The Jew as Legitimation

This book traces the historical phenomenon of "the Jew as Legitimation." Contributors discuss how Jews have been used, through time, to validate non-Jewish beliefs. The volume dissects the dilemmas and challenges this pattern has presented to Jews. Throughout history, Jews and Judaism have served to legitimize the beliefs of Gentiles. Jews functioned as Augustine's witnesses to the truth of Christianity, as Christian Kabbalist's source for Protestant truths, as an argument for the enlightened claim for tolerance, as the focus of modern Christian Zionist reverence, and as a weapon of contemporary right wing populism against fears of Islamization. This volume challenges understandings of Jewish-Gentile relations, offering a counter-perspective to discourses of antisemitism and philosemitism.

David J. Wertheim is Director of the Menasseh ben Israel Institute for Jewish Cultural and Social studies in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which is an academic partnership between the University of Amsterdam and the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam. He is the author of Salvation through Spinoza, a Study of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany.

1. Introduction; David Wertheim.- 2. The Maccabean Martyrs as Models in Early Christian Writings; Jan Willem van Henten.- 3. Alterity and Self-Legitimation: The Jew as Other in Classical and Medieval Christianity; Jeremy Cohen.- 4. The Theological Dialectics of Christian Hebraism and Kabbalah in Early Modernity; Andreas B. Kilcher.- 5. Christian Readings of Menasseh ben Israel. Translation and Retranslation in the Early Modern World; Sina Rauschenbach.- 6. Ideology and Social Change. Jewish Emancipation in European Revolutionary Consciousness (1780-1800); Jonathan Israel.- 7. Post-Biblical Jewish History through Christian Eyes. Josephus and the Miracle of Jewish History in English Protestantism; Jonathan Elukin.- 8. Alien, Everyman, Jew. The dialectics of Dutch "Philosemitism" on the Eve of World War II; Irene Zwiep.- 9. The British Empire's Jewish Question and the Post-Ottoman Future; James Renton.- 10. The Action Portuguesia. Legitimizing National Socialist Racial Ideology as a Dutch Sephardic Strategy for Safety, 1941-1944; Jaap Cohen.- 11. Disowning Responsibility. The Stereotype of the Passive Jew as a Legitimizing Factor in Dutch Remembrance of the Shoah; Evelien Gans.- 12. Source of Legitimacy. Evangelical Christians and Jews; Yaakov Ariel.- 13. Settlers in a Strange Land. Dutch, Swiss, American, and German Protestants in Nes Ammim (Israel), 1952-1964; Gert van Klinken.- 14. How the Turn to the Jews after the Shoah Helped Open Catholics to Religious Pluralism; John Connelly.- 15. The Battle for Jewish Sympathy. The House of Orange, the Dutch Jews, and Postwar Morality; Bart Wallet.- 16. Geert Wilders and the Nationalist Populist Turn toward the Jews in Europe; David Wertheim.