A review by tumblehawk
Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg

5.0

Hoo buddy, this book really stretched my brain out. I haven’t read something this heady and dense in years but the deeper I got the more engaged I became. Nirenberg, a historian, sets out to chart the history of perspectives on Jews and Judaism in ‘western’ thought, charting how the figure of the Jew and the idea of Judaism have been fundamental in every era in the framing of worldviews by various critical thinkers, even those who had little to no actual exposure to/interaction with actual real Jews. The idea of the Jew becomes a sort of foil, a projection, an abstract calamity into which all of the anxieties of an era can be poured. The point of the book, he repeats again and again, isn’t to say that these thinkers (Paul, Augustine, Martin Luther, Shakespeare, etc etc) are anti-semites but that by charting the way Jews and Judaism figured into their way of understanding the world, we can gain a greater understanding of how the real actual lives of Jews were affected—you won’t be shocked to learn that this book ends in the 1940’s. A really powerful read.