Abstract: In this contribution, Topolski argues that the erasure and denial of Europe’s race–religion constellation can help us understand how it has been possible to resurrect the divisive, exclusionary and problematic myth of a ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition in Europe. While this term can be, and has been, used in diverse and contradictory ways in the past few decades, Topolski is most interested in how it masks Islamophobia. To do this, she turns to Europe’s denied race–religion constellation. She contends that we cannot understand European racism, past or present, without making the race–religion constellation visible, and that its invisibility today is not accidental. Next, Topolski wants to show how the current resurrection of the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ serves to mask and conceal the race–religion constellation. The focus is thus on the exclusion of religions that have not assimilated to the accepted secularized norms of white Christianity, particularly its Aryan/Protestant form, and how this exclusion is connected to the race–religion constellation. In the final part, Topolski explains how the latter might serve the collapsing European project, as well as struggling nation-states, as a scapegoat mechanism to blame Europe’s Others for problems Europe has itself created. This leads to their further exclusion and a lack of tolerance in terms of practice and rituals (which might be connected). For these reasons, Topolski argues we need to reject the use of the term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ and make visible the hidden race–religion constellation.
Abstract: In this contribution, I examine the Catholic political practice of “intercessions” (shtadlanut) as a means to control and manage relations between state power and Jewish communities by means of a privileged elite. While governmental techniques or mechanisms of minority management are only part of a broader question of majority–minority power relations, the theological-political roots of such “management” strategies are often overlooked because the problem is assumed to be secular. In my analysis of shtadlanut, I show how Jewish communities were internally divided between “good” and “bad”, “managed” by the ruling powers, and homogenized. It is precisely this type of enforced collaboration with power, in combination with reduced agency and de-politicization, that I claim goes beyond the “Jewish Question”. Rather, we must turn our gaze on Europe and consider how, and why, it continues to make 'others' into problems. By doing so, we can challenge the frame of the contemporary "Muslim Question".
