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Jewish Theology as a Science in the Context of Post-Shoah Germany
Author(s): Fehige, Yiftach
Date: 2026
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Jewish Studies, Universities / Higher Education, Religion, State and Government: Relations with Religion, Theology
Abstract: This paper analyses the contested institutionalization of Jewish theology in contemporary Germany, focusing on the founding and crisis of the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam. It situates this within broader debates over theology's scientific status and the conditions under which it gains institutional legitimacy in secular, democratic societies. Following Paul Feyerabend's call to contextualize science historically and sociologically, the paper challenges essentialist accounts of science and religion. It argues that academic Jewish theology must be understood within Germany's shifting social system of public knowledge—shaped by political culture, communal authority, and contested epistemic norms—contributing to debates about pluralism, religious authority, and theology's role in the modern university.
Navigating (De)Conversion While Maintaining Social Relations Across Different Religions in Flanders (Belgium)
Author(s): Van Praag, Lore; Klaver, Kaya; Verschraegen, Gert; Loobuyck, Patrick
Date: 2025
Topics: Secularity, Secularisation and Secular Jews, Main Topic: Other, Religion, Religious Observance and Practice, Networks, Comparisons: Between Jews and Non-Jews
Abstract: Religious (de)conversion trajectories often involve shifts in social networks, both within and outside religious communities. This paper explores two key aspects: first, the strategies used by (de)converts in Flanders (Belgium) to communicate their (de)conversion, and second, how they experienced the reactions of their social networks, shaped by the organization of their religious groups. Based on 43 in-depth interviews with individuals who have recently (de)converted from and to Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or a secular worldview, the thematic analysis shows that most participants revealed their (de)conversion gradually, often anticipating reactions. Some led “two lives” to maintain harmony with family and social networks, seeing this as an act of love. While some relationships were disrupted, many were eventually restored. Notably, differences in communication strategies and social reactions were found depending on the structure and nature of the religious groups involved.
Glaubensspuren: Jüdische, muslimische und christliche Lebensrealitäten in Ostdeutschland
Translated Title: Traces of Faith: Jewish, Muslim and Christian realities of life in East Germany
Author(s): Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland
Date: 2023
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Islam and Muslims, Christianity, State and Government: Relations with Religion, Religion, Religious Observance and Practice, Comparisons: Between Jews and Non-Jews
Abstract: Die „Denkfabrik Schalom Aleikum“ schaut auf der Suche nach Glaubensspuren durch ein selten geöffnetes Fenster: jüdische, muslimische und christliche Lebensrealitäten in Ostdeutschland. Wie spielt sich religiös-gesellschaftliches Leben ab in einer Region Deutschlands, in der die meisten Menschen keiner Konfession angehören und die Geschichte vieler Gemeinden zweifach unterbrochen wurde – durch die Schoa und die DDR? Juden, Christen und Muslime Ostdeutschlands haben oft eine andere Geschichte und auch eine andere Gegenwart als die in der restlichen Bundesrepublik. Das markiert nicht nur Probleme, sondern auch große Chancen für Deutschland. Was bedeuten multiple Zugehörigkeiten insbesondere für junge Erwachsene in einem Umfeld, das aktuell auch von antidemokratischen Aktivitäten geprägt ist? Die Autorinnen und Autoren führen diese Aspekte zu einer Frage des sozialen Miteinanders zusammen und entwickeln eine selten ausgeführte Perspektive.
Race and Religion in Everyday Life: Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Christian Privilege Among Female Converts in the Netherlands
Author(s): Schrijvers, Lieke L.
