Following the Second World War, antisemitism appeared to be on a decline. Presently, however, there is an uptick in antisemitic hate crimes, worldwide. Modern-day Islamic antisemitism in particular is in large part recycled European Christian antisemitism adapted for Islamic audiences and intensified by the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. This iteration of anti-Jewish bigotry is not the same as the “old,” but neither is it different. As will be explained, antisemitism has, throughout history, amounted to an anomaly in Islamic culture and in what may be called “normative” Islam. Indeed, Muslims and Jews lived together amicably for centuries. In fact, within dar-al-Islam, Jews were afforded greater opportunities for social advancement and participation in their host societies than Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews in Christendom. However, after the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, distinctly European antisemitic tropes have surfaced in the Islamic world. These have clearly been imported from old Europe (including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the virulent antisemitism of organizations such as Islamic Jihad). Disturbingly, these same tropes are making their way back into Europe via the growing Muslim minorities in various countries. While this “new antisemitism” of the twenty-first century is neither the same nor different from the old, neither is it unresolvable. The answer, I will assert, is to address historical Christian antisemitism and impress upon Muslims that antisemitism is contrary to Islamic teachings. The 2020 signing of the Abraham Accords by Israel and a number of Arab states, as well as Israel’s peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, show that antisemitism can be remedied and that Judeo-Islamic relations can be mended. The Jewish experience in Azerbaijan (a majority-Muslim state) and Singapore (where Jews constitute a tiny minority) further demonstrate that Jews and Muslims can indeed live peaceably together and even cooperate.

This thesis compares two perspectives on the production of Holocaust memory: a novel that leads up to The Holocaust in Britain and one that reflects the hindsight perspective of a liberator in the Soviet Union. The novels are Virginia Woolf’s BETWEEN THE ACTS and Vasily Grossman’s LIFE AND FATE. The analysis offers a locus of analysis for the diasporic literary energy created by the catastrophe in the 20th and 21st centuries. The project offers a theorized standpoint on the role of literature on official historical archives. Proposing a method through which contemporary readers can engage the diasporic event of The Holocaust, the project adopts both the extended metaphor and literal expression of soundscapes. Soundscapes encompass the immaterial processes of memorialization and the literal sonic textures developed in Holocaust novels. The critical perspective incorporates contemporary notions of narratology, archival practices, and cultural manifestations of language into the notion of literary ethnomusicology.

<p>In his important work, The Beginnings of Jewishness, Shaye J. D. Cohen has argued that what it meant to be a Jew underwent considerable revision during the second century B.C.E. While previously a Jew was defined in terms of ethnicity (by which Cohen means biological descent), in the wake of Judaism's sustained encounter with Hellenism, the term Jew came to be defined as an ethno-religion--that is, one could choose to become a Jew. Nonetheless, the recent work of scholars, such as Christine E. Hayes, has demonstrated that there continued to exist in early Judaism a strain of thinking that, in theory at least, excluded the possibility that Gentiles could become Jews. This genealogical exclusion, found in works such as Jubilees, was highly indebted to the "holy seed" theology evidenced in Ezra-Nehemiah, a theology which defined Jewishness in genealogical terms.</p> <p>This dissertation will attempt to contribute to a greater understanding of differing conceptions of circumcision in early Judaism, one that more accurately describes the nature of Jewish thought with regard to Jewishness, circumcision, and conversion. In terms of methodology, my dissertation will combine historical criticism with a literary approach to the texts under consideration. The dissertation will focus on texts from the Hebrew Bible as well as Jewish texts from the Second Temple period as these writings provide windows into the various forms of Judaism from which the early Christian movement arose.</p> <p>Beginning with the Hebrew Bible, I will argue that there is no evidence that circumcision was considered to be a rite of conversion to Israelite religion. In fact, circumcision, particularly the infant circumcision instantiated within Israelite and early Jewish society excludes from the covenant those not properly descended from Abraham. In the Second Temple period, many Jews did begin to conceive of Jewishness in terms which enabled Gentiles to become Jews. Nonetheless, some Jews found this definition of Jewishness problematic, and defended the borders of Jewishness by reasserting a strictly genealogical conception of Jewish identity. Consequently, some Gentiles who underwent conversion to Judaism in this period faced criticism because of their suspect genealogy. Our sources record such exclusion with regard to the Herodians, Idumeans who had converted to Judaism. </p> <p>Additionally, a more thorough examination of how circumcision and conversion were perceived by Jews in the Second Temple period will be instrumental in better understanding early Christianity. It is the argument of this dissertation that further attention to a definition of Jewishness that was based on genealogical descent has broader implications for understanding the variegated nature of early Christian mission to the Gentiles in the first century C.E.</p> / Dissertation

