Abstract: Built from nothing on the Parisian periphery in the 1950s, the neighbourhood known as Les Flanades in Sarcelles is perhaps the single largest North African Jewish urban space in France. Though heavily policed since 2000, Les Flanades had been free from violence. However, on 20 July 2014, violence erupted close to the central synagogue (known as la grande syna’) during a banned pro-Palestinian march. The violence pitted protestors and residents against one another in a schematic Israel v. Palestine frame leading to confrontations between many descendants of North African Jews and Muslims. Using that moment as a strong indicator of a broken solidarity/affinity between people of North African descent, Everett’s article traces a process of de-racialization, amongst Jews in Les Flanades, through the use of place names. North African Jewish residents use the local names of first-, second- and third-generation residents for their neighbourhood, ranging from from Bab El-Oued (a suburb of Algiers), via un village méditerranéen (a Mediterranean village), to la petite Jérusalem (little Jerusalem). Using the lens of postcolonial and racialization theory—a lens seldomly applied to France, and even less so to Jews in France—and a hybrid methodology that combines ethnography with discursive and genealogical analyses, Everett traces the unevenness of solidarity/affinity between Muslim and Jewish French citizens of North African descent and the messy production of de-racialization. This approach involves looking at shifting landscapes and changing dynamics of demography, religiosity and security and describing some tendencies that resist these changes consciously or not. Examples include the re-appropriation of Arabic para-liturgy and an encounter with a lawyer from Sarcelles who has taken a stand in prominent racialized public legal contests.
Abstract: In March 2017 Salam Shalom Barcelona started as an initiative aimed at enhancing interreligious relations and dialogue between Jews and Muslims living in the city. This initiative followed the steps of a former one that was established in Germany in 2013 called Salam Shalom. Despite Salam Shalom Barcelona’s short history, the promoted activities have shown that it can be a successful project with a high future potential. However, establishing interreligious dialogue is not an easy endeavor. It has to take into account different historical, political and social issues that impact the religious groups and communities. Therefore, this chapter aims to explain the Salam Shalom Barcelona initiative within the historical and social context of Spain, in order to enhance our understanding of its complexities and challenges. On the one hand, it presents a short introduction of the historiographical discussion regarding interreligious relations during the medieval period in Spain, considered by many historians to be exceptional and to serve as a model of culture of tolerance and convivencia. On the other, the chapter describes the main characteristics of the Jewish and Muslim communities in Barcelona. Broadly speaking, the chapter aims to show the importance of analysing and identifying the complexities, difficulties and challenges of the Muslim-Jewish dialogue in the current Catalan context, as well as contributing to future perspectives of this dialogue.
Abstract: Cyprus is not only the island of Aphrodite and love, it is also a meeting place for many people and cultures. There is evidence of a Jewish presence in Cyprus since the Hellenistic period dating back to the third century BCE, when there were trade relations established between Cyprus and the Land of Israel. The Jews had close relationships with many of the other religious groups on the island and were perceived favourably by the first Muslims who arrived here in seventh century CE. This chapter endeavours to present Jewish-Muslim relations, emphasising the past three centuries, including Ottoman and British rule, to the present day. Jews as adherents of a religion revealed by God, possessed a scripture, and were given a better status than those who were non-monotheistic given by Muslim authorities. Conversely, Jews suffered greatly after World War II when they traveled to Palestine via Cyprus, as it became a safe haven, where Jews, aided by Muslim and Christians were kept in refugee camps before being transported to Israel. This study examines historical conditions that led to friendship and intercultural understanding, which has been the foundation of positive modern coexistence, trade, and exchanges of ideas in the present day. In addition, it answers the following questions: Were Jews able to keep their religion and be treated equally? How did Ottoman Muslims treat the Jews and how do Turkish Cypriots, an important population group on the island today treat Jews? How do cultural and religious differences influence interethnic, intercultural and interreligious relations today?
Abstract: At the turn of the millennium, Middle Eastern and Muslim Germans had rather unexpectedly become central to the country's Holocaust memory culture—not as welcome participants, but as targets for re-education and reform. Since then, Turkish- and Arab-Germans have been considered as the prime obstacles to German national reconciliation with its Nazi past, a status shared to a lesser degree by Germans from the formerly socialist East Germany. It is for this reason that the German government, German NGOs, and Muslim minority groups have begun to design Holocaust education and anti-Semitism prevention programs specifically tailored for Muslim immigrants and refugees, so that they, too, can learn the lessons of the Holocaust and embrace Germany's most important postwar democratic political values.
