The chapter analyzes the situation of Jews, Jewish organizations, Zionism, anti-Semitism, and the development of racist ideologies.

According to Tacitus, Tiberius declared before the Senate that he observed all of the deeds and pronouncements of Augustus as if they were law (Ann. 4.37). This chapter explores the degree to which that statement is true and the consequences of Tiberius’ adherence to Augustan precedents. I begin with an overview of Tiberius’ relationship with the Senate. I then examine the much criticized fiscal policies of Tiberius. Even those were a consequence of his reverence for Augustus and his desire to preserve Augustan precedent. Next, we examine the notion of the pax Augusta under Tiberius. Again, we see that Tiberius was bound by Augustan policy in his failure to expand the empire. Finally, we analyze the persecution of Jews, worshippers of Isis, and astrologers in the reign of Tiberius. These persecutions were prompted not only by Tiberius’ desire to follow Augustus’ precedents but also, more importantly, by attacks on the domus Augusta.

What are the implications of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection for thinking, prejudicial or otherwise, about foreigners, race, Jews, sexual orientation, and women? Did Darwin himself, caught in Victorian prejudices, have any awareness of the full implications of his theorizing?

Examines American relations with non-Protestant others within the Mediterranean, primarily Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. Pays particular attention to shipwrecks in Morocco.

Once Christian Europe’s most paradigmatic internal Other, Jews are now mostly seen as a well-integrated and successful religious minority group. For centuries, Jews faced political, social, and legal exclusion. Now, politicians proudly invoke the West’s shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ heritage. Compared to the past, public expressions of antisemitism have become increasingly taboo. Jews have seemingly moved from being paradigmatic outsiders to accepted insiders. Despite this undoubted success, there are still moments when this position can become suddenly unsettled. There are not only the terrible attacks on Jewish life, such as the synagogue shootings in Halle in 2019 and a year earlier in Pittsburgh, the still alarming rates of antisemitic violence, the groups of white supremacists chanting in the streets that Jews will not replace them, or the flourishing antisemitic conspiracy theories in the online and offline worlds. Uneasiness with Jews and Judaism also still manifests in less extreme and less overtly hostile ways in the midst of society on the terrain of liberal law.

This chapter is the first of two that examine the legal encounter with Jewishness in public space by focussing on the Orthodox practice of the eruv. The eruv is a distinctly Orthodox practice and fault lines here do not run simply between Jews and non-Jews but also between different Jews. In the modern secular legal arena, questions of non-establishment and the boundaries of religious freedom serve as the dominant legal frames, turning the eruv into a matter of excessive religiosity to be contained by law. Yet underneath the lofty language of constitutional separation often lurk concerns about national and local identity as well as sovereignty and ownership. Moreover, while circumcision has often galvanised Jews of different denominations, the eruv exposes internal Jewish rifts about Jewish identity and difference in contemporary societies. Indeed, some Jews themselves have not shied away from mobilising the authority of secular law to enforce their vision of what they consider the acceptable boundaries of Jewishness today.

In 2012, a German district court in the city of Cologne decided that male circumcision for non-therapeutical reasons amounted to criminal assault that could not be justified by parental consent. Over a period of several months, between the decision and the drafting of the amending legislation, the German public and academy became embroiled in a remarkably heated and emotional debate about the future of the practice. But this time, the resentment did not just appear in the notorious online world but became woven into medical and legal arguments against circumcision. Even though critics of circumcision were eager to stress that their concerns were children’s rights alone, the Cologne debate sent a signal to Germany’s Jews that the law could easily turn them into strangers again. Through a close reading of this legal controversy, this chapter examines how contemporary secular legal responses to religious infant male circumcision reproduce Christian ambivalence and rely on a supersessionary logic that renders Jews as stuck in a backward past, while constituting the majoritarian secularised Christian culture as a superior locus of equality and progress.

This is the first of two chapters concerned with the Jewish practice of infant male circumcision. In this chapter, I trace the history of circumcision as a trope for Jewish difference in European Christian thought and consider its symbolic role in debates about the legal equality of Jews. Christian thinkers spent much time pondering Jewish circumcision and what it told them about the supposedly ‘carnal’, particularistic, and anachronistic nature of Jews. Apart from constituting a trope for what differentiated Jews from Christians, the bodily sign eventually also became enmeshed in discussions about the possibility of Jewish emancipation where it offered a site to debate the fitness of Jews to become citizens. However, regardless of how much Christians disdained circumcision, they mostly respected the Jewish right to circumcise and due to a curious twist of history, some Christian societies eventually even embraced circumcision themselves. More recently, circumcision has emerged as a human rights issue and I explore the role of Christian ambivalence in contemporary calls for a ban on the practice in the name of children’s rights and gender equality.

Jews were among the founders of Antioch and contributed greatly to the social and material evolution of the city. How they adjusted to the imperial agendas of Late Antiquity, as well as their characterization in the textual record are the main objects of inquiry.

Comparing the fourth-century writings of John Chrysostom and Libanius with the sixth-century writings of Severus of Antioch and John Malalas suggests that Jewish characters continued to play significant roles in Christian writings even as Jews themselves became less visible in the city of Antioch.

Chapter 8 continues this discussion, noting that Moses and Elijah are both held in honour by Jews, Christians and Muslims, as is Jesus by Christians and Muslims (following Christian scholars such as David Thomas). Although there are important and abiding doctrinal differences between these Abrahamic Faiths, particularly about the status of Jesus and Mohammed, this chapter argues that there are crucial ethical commonalities that could and should help to move the world beyond religiously inspired violence. The chapter ends with an extended discussion of Raimon Panikkar’s inspiring vision of the Cosmic Christ in his collected works Omnia Opera.

The book is bought to a close by the invasion and occupation of Poland, the radical inner colonization of the Warthegau, ethnic cleansing of Poles, the simultaneous ghettoization of Jews, Lebensraum and the conquest of Eastern Europe, Christaller and his organizational plans for the conquered East, Zamosc, the Holocaust, and the post-war legacy. Posen and West Prussia were cleared of Germans and Poland successfully inner colonized this space. The Junker estates of East Germany were broken up. West Germany accepted 8 million expellees from Eastern Europe and, in their final act, the inner colonizers helped settle many of them on farms.