Jewish ethicists face a twofold task of persuading audiences that (a) their proposal for an issue of social concern and justice is the right and good thing to do, and (b) their proposal fits within the Judaic tradition writ large. Whereas most scholarship in the field focuses on how Jewish ethicists argue by dividing arguments into halakhic formalist, covenantalist and narrativist categories, these efforts fail both to reflect the diverse ways ethicists actually argue and to explain why they argue in these ways. My project proposes a new methodology to understand how and why Jewish ethicists argue as they do on issues of justice and concern. My project combines philosophical theology and discourse analysis. The first examines an ethicist’s notion of covenant (brit) in light of theories found in the Jewish textual tradition. Clarifying an ethicist’s notion of covenant uncovers that person’s assumptions about the scope and binding nature of elements in the Judaic tradition, and that person’s conception of an audience’s responsibilities to the normative argument s/he articulates. Certain themes come to the fore for each ethicist that, when mapped, reveal striking relationships between an ethicist’s notion of covenant and anticipated ethical rhetoric. These maps begin to show why certain ethicists argue as they do. Discourse analysis then identifies the interrelationships between the speaker, the spoken and the audience – as they are actually articulated in Jewish ethicists’ practical arguments. These relationships form the how of Jewish ethical arguments insofar as they reflect an author’s rhetorical choices. My project applies discourse analysis to the rhetoric of a sample of living Jewish ethicists (J. David Bleich, Elliot Dorff, Eugene Borowitz) who speak out on issues of social concern and justice. As will be seen, a rich and complex relationship exists between an ethicist’s theory of covenant and his subsequent moral rhetoric. This twofold methodology enables the student of Jewish ethics to understand how and why seemingly disparate styles of normative speech are nonetheless participating in a common endeavor and discourse. And it supports the theologically-based rhetoric of religious ethical discourse in shaping justice in multi-cultural societies.

This thesis investigates the problem of contemporary historiography and regime representation in Flavian Rome through a close study of a text not usually read for such purposes but which has obvious promise for a study of this theme, the Jewish War of Flavius Josephus. Having surveyed the evolution of our conception of Josephus' relationship to Flavian power, taken a broad account of issues of political expression and regime representation in Flavian Rome outside Josephus and examined questions relating to the structure and date of the work, I will provide a series of thematically-focused readings of the three senior members of the Flavian family, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, as represented by their contemporary and client Josephus. Key topics to be explored include the level of independence of Josephus' vision, his work's relationship to how the regime is depicted in other contemporary sources, how Josephus makes the Flavians serve his own agenda (which is distinct from the heavy focus of most previous scholarship on how Josephus served their agenda), and the viability and usefulness of certain types of reading practices relating to figured critique which have recently become influential in Josephan scholarship. The thesis offers a new approach to Josephus' relationship to the Flavian Dynasty and sheds new light on contemporary historiography and political expression in the Early Principate.

Understanding the psychology behind the perpetrators of the Holocaust has been difficult because experiments on conformity and obedience cannot readily simulate the reality of the Holocaust. There exists historical documentation surrounding the leaders of the Nazi organization instrumental for the perpetration of the Holocaust, but the underlying motives of Hitler's leaders relating to governmental policies of systematic extermination of the Jews in Europe, are not known, as the strategy and operationalization of the actions were kept extremely secret, disguised by euphemisms, or only discussed verbally. This research study was to further understand the thought processes behind the manipulation tactics applied by leaders of the Nazi organization, and the leaders of Britain, America, and the Soviet Union during the Holocaust, by reviewing their personal writings, communiques, and orders. The theoretical base used was the theory of groupthink by Janis, because it is most applicable to understanding complex human psychology. The research questions of the study were: a) to find the origins of the Final Solution, why it gained acceptance by the Nazis, and the role of anti-Semitism ; and b) to identify groupthink symptom language relating to German, British, American, and Soviet leaders during the Holocaust. A qualitative multiple retro-historical case study methodology was selected. Data were collected and analyzed from archival material and groupthink theory was found to be ideally suited to the study of the Holocaust. Translation of a period of Alfred Rosenberg's diary relating to Hitler's issuance of the 'Hitler Extermination Order,' was discovered. The results show areas for further research, including the translation into English of the Alfred Rosenberg diary that was lost to history for over 60 years. The findings of this research study will hopefully help organizational psychologists to better remedy groupthink practices.

This work traces the relationship of Jews to African-Americans in the process of Jews attaining whiteness in the 20th century. Specific attention is paid to blackface performance in The Jazz Singer and the process of identification with suffering. Theoretically this work brings together psychoanalytic theories of projection, repression and masochism with afro-pessimist notions of the libidinal economy of white supremacy. Ultimately, I argue that in its enjoyment and its masochism, The Jazz Singer empathizes with blackness both as a way to assimilate into white America and express doubt at this very act.

