisemitism, Philosemitism and the Rise of Holocaust Memory,” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 1 (2009), 8.
- 18.
Edelstein, An Unacknowledged Harmony, 10.
- 19.
The idea that antisemitism may exemplify the legitimizing force of Judaism is forcefully advocated by Slavoj Žižek, who infers from the sentence “We have to kill the Jew within us”, attributed to Hitler, that “Gentiles need the antisemitic figure of the ‘Jew’ in order to maintain their identity.” Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London, 2010), 135. An in-depth exploration of the way negative perception of Jews served a legitimizing purpose throughout Western history may be found in David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York, 2013).
- 20.
Zygmunt Bauman, “Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern,” in Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus.
- 21.
Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (Madison, 1977), 112.
- 22.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition with added prefaces (San Diego, 1985), 57.
- 23.
Ibid., 66.
- 24.
Anna-Dorothe Ludwig, “Between Orientalization and Self-Orientalization; Remarks on the Image of the ‘Beautiful Jewess’ in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century European Literature,” in Orientalism, Gender, and the Jews: Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, ed. Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, and Axel Stähler; Kalmar and Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, xix.
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Wertheim, D.J. (2017). Introduction: The Jew as Legitimation, Jewish-Gentile Relations Beyond Antisemitism and Philosemitism. In: Wertheim, D. (eds) The Jew as Legitimation . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42601-3_1
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