Date: 2024
Topics: Conversion, Christianity, Islam and Muslims, Main Topic: Other, Race, Religion, Comparisons: Between Jews and Non-Jews
Abstract: This article analyzes how the intersections of race and religion impact the experiences of women converting to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam in the Netherlands. It builds on the innovative historical and philosophical work by scholars who call attention to the intersections of race and religion. In ethnographic studies of female converts such entanglements of race and religion have primarily been noted in the case of white converts in Islam. However, research into race and racialization among Christian and Jewish female converts is rare, and a comparative approach even rarer. A bottom-up comparative approach, I argue, has the potential to critically examine not only the positions of religio-racialized minorities, but also the mechanisms of religious/racial hegemony at work in Western Europe. The article thus explores how becoming a religious minority impacts one’s sense of belonging to the nation and how processes of racialization, specifically antisemitism and Islamophobia, impact the conversion process.
A comparative look at right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobi hate crimes in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia
Author(s): Kersten, Joachim; Hankel, Natalia
Editor(s): Von Mering, Sabine; McCarty, Timothy Wyman
Date: 2013
Topics: Antisemitism, Antisemitism: Right-Wing, Antisemitism: Christian, Hate Crime, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Nationalism, Xenophobia, Extremism, Religion
Abstract: With the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and with Mikhail Gorbachev’s politics of glasnost and perestroika, suppressed religious and national movements emerged as visible elements of political conflict in what once constituted the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). While in the former USSR this concerned the huge former “Turkestan” region with its religious roots in Islam, and the Orthodox denominations of Russia and the Ukraine, the post-USSR Eastern European satellite states saw an eruption of both nationalism and/or suppressed Catholicism. Mark Juergensmeyer (2008: 152) describes how in Russia, the Ukraine, and Poland “religion became the expression of a nationalist rejection of the secular socialist ideology.” Partly, the free expression of religion was a component of what could be termed a democratic “eruption,” and at the same time it created strong links to “nationalist and transnationalist identities of a bygone era” (Juergensmeyer 2008: 156). The role of right-wing extremism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism ought to be assessed in the context of the transformation of the post-Stalinist political cultures of Eastern Europe and Russia. As much as religion and its institutions were indispensable for the opposition to the Stalinist state, they helped to recreate the old nationalisms of the 19th century (and earlier) of which anti-Semitism was often an integral component. Religious zeal combined with nationalistic patriotism contains ideologies of purity for which “others,” be they ethnic minorities or Jews, were the paramount danger and source of a feared “racial pollution” (cf. Douglas 1966/2007). In the early 1990s, after German re-unification, similar developments could be observed in parts of the former German Democratic Republic. Minkenberg (2002) sees the rehabilitation of the nation state (National-staat) in Eastern Europe in line with the spread of nationalistic rhetoric and the concept of a national ethnic identity. In the context of economic, and partly also cultural crisis, minorities are used as a scapegoat for the problems at hand. Combined with a rejection of internationalism, diversity, and European Union (EU) integration, such resentments seem like “natural” consequences of newly formed national identities (Thieme 2007a, 2007b). In the findings of the European Social Survey (2006), Polish, Hungarian, and Ukrainian populations frequently show more sympathy for conservative (right-wing) politics, gender inequality, and homophobia than Western European societies.
Holocaust Memory and Britain’s Religious-Secular Landscape Politics, Sacrality, And Diversity
Author(s): Tollerton, David
Date: 2020
Topics: Holocaust Memorials, Holocaust Education, Holocaust Commemoration, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Secularity, Secularisation and Secular Jews, Religion
Abstract: British state-supported Holocaust remembrance has dramatically grown in prominence since the 1990s. This monograph provides the first substantial discussion of the interface between public Holocaust memory in contemporary Britain and the nation’s changing religious-secular landscape.

In the first half of the book attention is given to the relationships between remembrance activities and Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and post-Christian communities. Such relationships are far from monolithic, being entangled in diverse histories, identities, power-structures, and notions of ‘British values’. In the book’s second half, the focus turns to ways in which public initiatives concerned with Holocaust commemoration and education are intertwined with evocations and perceptions of the sacred. Three state-supported endeavours are addressed in detail: Holocaust Memorial Day, plans for a major new memorial site in London, and school visits to Auschwitz. Considering these phenomena through concepts of ritual, sacred space, and pilgrimage, it is proposed that response to the Holocaust has become a key feature of Britain’s 21st century religious-secular landscape. Critical consideration of these topics, it is argued, is necessary for both a better understanding of religious-secular change in modern Britain and a sustainable culture of remembrance and national self-examination.
