Search

This paper examines the depiction of Jewish and Christian merchants in the medieval English Host miracle play, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. This play is a critical illustration of religious racialization, effectively demonstrating the perpetuation of anti-Jewish stereotypes and legitimizing violence. Positioned within a broader scholarly debate, particularly in relation to Augustine's doctrine of Jewish witness, the play portrays Jews as allegorical figures that validate Christian theological constructs. This paper delves into the representation and linguistic depiction of Jewish characters in the play, emphasizing their systematic dehumanization and instrumentalization in Christian narratives. A significant focus is placed on the coerced conversion of Jewish characters, which forces them into the archetype of the "Wandering Jew", thereby highlighting motifs of symbolic aggression and unending diaspora. This paper also confronts contemporary scholarly perspectives that view the play as challenging religious boundaries, positing that such interpretations overlook the ingrained racialization and marginalization of Jewish identity during the European Middle Ages. It argues that the play's transient disruption of power dynamics ultimately reinforces prevailing social hierarchies, thereby solidifying deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper aims to examine how Anti-Semitism, its determinants, and its forms appear in Pál Závada’s selected novel and, based on this analysis, to evaluate the extent to which its various forms are represented. The paper calls for more attention to the stereotypes and prejudices underlying various manifestations of intolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the reception of M. I. Artamonov's (1898-1972) and L. N. Gumilev's (1912-1992) works focused on the history of Khazar Khaganate and their position in the context of Soviet academia. The paper is based on the prosographical approach to the topic and comparative analysis of primary texts published by Gumilev and Artamonov, mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. The main aim of the study is to analyze and reflect on their findings in the broader context of the Soviet academic discourse and intellectual milieu of Russian nationalists. I argue that Gumilev's radical revision of the history of Khazar Khaganate far exceeded previous Artamonov's findings and attracted the attention of Russian nationalist groups of the post-Stalinist era mainly due to its antisemitic narrative. Furthermore, despite the ever-present ambivalence of Gumilev's contact with Russian nationalists during the 1970s, he was heavily affected by the unstable relationship between Russian nationalists and the official Soviet regime. During that time, Gumilev faced strong censorship of his texts, and his most radical revisionist study focused on the Khazaria was eventually published only posthumously in 1993. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antisemitism has been found on both the extreme left and right among political elites. However, at the mass public level, limited research suggests right-wing antisemitism, but not much left-wing antisemitism. This paper challenges that research, at least for the U.S., offering an alternative theory. The theory argues that the lowest levels of antisemitism will be found among mainstream liberals and conservatives. Ideological moderates will exhibit higher rates of antisemitism, while those lacking an ideological orientation will show still higher antisemitic rates. Extremists of the right and left may be more antisemitic than mainstream conservatives and liberals, but the inability of standard ideological self-placement questions to distinguish extreme ideologues from the very conservative/liberal makes it difficult to test the extremism hypothesis. Numerous items measuring attitudes towards Jews in the U.S. across five major surveys finds overwhelming support for the mainstream philosemitism theory. The conclusion puts the findings into perspective and offers suggestions regarding future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the author attempts to analyze the canons of the Orthodox Church, which are still normative for all Orthodox Autocephalous Churches, in order to identify the image of Jews and the restrictions or prohibitions imposed by these canonical texts. The paper is structured in three parts that analyze the canonical provisions regarding Jewish religious influences, Judaizing practices, Jewish–Christian religious syncretism, and social interaction with Jews based on religious influences. The main purpose of the present paper is to identify whether the Canonical Tradition of the Orthodox Church contains a form of anti-Semitism or exclusion of Jews on the basis of these texts. A well-articulated contextual interpretation of the canons is necessary to understand the relationships between Christians and Jews in the Byzantine period. To this end, the canons of the Orthodox Church will be interpreted in the social, historical, doctrinal, and canonical context of their promulgation in the life of the Orthodox Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muslims are often accused of being antisemitic and for being a major source of attacks and violence against Jews and Jewish institutions. Research also finds variation in Muslim orientations toward Jews at the