The Origins of Modern Antisemitism: A Case Study of the Jews in England 1881-1920
Creators: name: Siegal, Nurit
Publisher: name: University of Chicago
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Antisemitism
subject: Modern Antisemitism
subject: Liberalism
subject: Postcolonialism
subject: Political Theory
subject: Equality
subject: Anti-Judaism

description: Scholarship on modern antisemitism frequently assumes that the spread of liberal political thought in modern nation-states worked to eliminate pre-existing sociopolitical hierarchies between Jews and non-Jews and increase toleration of Judaism. Using the Jews of modern England as a case study, this thesis argues that, contrary to this assumption, liberal politics did not eliminate these inequalities but rather reinforced them vis-à-vis modern social and political projects. The purpose of this thesis is to therefore examine liberal policies and discourses which deliberated on the ethno-religious aspects of Jewish identity perceived as being the greatest obstacle to their assimilation and naturalization. To strengthen their integration, liberal policies sought to supplant Jews’ ethno-religious identity with a “universal” religious Jewish identity compatible with the English nation-state concept and with liberal understandings of the “self”. This would ostensibly allow Jews to integrate into liberal British society while still maintaining a distinct religion, however abstracted. With great success, liberal institutions worked to suppress “problematic” aspects of Jewish identity, such as the use of Hebrew and other Jewish languages, prayers and rituals which reinforced Jews’ national identity and regional attachment to “Eretz Yisroel” (the Land of Israel), as well as imagined “Jewish” traits such as tribalism, obsession with money, and other “evils of the flesh”. Through its analysis, this thesis also contemplates why scholars have often associated the history of liberalism with “pro-Jewish” politics despite the de-Judaization efforts it inspired. It thus considers the following questions regarding scholarship on modern antisemitism: What are the moral values and cultural sensibilities which inform scholars’ understanding of oppression and how have those values shaped historical narratives around antisemitism specifically? While liberal and postcolonial scholars often disagree, for example, on which condemnations and even violence against Jewish groups deserve to be labeled as antisemitic, all social scholars assume the right to render judgment on the beliefs and actions of Jews across space and time, as well as the actions and beliefs of non-Jews towards them. And although this thesis neither denies the necessity of judgment nor its importance in the study of antisemitism, it remains critical of the liberal political philosophies which underly common judgements of Jews across scholarship to this day and which posit significant aspects of Jewish identity as inimical to social progress. In executing such a critique, this thesis inevitably presumes the value of a “pro-Jewish” historical narrative from which political inequalities and prejudices against Jews can be unearthed and analyzed. It does not attempt, however, to instead locate “true” political equality within the Jewish imagination of a just society, but rather questions the viability of equality as a social and political ideal all together.