HIST 405-02, The Fort Pillow Controversy, Spring 2013

Abstract

The term antisemitism was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr in order to replace anti-Judaism with a secular, scientific construct based on racial theory that went beyond religious and cultural hostility. Marr's term came from the field of philology, which grouped together 'Semitic' languages. In the early nineteenth century, anthropologists and philosophers opposed that linguistic designation with 'Aryan' languages and argued that these language groups encapsulated the spirit of the groups who used them. The opposition of Aryan and Semite, however, was itself grafted onto the older distinction between Christians and Jews and onto the stereotypes and prejudices that characterized that antipathy, which in turn were shaped by some of the myths about Jews generated in the ancient Greco-Roman world. The very word 'anti-Semitism' thus encapsulates part of the complex history that this course will examine. We will discuss, evaluate and differentiate Judeophobia in the Greek and Roman world, the anti-Judaism of Christians as they defined themselves against the Synagogue, the association of the Devil and the Jews in the Middle Ages, the lives of Jews under the crescent of Islam, the Enlightenment's 'emancipation' from prejudice that nevertheless secularized anti-Judaism in the modern period, the fusion of anti-Semitism and nationalism, Nazi racial anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and anti-Zionism and the 'new Judeophobia' in the third millennium. The course will thus survey “the longest hatred” as a means to understand the ways that anti-Semitism and racism have accommodated to changing circumstances. This will prove fertile ground for a broader understanding of how prejudice and stereotyping operates and for the consideration of strategies for disabling race thinking in the West.