aggregate, cross-national level, with lower levels of anti-Jewish sentiment in some western nations. There is also variation in the antisemitic sentiment of Muslims at the individual level in western nations. This paper asks whether factors that affect antisemitism among non-Muslims similarly affect Muslims with the same weight. In order to estimate these relative effects with precision, it is desirable to have a common dataset that includes both Muslims and non-Muslims. Since Muslims comprise a small percentage of the population in most western nations, nationally representative surveys rarely contain enough Muslim respondents for reliable statistical analysis. This paper uses the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey, which has over 500,000 respondents, including 5000 Muslim respondents, sufficient for such analysis. The analysis finds that although American Muslims are less positive toward Jews than non-Muslims, the difference is not great, and, on average, American Muslims have positive views of Jews. Results also find that education, being foreign born, and perceiving discrimination against Muslims similarly affects Muslim and non-Muslim attitudes toward Jews. However, perceptions of a weak economy and age have discernably different effects on Muslim and non-Muslim attitudes toward Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines French philosopher Sarah Kofman's fractured relationships to her identities as Jew and woman. Active participant in postwar debates surrounding deconstruction and psychoanalysis, acclaimed reader of Freud and Nietzsche, and interlocutor of Derrida, Kofman is today most widely remembered for her autobiographical writings about her childhood as a young Orthodox Jewish girl during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Kofman's mother sent her to pretend to be the daughter of a Christian woman, which both ensured Kofman's physical survival and led to an uncanny Freudian doubling of the maternal figure, such that both "Jew" and "Christian" became unstable, mimetic identity categories which Kofman could never again fully inhabit. The paper examines Kofman's writings on Nietzsche, suggesting that her attempt to absolve the German philosopher of the charges of antisemitism oft leveled against him functioned as a similarly failed and incomplete means of asserting control over her personal identity. If Kofman could demonstrate that Nietzsche was not in fact an antisemite, then she could write herself into the lineage of Continental philosophy and reclaim the stable ancestry she lost during the war. Yet the paper concludes that a counter-narrative running throughout Kofman's writings suggests an awareness that she could never fully absolve Nietzsche, and therefore that her attempt to claim Nietzsche as a father figure would always fail. The paper thus suggests that the illusion of control and stability epitomized by Kofman's reading of Nietzsche provides an interpretive thematic to understand the unstable figure of the post-Holocaust Jewish philosopher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper uses letters – some unpublished – from the mid-1940s and the second half of the 1970s exchanged by Mattei Dogan and Henri H. Stahl, to render the way sociological education was organized at the University of Bucharest immediately after the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1944, when the influential Toronto critic William Arthur Deacon lamented the absence of a Canadian "equivalent of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" because Canadians are "still pioneering, still afraid of ourselves intellectually and emotionally," little did he know that a significant candidate was on the horizon. Gwethalyn Graham's second novel, Earth and High Heaven, which appeared later that year, launched an analysis of anti-Semitism that was quickly embraced by cultural arbiters and the general public in both Canada and the United States. This article situates the production and reception history of Graham's book in relation to other novels by English Canadian women writers that advocated for social change, and offers cases studies of the three most widely disseminated works that used the power of fiction to marshal empathy: Marshall Saunders's Beautiful Joe (1894), Graham's Earth and High Heaven (1944) and Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights how the Muslim Brotherhood instrumentalized antisemitic conspiracies in its journal al-Daʻwa in its bid to strengthen its socio-political authority under Sadat. After discussing theoretical insights on conspiracy theories and (Muslim and Muslim Brotherhood) antisemitism, the paper zooms in on the return of the Muslim Brotherhood under Sadat, focusing on the movement's internal dynamics and its growing socio-political ambitions, followed by a content analysis of antisemitic conspiracy theories found in al-Daʻwa. The final part of the paper analyses the different dimensions and the functions of these antisemitic conspiracies for the movement. The paper concludes that through the antisemitic conspiracies, the Muslim Brotherhood has positioned itself as a religious, moral and political authority. Although al-Daʻwa promulgated classical (European) antisemitic conspiracies, these were utilized by the movement for purposes other than mere hatred and distrust of the Jews and Jewish–Muslim polemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]