On Learning from the Margins: Jewish Nonreligious Grammars within a Secular-Protestant Landscape
Author(s): Sheldon, Ruth
Date: 2019
Topics: Jewish Neighbourhoods, Religion, Religious Observance and Practice, Secularity, Secularisation and Secular Jews, Main Topic: Other, Denominations: Haredi / Strictly Orthodox, Ethnography
Abstract: This contribution to the special issue draws on ethnographic fieldwork exploring pluralities of Jewish life across adjacent urban neighbourhoods in London in order to engage with the conceptual questions and empirical omissions that are currently of concern to scholars of nonreligion. Learning from some illustrative moments in my fieldwork in which articulations of non-belief in God serendipitously arose, I first consider how marginal Jewish perspectives trouble the conceptual framing of ‘religion/nonreligion’ within (post)Protestant cultures. I then show how an ethnographic approach focused on the specific contexts in which piety or belief in God is othered can deepen understanding of the heterogeneous formations of ‘nonreligion’, even within relatively well-researched settings such as contemporary London.
Religiosity, Religious Practice, and Antisemitism in Present-Day Hungary
Author(s): Ildikó, Barna; Kovács, András
Date: 2019
Topics: Antisemitism, Christianity, Jewish Relations With Non-Jews: Jewish - Christian Relations, Main Topic: Antisemitism, Religion, Surveys, Antisemitism: Attitude Surveys, Antisemitism: Christian, Nationalism
Abstract: Since 1995, Surveys on antisemitism using national representative samples have been regularly carried out in Hungary. In this article, we used data from the 2011 and 2017 surveys to explore the relationship between three types of antisemitism, namely religious, secular, and emotional. Moreover, we scrutinized how different religiosity indicators can be used as explanatory variables for the different types of antisemitism. We found a slight increase in religious and secular antisemitism between 2011 and 2017, while emotional antisemitism remained almost the same. Religious anti-Judaism significantly correlated with both secular and emotional antisemitism, however, its relationship was much stronger with the former. When analyzing the relationship between different types of antisemitism and religiosity indicators, we found that while in 2011, all the indicators were connected to religious, and most of them to secular and emotional antisemitism, in 2017, only the variables measuring subjective self-classification remained significant. The results show that the relationship between religion and antisemitism underwent some substantial changes between 2011 and 2017. While in 2011, personal religiosity was a significant predictor of the strength of antisemitism, in 2017, religion serving as a cultural identity marker took over this function. The hypothetical explanatory factor for the change is the rebirth of the “Christian-national” idea appearing as the foundational element of the new Hungarian constitution, according to which Christian culture is the ultimate unifying force of the nation, giving the inner essence and meaning of the state. In this discourse, being Christian is equated with being Hungarian. Self-declared and self-defined Christian religiosity plays the role of a symbolic marker for accepting the national-conservative identity discourse and belonging to the “Christian-national” cultural-political camp where antisemitic prejudices occur more frequently than in other segments of the society
Imago Dei and Peoplehood: Comparative Rhetorics of Racialization in Orthodox and Jewish Public Discourse
Author(s): Kapranov, Yan; Iwanowska, Bożena; Ivanytska, Natalia
Date: 2026
Topics: Discourse and Narrative, Main Topic: Other, Comparisons: Between Jews and Non-Jews, Language, Religion
Abstract: This article examines how sacred vocabularies from Orthodox Christianity and Judaism function in racialised public discourse in Poland and Ukraine between 2020 and 2025. It asks how terms such as imago Dei/tselem Elohim, neighbour-love and chesed, holiness/purity, suffering/martyrdom, and exile/return are mobilised across pulpit, policy, and platform communication. Drawing on a corpus of 23 publicly available texts, the study applies comparative rhetorical discourse analysis informed by Burke’s concepts of identification and logology and Pernot’s account of the religious dimension of rhetoric, alongside a coding scheme focused on topoi, metaphors, frames, appeals, and boundary work. The findings show convergences in dignity claims, memorial warning, and care rhetoric under conditions of war and displacement but also clear divergences: Jewish discourse more often mobilises peoplehood as a rhetoric of continuity and communal protection, whereas Orthodox discourse more often ties sacred language to national-historical self-location, ecclesial autonomy, and opposition to russkii mir (“Russian world”). Across the retained corpus, dog-whistle-like discourse appears mainly as an object of quotation or denunciation, while explicit counter-speech is widespread. The article concludes that sacred language remains an active rhetorical resource for defining dignity, injury, solidarity, and belonging, although its function varies across arenas, traditions, and the corpus’s asymmetries.
