suggests that Bacon’s fictional world can be read as a means of discussing England’s policies. This interpretation will be tested in this essay by focusing on two contentious contemporary issues. Specifically, I explore whether Bacon argues in the New Atlantis for England’s continued imperial growth and whether he advocates a policy of Christian toleration of Jews. In Of Plantations Bacon describes colonies as ‘heroical works’.3 Bacon’s attitude to colonial expansion in the New Atlantis is rather more complex. In this utopian world colonial endeavour is redundant. The
6 The return of the Jewish question and the double life of Israel So now the Jew is mistrusted not for what he is, but for the anti-Semitism of which he is the cause. And no Jew is more the cause of anti-Semitism than the Jew who speaks of anti-Semitism. (Howard Jacobson, When Will the Jews be Forgiven for the Holocaust? ) 1 Those who have always felt that Jews were
2441Chapter2 16/10/02 8:03 am Page 39 2 Instrumentalising the Holocaust: from universalisation to relativism For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them: e.g. men becoming builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics)1 Where once it was said that the life of Jews would be ‘a light unto nations’ – the bearer of universal lessons – now it is the ‘darkness unto nations’ of the death of
as Martin Buber and Niebuhr’s close colleague Paul Tillich. Like Niebuhr, but in a more pugnacious manner, Herberg rejected the longstanding tendency of Jews and theologically liberal Protestants to ally themselves with social scientists and other secular thinkers. Herberg’s writings, especially his iconic book Protestant–Catholic–Jew (1955), were key points of reference for Greeley, Marty and others of their generation as they grappled with the American religious scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s
there was a radical attempt to transform the confessional foundations of the constitution. Measures limiting the exercise of liberty of conscience were repealed, the Convocation of the Church of England was suspended, and a project to fundamentally remodel the constitutional balance between the three estates was attempted.9 Toland, briefly, was right at the heart of these projects. Republican ambitions had come home. That Toland saw radical opportunity can be seen in one of the first works he published under the new monarchy –The reasons for naturalising the Jews
justify their atrocities. Of central importance was a ‘game of numbers’, or Ronnie Landau’s ‘grotesque competition in suffering’.1 Like the works of Stannard, Dadrian, Hancock, and others reviewed in the comparative genocide debate, Serbs and Croats used the Jews as the litmus test for historical suffering, while also trading genocide stories with each other. By inflating their own numbers of dead, and reducing the numbers of enemy dead, they conducted their own comparative genocide debate within Yugoslavia. Both Jasenovac and Bleiburg became emblematic of national
In this study, the various aspects of the way the Jews regarded themselves in the context of the lapse into another religion will be researched fully for the first time. We will attempt to understand whether they regarded the issue of conversion with self-confidence or with suspicion, whether their attitude was based on a clear theological position or on doubt and the coping with the problem as part of the process of socialization will be fully analysed. In this way, we will better understand how the Jews saw their own identity whilst living as a minority among the Christian majority, whose own self-confidence was constantly becoming stronger from the 10th to the 14th century until they eventually ousted the Jews completely from the places they lived in, England, France and large parts of Germany. This aspect of Jewish self-identification, written by a person who converted to Christianity, can help clarify a number of
Universalism has acted as a stimulus for Jewish emancipation, that is, for civil, political and social inclusion. It has also been a source of anti-Jewish prejudice up to and beyond the classic antisemitism of the modern period. While the experience of Jews is by no means unique in this respect, one of the peculiarities of the 'anti-Judaic' tradition has been to represent Jews in some important regard as the 'other' of the universal: as the personification either of a particularism opposed to the universal, or of a false universalism concealing Jewish self-interest. The former contrasts the particularism of the Jews to the universality of bourgeois civil society. The latter contrasts the bad universalism of the 'rootless cosmopolitan Jew' to the good universalism of whatever universal is advanced: nation, race or class. This book explores debates over Jewish emancipation within the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, contrasting the work of two leading protagonists of Jewish emancipation: Christian von Dohm and Moses Mendelssohn. It discusses the emancipatory power of Karl Marx's critique of Bruno Bauer's opposition to Jewish emancipation and endorsement of The Jewish Question. Marxist debates over the growth of anti-Semitism; Hannah Arendt's critique of three types of Jewish responsiveness--assimilationism, Zionism and cosmopolitanism-- to anti-Semitism; and the endeavours of a leading postwar critical theorist, Jurgen Habermas are also discussed. Finally, the book focuses its critique on left antizionists who threaten to reinstate the Jewish question when they identify Israel and Zionism as the enemies of universalism.
details, the story of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 .8 Titus and Vespasian, Roman leaders and recent converts to Christianity (conversions accomplished through miraculous cures and the Passion twice told), embark upon a crusade against the Jews of Jerusalem to avenge Christ’s death. The Romans lay siege to the city and after a tremendous battle in which many Jews are slain, the Jews retreat within the city walls and the Romans assail the town. The poem relates the diverse details of both Roman and Jewish actions during the two-year siege, including detailed
8 Conclusions: The change in mentality Apostasy and Jewish identity Conclusions: The change in mentality J ewish self-definition in medieval Europe was based upon classical Jewish values: first, the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people as the chosen people; second, an explicit Jewish identity deriving from the world of commandments unique to Judaism. As the Jewish group lived within Christian society, the essence of whose theological view was that Christians and Christianity had supplanted Jews and Judaism as God’s chosen people and religion