(Reviewer: Kenneth Hughes, Vol. 71, No. 3, Chanukah 2016)
There is no getting away from it: David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is the kind of book of which one says simply, it marks an epoch; it is a great work.
It is a book which revives and revises all the old debates about the origins of Antisemitism.
It gives a novel twist to all these old discussions, by locating Antisemitism as derivative from a discourse ANTI-JUDAISM, which it sees as directed primarily against Judaism both as a culture and as a religion; and which it most challengingly, takes to be, not just some eccentric and peripheral deviation, but a central part of the traditional Western Christian (and also of the Islamic) cultural heritage.
Anti-Judaism gives a radical revisionist interpretation – and, in the future, nobody will be able to write on these issues without first taking Nirenberg’s terrific synthesis into account.
It is also a remarkable and unusual work, in that it seeks to revise and modify in important ways a powerful argument, which the author himself was the first to put forward and defend in an earlier and likewise seminal book. This was Nirenberg’s ground-breaking first work: Communities of Violence: persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 1996).
In this work which was based on his doctoral thesis, Nirenberg drew on the very rich archives of the Kingdom of Catalonia in Barcelona, to revisit a number of well-known incidents involving inter-communal violence-which earlier historians had drawn on when writing the history of Antisemitism or (in some cases) of medieval intolerance. It was an avowedly revisionist work, because Nirenberg wanted to take issue with the work of earlier historians like Norman Cohn, who in his classic book The Pursuit of the Millennium had argued that medieval social and religious struggles involving a vision of the Last Days, had anticipated or prefigured in important ways, the delirious persecutory mania of 20th Century totalitarianism – both the Nazis and the Soviets. Nirenberg will have none of this: there is no straight road leading from Barcelona to Auschwitz, he says – and sets up arguments to prove his point by locating the medieval violence in the context of an ongoing series of inter-communal hostilities which are very clearly specific to the various communities present in medieval Catalonia, and gives us what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz liked to call “thick description” – showing how the cultural meanings of the violence of that time have no modern parallels. (There was, for example, a strange custom whereby tonsured children were permitted to throw stones into the ghetto – or at Jewish funeral processions – during Holy Week. And there was carnival mockery when fourteen year old children – but only they – were permitted to dress up as Jews or Muslims for purposes of satire). The idiosyncrasy – and the cultural specificity of these performances, leads Nirenberg to contend that there can be no such thing as an “eternal Antisemitism”.
Yet, in his more recent work, this is exactly what he does contend. How does he square the contradiction? Basically, so far as I can see, by arguing that there is a continuing line of discourse, ANTI-JUDAISM which is central to the pursuit of the Christian (and also of the Islamic) faith, a discourse which gets passed on from generation to generation, and which serves as a kind of cultural template – a resource on which individuals and communities can draw, according to their needs. It is independent of contact or experience with actual Jews and so can sometimes function in communities from which Jews are totally excluded or absent. (A classic case is that of Shakespeare imagining Shylock in Elizabethan England).
It is also a very disturbing book, and for two reasons. One initially is disturbed because the subject matter is intrinsically repellent, if not indeed horrifying and depressing; and then subsequently, one also worries because of wondering whether – despite the author deploying great care and considerable subtlety – he has got it exactly right.
As to the first worry, let me illustrate by taking a striking example. Much of Nirenberg’s exposition is a breezy survey of the high-roads of European culture. One of Shakespeare’s most famous passages (much quoted by patriotic Englishmen on national occasions) is a long celebratory eulogy of England as “this scepter’d isle”, “this precious stone set in a silver sea” which is a speech put into the mouth of John of Gaunt, in the history play Richard II. The piece is so well-known that it has become hackneyed.
So it comes as something of a shock when Nirenberg runs on beyond the oft- quoted paragraphs and shows that the speech culminates in an anti-Jewish diatribe, where England is described as leased out (“bound in with shame, with inky blots and rotten parchment bonds”) to a group of rulers metaphorically equated with “stubborn Jewry”. Thus, Shakespeare manages to combine neatly both the stereotype of the Jew as extortionate money-lender with religious discourse about the Jews holding out against Christianization. This is what Nirenberg means when he talks about “thinking with Judaism”.
Some parts of the book tread well-worn paths – other authors have taken us on a guided tour of the anti-Jewish strain in Christian theology, for example – while other parts explore long-forgotten byways. But what gives Nirenberg’s book its unique power is his capacity to find examples of Anti-Judaism in iconic texts by major European writers and thinkers where one least expects it.
As regards my second concern, what is at stake here is whether the author has found the best way of dealing with his subject matter. To be sure, his account is powerful and in each episode he discusses his analysis is incisive and convincing. But what is not altogether clear to me is the thread which binds these episodes together – the notion of ‘discourse’ is a vague one and one is not always sure that it is the same discourse which is at issue. One would have liked to see him pay more attention to questions of how the discourse gets transmitted – and how it gets edited or combined with other discourses. In particular Norman Cohn’s work remains a powerful account of another discourse – that of Christian Apocalyptic, which may not have lead straight to Auschwitz, but which was certainly intertwined with Anti-Judaism, and whose importance for the history of the Crusades, and for the history of the Western Revolutionary tradition has recently been re-underlined by the work of several historians (such as Jay Rubinstein’s Armies of Heaven and Martin Malia’s Histor y’s Locomotives).
To sum up, this is a major work, by one of today’s most erudite and original historians, which nonetheless is not a work for the specialist only. The questions it raises about culture and intolerance invite ref lection by all thinking people.
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg, W. W. Norton, New York, 2013, 624pp
Dr Kenneth Hughes is an independent scholar, who recently retired from teaching Mathematics and the History of Ideas at the University of Cape Town.
