Abstract: Around 2011 Israeli (Jewish) immigration to Germany became a recurring subject in public discourse. Reflecting ideological investments, the migration was reported with curiosity. Israeli migrants turned into Jews in German imagination, contradicting their self-definition of being primarily Israelis. As Jews they were welcome, but within limits. If the ‘guests’ expressed too much agency and challenged the status quo of German/Jewish and more so Jewish/Muslim and Israeli/Palestinian relations, things could become complicated. While Palestinian issues are met with increasing support across the social, media, and political spheres, Palestinians are not that welcome as (Muslim) migrants. They are suspected of importing a ‘new antisemitism.’ This paper seeks to unravel the conflicting attitudes towards the interlinked categories Israelis/Jews and Muslims/Palestinians, by focussing on the issue of the politics of hospitality. These reveal how agentic presences of those categorised as others destabilise the assumed ethnic, and ethno-religious boundaries of the German, nominally Christian, majority.
Abstract: Religious minorities have always been at the centre of the German nation-state’s self-understanding, as it came to define itself vis a vis, and often against, them. Historically, this can be seen specifically in the Jewish experience, and today reverberates in the experience of Muslims grappling with a position of alterity in German society. We will move beyond the scholarship on these two religious minority groups to that of these two religious minority groups—that is the intellectual milieu of German Jews and German Muslims. Both have confronted the insider-outsider status of religious minorities in Germany, while themselves occupying—and thinking from—this position of alterity. As Jewish intellectuals a century prior, Muslim intellectuals are confronting the (im)possibility of fully belonging to the society at hand. In so doing, they are, at times inadvertently, coming into conversation with Jewish intellectuals past on ideas surrounding the practice of religion, pluralism, minority-state relations, and social ethics.
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.
Abstract: On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, unleashing the fi rst Gulf crisis. When, by January, the United Nations’ economic sanctions had failed to force Iraqi withdrawal, the United States and a thirty-four nation coalition invaded. Although Israel did not participate, this brief war, over by February 28, could not help but intersect with the ongoing Arab-Israeli confl ict. Not only did the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, choose to drop missiles on Tel Aviv, touching off a secondary crisis over potential Israeli involvement, but calls to resolve the Palestinian question as part of a regional settlement circulated widely. For Muslims and Jews watching developments from afar, the First Gulf War thus became more than a conflict over Kuwaiti independence, oil rights or western imperialism. Rather it became a barometer of Muslim-Jewish relations around the world.
Abstract: In this paper, the question of importance of Judeo--Spanish as the means for maintaining ethnic identity among the Sephardim in the territories of former Yugoslavia is investigated through an analysis of articles dedicated to the topic published in El amigo del puevlo (a Judeo-Spanish periodical which first was published in Serbia, and then in Bulgaria), fragments from the books by Angel Pulido, Los israelitas espanoles y el idioma castellano (Madrid 1904) and Espanoles sin patria y la raza sefardi (Madrid 1905),as well as unpublished documents from the Archive of Serbia and the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.The present analysis suggests that a specific language ideology(negative attitudes towards the minority language in question) has played a crucial role in language shift in favor of the majority languages in the region (which has not jeopardized the concept of ethnic identity and membership), thus supporting findings by other authors(e.g., Myhill 2004, Weis 2000) that the maintenance of ethnic identity among Jews over the centuries has often been strengthened bycultural (religious, traditional, literary, etc.) rather than linguistic criteria. From the theoretical standpoint, this research clearly supports the view that the construction of ethnicity and ethnic identity should be viewed as a complex process in which different factors (language being only one of them) have different values and saliency at different points in time (e.g., see Fishman 1989; 1999)
Abstract: In current political developments in Europe and the USA, it is striking that a strengthening of nationalism goes hand in hand with certain gender stereotypes, and often this discourse is also linked to moments of antisemitism. Using the example of the Austrian Freedom Party, this chapter analyses this mutual interplay of ideologies and elaborates in particular on the question of how and to what extent an antisemitism that is not expressed openly, can latently be effective in nationalism and antifeminism. Especially against the background of the taboo of manifest and racist antisemitism in the Western, post-national-socialist political public sphere in Germany and Austria, an analysis of this phenomenon is highly relevant. I call this phenomenon the intersectionality of ideologies. It can provide insight into whether antisemitism, as sometimes pretended, has actually been overcome, or whether it is not in fact effective within other ideologies, such as nationalism or antifeminism. The chapter will therefore focus on an analysis of the similarities of antisemitic and antifeminist discourses in the Austrian Freedom Party and their contribution to the strengthening of a nationalist collective.