Based on ethnographic research conducted over a decade, Subcontractors of Guilt explores when, how, and why Muslim Germans have moved to the center of Holocaust memory discussions. Esra Özyürek argues that German society "subcontracts" guilt of the Holocaust to new minority immigrant arrivals, with the false promise of this process leading to inclusion into the German social contract and equality with other members of postwar German society. By focusing on the recently formed but already sizable sector of Muslim-only anti-Semitism and Holocaust education programs, this book explores the paradoxes of postwar German national identity.
Abstract: Muslim–Jewish relations have a long and complex history. However, notions that all Jews and Muslims are eternal enemies are proven wrong both historically and by today’s survey data. A comprehensive review of the available survey data from the last two decades provides a glimpse into the views of Muslims and Jews of each other in countries where both communities are a minority. It is based on surveys from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S., including more than 91,000 respondents, comprising almost 27,000 Muslims and, in additional surveys, more than 52,000 Jewish respondents. Many Muslims and Jews acknowledge that the other community suffers from discrimination, albeit to varying degrees. Jews often see Islam and Muslim extremists as a threat to Jews, but most Jews, more than society in general, seem to distinguish between Muslim extremists and Muslims in general. Antisemitic attitudes are significantly higher among Muslims than among the general population in all surveys, even though the majority of Muslims in most European countries and in the United States do not exhibit antisemitic attitudes. The differences in anti-Jewish attitudes between Muslims and non-Muslims do not disappear when controlling for sociodemographic factors.
Abstract: This book focuses on the development of bilateral Jewish-Muslim relations in London and Amsterdam since the late-1980s. It offers a comparative analysis that considers both similarities and differences, drawing on historical, social scientific, and religious studies perspectives. The authors address how Jewish-Muslim relations are related to the historical and contemporary context in which they are embedded, the social identity strategies Jews and Muslims and their institutions employ, and their perceived mutual positions in terms of identity and power. The first section reflects on the history and current profile of Jewish and Muslim communities in London and Amsterdam and the development of relations between Jews andMuslims in both cities. The second section engages with sources of conflict and cooperation. Four specific areas that cause tension are explored: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; antisemitism and Islamophobia; attacks by extremists; and the commemoration of wars and genocides. In addition to ‘trigger events’, what stands out is the influence of historical factors, public opinion, the ‘mainstream’ Christian churches and the media, along with the role of government. The volume will be of interest to scholars from fields including religious studies, interfaith studies, Jewish studies, Islamic studies, urban studies, European studies, and social sciences as well as members of the communities concerned, other religious communities, journalists, politicians, and teachers who are interested in Jewish-Muslim relations.
Abstract: Während seiner zweieinhalbjährigen Laufzeit sammelte das Dialogprojekt des Zentralrats der Juden in Deutschland „Schalom Aleikum“ Stimmen aus der deutschen Gesellschaft zum jüdisch-muslimischen Dialog. Jedes Jahr fanden, in Zusammenarbeit mit forsa. Gesellschaft für Sozialforschung und statistische Analysen mbH, bundesweite Online-Umfragen statt. Die Ergebnisse werden nun als Buch präsentiert. Es sind Zahlen und Statistiken, die nachdenklich stimmen – manche optimistisch, manche ambivalent, einige pessimistisch. Gleichzeitig sollen sie als essenzieller Impulsgeber für Politik und Gesellschaft fungieren.
„Ich hoffe, dass das Buch hilft, ein realitätstreues Bild von der deutschen Gesellschaft im Hier und Jetzt zu erhalten – in all seinen positiven, wie auch negativen Facetten. Meine Hoffnung ist auch, dass in Zukunft die Menschen offen, respektvoll und voller Neugierde miteinander umgehen und aufeinander zugehen.“ Josef Schuster, Präsident des Zentralrats der Juden in Deutschland
Abstract: Michael Whine presents an overview of the participation of European Muslim organisations in Holocaust commemorations. The Holocaust is viewed by many Muslims, particularly Arabs, as a European tragedy which led to negative implications and suffering in the Arab world through the creation of the State of Israel. The Holocaust is therefore often related to the Nakba. Whine’s analysis focuses on Muslims’ participation in Holocaust commemoration on the Holocaust Memorial Day, local initiatives in schools and Jewish-Muslim dialogue and the reaction of Muslim students to Holocaust education in school. Whine acknowledges that Muslims played only a minor part as victims or perpetrators during the Holocaust, but he argues that the rejection of Holocaust commemoration as a form of Zionist propaganda adopts Islamist and Arab nationalist antisemitism. Whine presents a case study of the Muslim Council of Britain which illustrates this kind of reaction to the Holocaust Memorial Day. However, he discusses other smaller organisations, individual Muslims and approaches to education in the UK, France, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands in order to provide examples of a more constructive approach. Whine argues that Holocaust commemoration has become a defining aspect of European history and identity.
