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Anti-Judaism
- The Western Tradition
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
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Anti-Judaism
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Editor reviews
While Judaism is the central progenitor of the great Western religions, how central has it remained to Christian, Muslim, and even pagan thought? According to University of Chicago Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought, David Nirenberg, Judaism is so central that western thought has been driven in part by a rigorous attempt to deny it.
Anti-Judaism, Nirenberg argues, has been a major aim and rhetorical tactic not only in Western religious thinking, but also in the development of secular philosophy from ancient times to modernity. In a scholarly and erudite style, prolific voice actor Robert Blumenfeld gives color to the fascinating deployment of anti-Judaism from Ancient Greeks and Romans to the Protestant Reformers and continuing as the hallmark of the Third Reich.
Summary
A powerful history that shows anti-Judaism to be a central way of thinking in the Western tradition.
This incisive history upends the complacency that confines anti-Judaism to the ideological extremes in the Western tradition. With deep learning and elegance, David Nirenberg shows how foundational anti-Judaism is to the history of the West. Questions of how we are Jewish and, more critically, how and why we are not have been churning within the Western imagination throughout its history. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans; Christians and Muslims of every period; even the secularists of modernity have used Judaism in constructing their visions of the world. The thrust of this tradition construes Judaism as an opposition, a danger often from within, to be criticized, attacked, and eliminated. The intersections of these ideas with the world of power - the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, the German Holocaust - are well known. The ways of thought underlying these tragedies can be found at the very foundation of Western history.
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What listeners say about Anti-Judaism
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- CMN
- 28-06-23
Very dense, very complex, very important history
This book has taken me quite a long time to get through as it is a lot to process and absorb, however as anti-Semitism is becoming more open once again I think it's useful to have a grasp of the scope, the depth and the way anti-Semitism has been used through out history as a kind of comparison by different groups, with so many taking Judaism as the thing they are not, even when the version of Judaism they're using has nothing to do with actual Judaic beliefs or practices.
This book may not tell you how to defeat anti-Semitism, but I think understanding how old it is, and the ways in which it is used will help you see it, recognise it for what it is and reject it.
The narrator seems to be a bit of a sticking point for other reviews, but I didn't mind it. It is a bit flat but I listen to everything at 1.35x speed so I can pay attention to it, so maybe it seemed less flat or awkward that way. Plus this is a dense and thorough history of something very unpleasant, I think if the presentation was much more emotional and animated it would become tiring to get though.
I will say that one thing I found jarring is they seem to have done a bunch of re-recordings, probably for lines that didn't record well the first time, but they don't fit into the narration very well - they're much louder than the rest of the recording and often startled me with how it goes from the usual narration to that. I think the listen would be much easier if this could be fixed.
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