Browsing by Subject "Jews -- Identity"
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- ItemA Question of Origins: The Application of Ethnoracial Categories to Jews and Christians in Contra Celsum(2008) Applegate, JesseOrigen wrote Contra Celsum in response to The True Doctrine by Celsus, a polemic against the Christians, but Celsus’s attack on the Christians actually begins with the Jews. Calling on a counterhistorical exodus tradition that stretches back hundreds of years, he claims that the Jews were originally Egyptians who rebelled, left Egypt, and created new religious practices. This had serious ramifications, according to Celsus, and his use of the terms genos and ethnos are crucial to understanding what these ramifications were. Genos and ethnos were both terms that identified groups in antiquity, and could be defined by any number of physical or social characteristics. Additionally, they could refer both to groups that were fixed and unchangeable, or groups that were fluid and could change. Their relevance did not lie in their exact meaning, therefore, but rather how they functioned, and for Celsus they functioned as both fixed and fluid, depending on the situation. They are fixed when he wants to criticize the Jews for rebelling, because he finds it unacceptable that they simply turned their back on their ancestors’ (the Egyptians) traditions, yet they are fluid enough to allow the Jews to become a separate ethnos. In both cases, though, the defining characteristic of Celsus’s ethnos and genos is religious practice; this allows them to separate from the Egyptians and form their own group, even if they were not supposed to do so. Thus, Celsus presents the Jews as having abandoned the religious practices of the Egyptians for new ones and becoming inferior to every ethnos that did follow the traditions of their ancestors. Celsus’s aim is not really to criticize the Jews, however, but instead the Christians, and according to him, they are even worse because they did to the Jews what the Jews did to the Egyptians: they broke away and started new practices. This means that they rebelled against the traditions of a group who in turn created their own traditions by rebelling against those of another group. Furthermore, because the Christians have actively spread everywhere and are not really even linked to one another by religious practice, they are worse than the inferior ethnos of the Jews, who at least still have unique customs. To Celsus the Christians are not an ethnos at all, and they do not fit into the established societal order. Origen did not want to answer Celsus’s accusation because he felt that it missed the point; being Christian should be about theology and belief, not fitting in as a genos or ethnos, and defending the Christians against Celsus by directly responding to his points would mean giving the paradigm he insisted upon too much attention. In addition, answering Celsus was a difficult task for Origen because it required him to defend the antiquity of the Jews, the ancestors of the Christians, while still arguing that the Christians were justified in breaking away from them. It was a necessary task though, to prevent possible unrest directed toward the Christians that could lead to persecutions. He accomplishes it by using the same conception of genos and ethnos fixity/fluidity as Celsus did, agreeing that fixity and antiquity were important, and claiming that the Jews were a group that had both, but in the case of the Christians allowing that fluidity could be (and should be) acceptable. Origen is also opportunistic regarding the defining trait of genos and ethnos, and he changes it based on the situation. For the Jews, their language shows that they were never Egyptian and so could never have abandoned Egyptian tradition, and for the Christians it is their belief in Jesus as the Messiah which proves that they are the rightful heirs to Jewish tradition. So the Christians reap the benefits of Jewish legitimacy, but still have their break from the Jews justified. While Origen’s argument is rather ingenious, Contra Celsum is still a good example of both the difficulty for Christians of defending against ethnoracial attacks, and the inevitability and necessity of doing so.
- ItemDignity is Everything: Isaiah Berlin and His Jewish Identity.(2005) Chappel, James; Gerstein, LindaThis essay represents my attempt to grapple with the meaning of Isaiah Berlin’s life and work. It is not a dispassionate consideration of his thought; those seeking that are directed to George Crowder’s excellent Isaiah Berlin: Liberty and Pluralism. Nor is it a biography, as Michael Ignatieff has already written a very fine one. It is rather my attempt to answer the following personal question: why is it that Berlin is such a wildly attractive figure to me? I had dabbled in philosophy and intellectual history before encountering Berlin. But when I read him for the first time, I felt like the Piltdown Man stumbling upon New York City. Ideas came to life, and the history of thought became exciting and important. But the army that sprang from the dragon’s teeth was not staid and dull. Berlin delights in ideas that flash instead of plod, coming from thinkers more like the warriors of the Old Testament than the benevolent preachers of the New. And when I began to read Berlin’s purely philosophical works, it struck me that these terrifying but fascinating ideas were not absent from his own thought: modified, surely, but not entirely ignored as they were by other liberals, then and now. This essay is my attempt to ascertain how and why Berlin’s ideas “flash” like those of de Maistre, instead of seeming limp and dull like those of John Dewey and Karl Popper, two of the most estimable liberals of the 20th century. Berlin’s wit, which has ever remained his most attractive feature to me, is much closer to the aristocratic hauteur of the conservative Waugh than the bitter acerbity of Bertrand Russell. As the Queen Mother once reputedly said of Isaiah Berlin: he is “such fun!”