Pedagogies and Practice: How Religious Diversification Impacts Seminaries and Clergy
Author(s): Tiffany, Austin
Date: 2018
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Rabbis, Diversity, Interfaith Dialogue and Relations, Denominations, Jewish Education, Comparisons: Between Jews and Non-Jews, Religion
Abstract: This thesis considers how religious diversification has shaped the roles of clergy and seminaries. The focus of this qualitative, interview-based study is seminaries and clergy affiliated with various denominations of Judaism and Protestant Christianity in greater London and New York City. Religiously diversifying societies in the US and England have brought forth new challenges for clergy and seminaries, prompting new questions about how or why a faith community should or should not engage with diversity in the public square. This study investigates how seminaries and individual members of the clergy, as sources of religious authority, are responding to religious diversification in different ways – the former sluggish to recognise the impact of religious diversification in curriculum and pedagogical structures and the latter seeing it as a resource for social action initiatives, local networks, and political activism. This has created a gap between training and practice whereby clergy have assumed greater religious authority in religious life. Beyond contributing to the field of sociology of religion, this thesis concludes by allowing the experience of clergy in interreligious engagement to inform appropriate pedagogies that could be employed by seminaries.
Les Juifs africains et antillais en région parisienne
Translated Title: African and Antillais Jews in the Paris region
Author(s): Mokoko Gampiot, Aurélien
Editor(s): Kaouès, Fatiha; Vanel, Chrystal; Vilmain, Vincent; Fauches, Aurélien
Date: 2012
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Diaspora and Relations Between Diaspora Countries, Ethnicity, Race, Jewish Identity, Religion
Abstract: The contemporary evolution of Judaism is marked by a dynamic diaspora whose transnational nature may be perceived in the variety of origins of Jewish believers. The diversity of Jewish communities includes an African, Caribbean, and even African American component, whose actual or alleged Jewish identity has led scholars to investigate into the intersection of race and religion in contemporary Judaism. The present study aims to contribute in the observation of this phenomenon, by focusing on the intersection of religion and ethnicity within Black Judaism in particular black Jews in France? After four years among blacks Jews in Paris area. How does one live as a Black Jew? How do these believers define themselves as Jews and Blacks? How is the notion of Jewishness implemented among them? How do they express their relation to the global Jewish world, and to both their religious communities and the wider French society?
Les juifs de France sont-ils en train de redevenir une minorité religieuse ?
Translated Title: Are the Jews of France in the process of becoming a religious minority again?