Abstract: For more than a decade, there has been a discussion about the scope and character of a “Muslim antisemitism” in Europe, spurred on by anti-Jewish harassment and terrorist attacks by Muslims in some European countries.* However, there are only a few major studies on the attitudes of Muslims towards Jews in Europe, while larger studies on the attitude of Jews towards Muslims have so far been missing completely. Based on the data from the 2017 survey, “Attitudes towards Jews and Muslims in Norway. Population Survey and Minority Study” (CHM), it is now possible to investigate how Jews and Muslims in Norway perceive each other, whether they see opportunities for cooperation as minorities and have common experiences of discrimination, what their positioning in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks like, and whether it influences their mutual perception. While the focus is on the relationship between Muslims and Jews, in some cases the results for the general Norwegian population are included as a tertium comparationis, since Jews and Muslims form part of Norwegian society.
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: 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: This thesis examines representations of Jewish-Muslim relations in contemporary French newspaper discourse, literary writing, and interreligious dialogue initiatives. Specifically, it analyses the extent to which a dominant discourse of inherently tense binary Jewish-Muslim relations exists and how individual Jewish and Muslim writers and interreligious dialogue activists navigate this difficult socio-political terrain. While I conceptualize some aspects of literary writing and interreligious dialogue as counter-narratives, this thesis does not simply seek to counterbalance the dominant narrative of polarization found in the media, but to demonstrate, first, how this narrative constructs public Jewish and Muslim identities and shapes the terrain on which interactions between Jews and Muslims occur. My thesis reveals that Jewish and Muslim writers and interreligious activists are deeply invested in challenging the oppositional model of Jewish-Muslim relations. However, my research also suggests that their level of success depends in large part on their ability to navigate normative understandings of Jewishness and Muslimness that are often overdetermined by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First, this thesis traces how Jewish-Muslim relations are defined and constructed in the media, focusing on the national dailies Le Monde and Le Figaro due to their considerable agenda-setting and framing power as elite and prestigious sites of journalistic expression. Subsequently, I consider how a set of contemporary novelists, Emilie Frèche, Thierry Cohen, and Nadia Hathroubi-Safsaf, formulate their visions of intergroup relations within this broader context. The novelists in this project have been included in the extent to which their works can be read asâand often are explicitly stated by these authors to beâa set of political interventions into the contemporary and highly politicized category of Jewish-Muslim relations. Finally, I examine how Jewish and Muslim activists promote interreligious dialogue and the challenges they face in doing so within a French republican framework that privileges the non-differentiation of ethnoreligious specificities. I conclude that the initiatives most likely to effectively challenge the dominant model of polarized Jewish-Muslim relations in contemporary France are those that de-emphasize Jewishness and Muslimness as separate and mutually exclusive categories, and instead emphasize hybrid identities and shared histories, while adopting an embodied, differentiated approach to solidarity.
Abstract: What is the nature of interactions between Jews and Muslims in contemporary Dubai, Berlin, and Warsaw? The purpose of the three presented case studies is to evaluate the state of affairs and identify newly emerging trends and patterns in the given trans-urban context. The methodology is based on qualitative anthropological research, emphasising an emic perspective that centralises respondents’ own lived experiences and worldviews. The main research’s findings made evident that interactions between Muslims and Jews in each examined location are, to various extents, acknowledged, and in some cases, also embody a formative part of public discourses. Perhaps the most visible manifestations of these relations are represented by the ambitious interfaith projects that were recently established in each geographical area in focus. The Abrahamic Family House (UEA), The House of One (GE), and The Community of Conscience (PL) reveal the aspirations of multi-faith religious leaders to overcome polarising dichotomies and search for common ground. One of the conclusive outcomes of the study is a somewhat diminishing impact of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict on the Jewish–Muslim relations; however, the extent differs in each destination in focus. Finally, an unpredicted observation can be made. A surfacing inclination towards embracing a joint Muslim–Jewish Middle Eastern identity was perceived
Abstract: This thesis focuses on young Christians’, Jews’ and Muslims’ experiences of interfaith work in the UK and what impact(s) being involved in interfaith might have on their religious, social, ethical and political identities. It is situated in a growing academic and policy interest in interfaith work as a means to build cohesive communities, mitigate tension and conflicts, and encourage active citizenship. It also engages with still under-explored questions around how young people active in interfaith work are affected by this activism. The aim is not only to understand how and why young people from different religions are involved in interfaith work, but also the impact being involved in interfaith work might have on young people’s identities and sense of belonging. Focusing on the biographical accounts of young Christians, Jews and Muslims involved in three different interfaith organisations in UK, the thesis explores how the young people have become interested in interfaith work; the relationships, messages and contexts that have been important in forging this interest and activism; what interfaith work means to them socially, theologically, ethically and politically; and the challenges they have experienced with this form of faith-based engagement. Drawing on Kate Tilleczek’s ‘complex cultural nesting approach’, this thesis attends to the young people’s complex personal experiences of interfaith work and the different social actors, contexts and frameworks that have been important in forming this interest. The thesis shows that, to understand young people’s interfaith work, we need a multidimensional approach that considers social and theological dimensions in young people’s lives; look at how interfaith work is a means to fulfil social and political goals, but also forms of theological commitment; and explore how challenges facing interfaith work inform young people’s experiences in different ways, particularly theological, social and political tension in relation to interfaith space, religious congregations and British society at large.