- ItemEffect of the Zionist youth movement on South African Jewry : negotiating a South African, Jewish, and Zionist identity in the mid-20th century(2003) Kegel, Terry; Kitroeff, AlexanderThis thesis investigates individual differences in identity development and actions of identification amongst a generation of South African Jewish youth in the mid-20th century. Specifically, it examines the effect of one's exposure to and acceptance of the Zionist youth movement in South Africa and its ideology of aliyah, immigration to Israel. Considering a range of individual relationships with the movement, from the unattached to the fully engaged, it gauges the influence of this ideology on the construction of and negotiation amongst one's South African, Jewish, and Zionist identities. After analyzing interviews of nineteen South African Jews growing up in the mid-20th century, I will suggest that through their exposure to the Zionist youth movement, this generation of South African Jewry, while generally ignoring the call for personal aliyah, used Israel as a means for strengthening their Jewish identity. Thus, while mostly unsuccessful in its ideological goal of recruiting immigrants to Israel, the movement's effect was still relatively positive for the survival of the Jewish people.
- ItemTwo Cowardly Ruffians Committed the Coldest-Blooded Murder in the History of the World: Constructing Criminality, Sexuality, and Jewish Masculinity in the Leopold and Loeb Case(2020) Wise, Allison Riley; Farneth, Molly B.In the summer of 1924, nineteen-year-olds Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb committed what would come to be called "the crime of the century" when they murdered fourteen-year-old Robert Franks on the outskirts of Chicago. From a pair of glasses found near the body, which experts deemed could only belong to a woman or "a particularly wizened face fellow," to psychiatric testimony in the courtroom claiming the murderers were hormonally deficient, improperly gendered, and inherently amoral men, the Leopold and Loeb case was rife with coded language that would come to connect homosexuality, Jewish masculinity, and criminality. In particular, the role of phrenology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and popular pseudoscience were combined to craft a legal strategy that would paint Leopold and Loeb's homosexuality and fragile Jewish masculinity as indicators of their predisposition to criminal behavior and deviant activity. Combined with media coverage intent on sensationalizing the role of affluence, sexuality, and intellectual dominance in the case, the story of Leopold and Loeb created a lasting correlation between Jewishness, gendered performance, abnormal sexuality, and criminality in American public life and cultural politics.
- ItemWe Know What We’re Not: David Berger, Chabad Messianism, and Theological Self-Definition in Judaism(2010) Dillon, Roseanne; Koltun-Fromm, NaomiSince the 1994 death of Chabad-Lubavitch’s beloved seventh Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Hasidic Jewish sect has found itself in the midst of a controversy. Members of the sect had declared Schneerson to be the messiah during his life, and after his death, rather than abandon this belief, some adopted a “second-coming” theology, claiming that he would return. David Berger, the leading opponent of so-called Chabad Messianism, published The Rebbe, the Messiah, and the Scandal of Orthodox Indifference in 2001, admonishing the Orthodox Jewish community for allowing this belief to be propagated under the banner of Judaism. Berger’s argument against the Chabad Messianists is evidence of a larger phenomenon in Judaism. Like Berger, who considers Chabad Messianists’ beliefs un-Jewish because they too closely resemble Christianity, others in Jewish history have understood Jewish identity against the religious other. I observe this phenomenon in two historic moments. In late antiquity, the Jewish Rabbis began to define Judaism as a religion rather than an ethnicity, constructing orthodoxy and heresy against the orthodoxy and heresy of Christian heresiologists. Again in the Middle Ages, Maimonides wrote Jewish law that was part anti-Christian polemic, stating that a messiah who dies before completing the redemption is certainly not the messiah. I argue that in each of these moments of external challenge to the Jewish community, an internal event is seen as threatening to topple the already shaky wall around Jewish identity. The anxiety that Jewish identity will become unrecognizable compels some Jews--to wit Berger, Maimonides, and the early Rabbis--to revive Jewish theological self-definition through categories of orthodoxy and heresy in order to strengthen the border around Jewish identity. When these moments of anxiety pass, dogmatic formulations fall away and the community returns to being something between a religion and ethnicity.