Author(s): Cohen, Martine
Editor(s): Obadia, Lionel; Zwilling, Anne-Laure
Date: 2016
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Minorities, Religion
La libertad religiosa en españa y la comunidad judía balear
Translated Title: Religious freedom in Spain and the Balearic Jewish community
Editor(s): Pons-Estel Tugores, Catalina
Date: 2013
Topics: Jewish Relations With Non-Jews, Law and Justice, Citizenship and Nationality, State and Government: Relations with Religion, Synagogues, Religion, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Jewish Community
Abstract: Este año se conmemora en España el Bicentenario de la Constitución de Cádiz de 19 de
marzo de 1812. Durante estos dos siglos muchas cosas han cambiado y muy
particularmente, en las relaciones entre el Estado y las confesiones
religiosas. Con la vigente Constitución de 1978 queda razonablemente resuelto
uno de los problemas permanentes en la historia del constitucionalismo español
como es la llamada “cuestión religiosa”. El reconocimiento de la libertad
religiosa ha traído consigo un pluralismo religioso que se refleja en una diversidad
de confesiones en la sociedad española que, progresivamente, van adquiriendo
una mayor presencia social. En nuestro país los judíos son una minoría
religiosa que no supera los 40.000 miembros. En Baleares, la población judía
está perfectamente integrada en la sociedad junto al resto de religiones y
comparte las mismas inquietudes que el resto de ciudadanos. Al coincidir en
este año 2012 otras conmemoraciones como la del XXV aniversario de la sinagoga
de Palma de Mallorca y el XX aniversario del Acuerdo suscrito entre el Estado
español y la Federación de Comunidades Judías de España, se presenta en este
libro un estudio del régimen jurídico y la evolución histórica de la Comunidad
judía de las Islas Baleares. El libro constituye, pues, una importante aportación científica que recoge trabajos de
representantes de la Comunidad Judía balear, de representantes de la Administración pública balear y de profesores expertos de diferentes Universidades españolas.

Contenido:

La libertad religiosa en España: IsidoroMartín Sánchez
La federación de comunidades judías de España y su acuerdo de cooperación con el Estado español
de 1992 (XX Aniversario): Marcos González Sánchez
Breve historia de la presencia judía en Mallorca: J. Maíz Chacón
Los chuetas como segmento escindido de la comunidad judeoconversa de Mallorca: P. de Montaner
La comunidad judía en las Islas Baleares. Un punto y seguido permanente en la historia (estudio
socio-jurídico): Abraham Barchillón Gabizón
XXV Aniversario de la inauguración de la sinagoga
de Palma de Mallorca: David Kaisin
Ethnicity, Religion and Demographic Change in Russia: Russians, Tatars and Jews
Author(s): Tolts, Mark
Date: 1996
Topics: Demography, Main Topic: Demography and Migration, Religion, Ethnicity, Comparisons: Between Jews and Non-Jews
Abstract:

This paper is the first to compare ethnicity, religion and demographic change among Jews, Russians and Tatars in Russia proper. These three groups were chosen specifically because they represent distinctive religions, as well as greatly differing ethnic backgrounds and cultures. The demographic transition of these three very different ethnic groups was studied for a period of over one hundred years. Ample Russian demographic statistics by ethnic group provided a good basis for such analysis.
Współczesne życie religijne Żydów w Polsce
Translated Title: Contemporary religious life of Jews in Poland
Author(s): Grabski, August
Editor(s): Grabski, August; Pisarski, Maciej; Stankowski, Albert
Date: 1997
Topics: Religion, Religious Belief, Religious Observance and Practice, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Netherlands: Social Integration and Religious Identity
Author(s): Hoofd, Hetty van het
Editor(s): Grant, Lisa D.; Miller, Helena; Pomson, Alex
Date: 2011
Topics: Jewish Education, Integration, Jewish Identity, Religion, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Tsarfat : mutations de l’identité juive à l’époque modern et contemporaine
Translated Title: Tsarfat : mutations of Jewish identity in the modern and contemporary period
Editor(s): Cohen, Erik H.
Date: 2014
Topics: Jewish Identity, Jewish Culture, Jewish History, Religion, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: This book contains a collection of articles on various aspects of Jewish life in France. Its twelve articles are divided into five sections: history, culture and Jewish thought, religious life, Zionism, and reflections on the Jewish community.
The articles are the product of an international conference on French Jewry organized by the Dahan Center at Bar-Ilan University.