The topic of this dissertation is the history and preservation of the synagogues associated with the Atlantic World (1636-1822). The synagogue is a significant kind of structure to study because it represents a specific ethnic demographic that transcends international political borders in history and preservation management. This thereby provides a special opportunity to study how different societies approach heritage interpretation and historic preservation for a common building type. Forty-four synagogues were identified that were constructed between 1636 and 1822 in the Dutch, British, Danish, and French empires, and in the United States. Only nine synagogues of the 44 surveyed survived. These nine synagogues are the last remaining vestiges of this heritage and their continued preservation is immensely important. Since the 1990s, some cultural resources has been regained from the lost synagogues through the work of archaeological excavations at several sites in the Caribbean and South America. Presently, 11 countries and territories (Brazil, Curacao, Gibraltar, Israel, Jamaica, St. Christopher and Nevis, St. Eustatius, Suriname, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and the United States) have (or have had) proactive preservation and/or archaeological activities on this heritage. The history of preservation of these sites has also been important within each of the respective participating countries and territories as symbols of meaning on multiculturalism / acase@tulane.edu

<p>This dissertation examines how Jews in medieval Egypt negotiated marital disputes while maneuvering between individual desires, legal prescriptions and societal expectations. The main sources for this investigation are the documents of the Cairo Geniza, a rich cache of manuscripts discovered in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. The study of medieval Jewish communities is often dominated by a top-down approach that focuses on the elites and adopts the perspective of the communal leadership as it examines the 'Jewish community' as the fundamental manifestation of Jewish life. The present study complements this perspective by offering a 'view from below' of married life and communal institutions. Recovering the life-stories of non-elite individuals as they experience communal institutions and creatively negotiate the legal arena reveals a substantially different image of Jewish communal life. For example, I show how women experienced the legal arena differently than their husbands as communal officials tended to pressure women to compromise their monetary rights. This, in turn, led women to adopt certain characteristic practices and behaviors in their interactions with communal leaders so as to withstand these pressures. In this way, rather than seeing communal legal institutions as merely imposing religious law on deviant practice, I shift the focus to the litigants' point of view as "consumers" of legal resources whose navigation of the pluralistic legal arena depended on status and personal networks as much as on legal considerations. Gender and status are revealed to be crucial categories in our understanding of Geniza society and medieval patriarchy. The result of this analysis is a better understanding of the instability and flexibility of married life and of their implications for the pursuing of legal disputes in medieval Egypt. The study is accompanied by an edition of nineteen previously unpublished Geniza documents that demonstrate the various aspects of married life examined in the study. </p>

Jewish ethicists face a twofold task of persuading audiences that (a) their proposal for an issue of social concern and justice is the right and good thing to do, and (b) their proposal fits within the Judaic tradition writ large. Whereas most scholarship in the field focuses on how Jewish ethicists argue by dividing arguments into halakhic formalist, covenantalist and narrativist categories, these efforts fail both to reflect the diverse ways ethicists actually argue and to explain why they argue in these ways. My project proposes a new methodology to understand how and why Jewish ethicists argue as they do on issues of justice and concern. My project combines philosophical theology and discourse analysis. The first examines an ethicist’s notion of covenant (brit) in light of theories found in the Jewish textual tradition. Clarifying an ethicist’s notion of covenant uncovers that person’s assumptions about the scope and binding nature of elements in the Judaic tradition, and that person’s conception of an audience’s responsibilities to the normative argument s/he articulates. Certain themes come to the fore for each ethicist that, when mapped, reveal striking relationships between an ethicist’s notion of covenant and anticipated ethical rhetoric. These maps begin to show why certain ethicists argue as they do. Discourse analysis then identifies the interrelationships between the speaker, the spoken and the audience – as they are actually articulated in Jewish ethicists’ practical arguments. These relationships form the how of Jewish ethical arguments insofar as they reflect an author’s rhetorical choices. My project applies discourse analysis to the rhetoric of a sample of living Jewish ethicists (J. David Bleich, Elliot Dorff, Eugene Borowitz) who speak out on issues of social concern and justice. As will be seen, a rich and complex relationship exists between an ethicist’s theory of covenant and his subsequent moral rhetoric. This twofold methodology enables the student of Jewish ethics to understand how and why seemingly disparate styles of normative speech are nonetheless participating in a common endeavor and discourse. And it supports the theologically-based rhetoric of religious ethical discourse in shaping justice in multi-cultural societies.