Abstract: This article analyzes the attitudes of 25 refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, now living in Germany, toward Jews, the Holocaust, Israel, and the Middle East conflict. It reveals both anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments among many of the respondents, as well as a lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, and a wide range of attitudes between individual participants. Some of the factors influencing attitudes include everyday knowledge in the countries of origin, Arab nationalism, as well as specific religious and ethnic identities. The findings are discussed in relation to other recent studies, and against the backdrop of German media discourse, current debates about an “imported” antisemitism among refugees and migrants, and the relationship between experiences of racial discrimination and anti-Jewish attitudes.
Abstract: This paper examines the discourse around anti-Semitism in Germany since 2000. The discourse makes use of the figure of the Jew for national security purposes (i.e. via the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the trope of the “dangerous Muslim”) and the politics of national identity. The article introduces the concept of the “War on Anti-Semitism”, an assemblage of policies about national belonging and security that are propelled primarily by white racial anxieties. While the War on Terror is fought against the Muslim Other, or the War on Drugs is fought against predominantly Latinx and Black communities, the War on Anti-Semitism is ostensibly fought on behalf of the racialized Jewish Other. The War on Anti-Semitism serves as a pretext justifying Germany's internal and external security measures by providing a logic for the management of non-white migration in an ethnically diverse yet white supremacist Europe.
In 2000, a new citizenship law fundamentally changed the architecture of belonging and im/migration by replacing the old Wilhelminian jus sanguinis (principle of blood) with a jus soli (principle of residency). In the wake of these changes and the resulting racial anxiety about Germanness, state sponsored civil-society educational programs to fight anti-Semitism emerged, targeting predominantly Muslim non-/citizens. These education programs were developed alongside international debates around the War on Terror and what came to be called “Israel-oriented anti-Semitism” in Germany (more commonly known as “Muslim anti-Semitism”).
Triangulated through the enduring legacy of colonial racialization, the Jew and the Muslim are con/figured as enemies in socio-political German discourses. This analysis of the War on Anti-Semitism has serious implications for our understanding of “New Europe”. By focusing on the figure of the Jew and the Muslim, the implications of this work transcend national borders and stress the important connection between fantasy, power, and racialization in Germany and beyond.
Abstract: In this paper I critically examine the conflation of Turk with Muslim, explore the Turkish experience of Nazism, and examine Turkey's relation to the darkest era of German history. Whereas many assume that Turks in Germany cannot share in the Jewish past, and that for them the genocide of the Jews is merely a borrowed memory, I show how intertwined the history of Turkey and Germany, Turkish and German anti-Semitism, and Turks and Jews are. Bringing together the histories of individual Turkish citizens who were Jewish or Dönme (descendants of Jews) in Nazi Berlin with the history of Jews in Turkey, I argue the categories “Turkish” and “Jewish” were converging identities in the Third Reich. Untangling them was a matter of life and death. I compare the fates of three neighbors in Berlin: Isaak Behar, a Turkish Jew stripped of his citizenship by his own government and condemned to Auschwitz; Fazli Taylan, a Turkish citizen and Dönme, whom the Turkish government exerted great efforts to save; and Eric Auerbach, a German Jew granted refuge in Turkey. I ask what is at stake for Germany and Turkey in remembering the narrative of the very few German Jews saved by Turkey, but in forgetting the fates of the far more numerous Turkish Jews in Nazi-era Berlin. I conclude with a discussion of the political effects today of occluding Turkish Jewishness by failing to remember the relationship between the first Turkish migration to Germany and the Shoah.