Specialists from France, Israel and the USA took part in the writing of this book: Gabrielle Atlan, Joëlle Allouche Benayoun, Philippe Boukara, Erik H. Cohen, Juliette Hassine, Dan Jaffe, Francine Kaufmann, Alain Michel, Simone Mrejen O'Hana, Michel Serfaty, Shmuel Trigano, and David Weinberg.
Jewishness in Postmodernity: The Case of Sweden
Author(s): Dencik, Lars
Date: 2005
Topics: Jewish Identity, Postmodernity, Religion, Jewish Community: Affiliation, Engagement and Involvement, Religious Belief, Values, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Religious Observance and Practice
Abstract: Dencik examines Sweden's Jewish community through the lens of postmodernity and concludes that the Jews of Sweden manifest their Jewish identities in a variety of ways including: a strong Jewish self awareness, increased activity in Jewish culture, granting new meanings to traditional Jewish practices, as well as many others.
Ethnic and religious questions in the 2001 UK Census
Author(s): Kosmin, Barry
Date: 1999
Topics: Censuses, Ethnicity, Religion, Demography, Main Topic: Demography and Migration
Abstract: This paper examines the national census as an important means of fostering a multicultural society and a participatory democracy. Redesigning it for this purpose can have long-term social, political and economic benefits for British society.

Encouraging minority communities to participate in the census as citizens and making it possible for them voluntarily to identify themselves in their own terms can be an important means of fostering a multicultural society. This approach can have long-term social, political and economic benefits for British society.
Religion and ethnicity: Judaism in the ethnic consciousness of contemporary Russian Jews 
Author(s): Chervyakov, Valeriy; Gitelman, Zvi; Shapiro, Vladimir
Date: 1997
Topics: Jewish History, Religion, Ethnicity, Jewish Identity, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: Jews have debated whether they are a racial, religious, ethnic or cultural group. Historically, Judaism (religion) and Jewish ethnicity have been fused. The Soviet regime suppressed traditional Jewish identities and substituted a secular, socialist Jewishness based on Yiddish which proved unpopular. Now that they are free to reconstruct Jewish life, we interviewed 1,300 Jews in three Russian cities to ascertain what they think being Jewish means. Judaism plays a very small role in their conceptions of Jewishness. To the extent that religious rituals are observed, they are manifestations of ‘symbolic ethnicity’. Many do not ‘feel’ Jewish because their culture and consciousness are largely Russian. Nevertheless, they are interested in learning more about Jewish traditions and culture. A Jewish ‘civil religion’ may emerge in Russia. Jewish identities have varied over space and time, and a uniquely Russian Jewish identity may evolve in the coming years. 
Jews and Judaism in Contemporary Europe: Religion or Ethnic Group
Author(s): Webber, Jonathan
Date: 1997
Topics: Jewish History, Religion, Ethnicity, Jewish Identity, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: The Jewish experience in Europe over the past two hundred years offers much of interest to the student of ethnicity and the sociologist of religion because of the opportunity to undertake comparative work on a single group living in a range of diverse socio‐political environments. European Jews have been treated from the outside as constituting a religion and, more recently, as an ethnic group; both these models have been internalized by Jews themselves. However, they coexist with major processes of internal change involving not only the disintegration of traditional Jewish culture and its reconstruction in highly attenuated form, but also the respective influences of the devastation of the Holocaust and of newer models deriving from Israeli perspectives on diaspora Jewish identity. Under these circumstances, ethnicity and religion as analytic categories do not easily fit the Jewish case: the proposal is made that attention to Jewish historical consciousness may be useful in advancing comparative and ethnographic studies. 
The Growth of Religious Diversity: Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Muslim Settlements
Author(s): Bluck, Robert; Gillat-Ray, Sophie; Graham, David; Singh, Gurharpal; Zavos, John
Editor(s): Catto, Rebecca; Woodhead, Linda
Date: 2012
Topics: Religion, Demography, Sociology, Main Topic: Other