1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:06,870 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on Jews, Liberalism, 2 00:00:06,870 --> 00:00:14,610 anti-Semitism, A Global History, a collection edited by Abigail Green and Simon Levy. 3 00:00:14,610 --> 00:00:19,410 My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities. 4 00:00:19,410 --> 00:00:25,320 It's a great pleasure to introduce the penultimate book at lunchtime of this academic year book at lunch time. 5 00:00:25,320 --> 00:00:34,830 As regulars will know, is Torture's flagship event series taking the form of a fortnightly bite sized book discussion with a range of commentators? 6 00:00:34,830 --> 00:00:42,750 Please do take a look at our website, a newsletter for further details and also for the full programme next term, which we have already. 7 00:00:42,750 --> 00:00:48,510 I'm delighted and for today to welcome Professor Green and Professor Salom to speak about their book. 8 00:00:48,510 --> 00:00:56,610 Also on the panel, Professor Adam Sutcliffe and Dr. Kay Ireton, Jews, Liberalism, anti-Semitism. 9 00:00:56,610 --> 00:01:05,070 A Global History explores how the emancipatory promise of liberalism, both shattered and structured by its exclusionary qualities, 10 00:01:05,070 --> 00:01:13,830 shaped the fate of Jews in many parts of the world during the age of Empire, challenging the European focus of much historiography in this field. 11 00:01:13,830 --> 00:01:18,750 This volume, as its title suggests, takes a determinedly global approach. 12 00:01:18,750 --> 00:01:29,010 It engages with accounts of recent historical work exploring issues of race discrimination and hybrid identity in colonial and post-colonial settings, 13 00:01:29,010 --> 00:01:33,960 and in so doing, investigates how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender, 14 00:01:33,960 --> 00:01:40,440 religion and race all functioned differently in different European Jewish heartlands in the 15 00:01:40,440 --> 00:01:47,550 Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman Empire and in the North American Atlantic world. 16 00:01:47,550 --> 00:01:52,890 I want to start by introducing the editors first and then the other members of our panel. 17 00:01:52,890 --> 00:01:58,470 So first, Professor Abigail Green. I'll wait for her to come on screen. 18 00:01:58,470 --> 00:02:04,950 So, Abigail, welcome. Abigail is professor of modern European History at Prisoners College here in Oxford. 19 00:02:04,950 --> 00:02:11,490 Her research, her recent work focuses on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. 20 00:02:11,490 --> 00:02:15,210 She's currently completing a three year Lehmkuhl Senior Research Fellowship, 21 00:02:15,210 --> 00:02:24,090 working on a new book tentatively entitled Children of 1848 Liberalism of the Jews From Revelations to Human Rights. 22 00:02:24,090 --> 00:02:28,500 It was tentatively titled that about a week ago. I don't know whether it's changed since then. 23 00:02:28,500 --> 00:02:32,610 I'm sure she'll tell us. Working in partnership with colleagues in the heritage sector, 24 00:02:32,610 --> 00:02:40,710 she's also a leading major for leading a major four year HLC funded and supported project on Jewish country houses. 25 00:02:40,710 --> 00:02:47,190 As I said, welcome, Abigail. Also editing this book is Professor Simon Levy Salamah. 26 00:02:47,190 --> 00:02:54,480 Again, I'll wait until I see my associate professor of modern history at the University of Venice in Italy. 27 00:02:54,480 --> 00:03:01,980 His fields of interest include the history of ideas, historiography and culture in Europe between the 19th and the 20th century is particular. 28 00:03:01,980 --> 00:03:07,590 Focus is nationalism's and fascism in the history of the Jews and of anti-Semitism. 29 00:03:07,590 --> 00:03:15,480 Amongst his many publications, there is most recently the Italian executioners, the genocide of Jews in Islam. 30 00:03:15,480 --> 00:03:22,380 These then are editors. The other two members of today's panel are Professor Adam Sutcliffe's. 31 00:03:22,380 --> 00:03:26,250 I'll wait until Adam arrives. Hello, Adam. 32 00:03:26,250 --> 00:03:32,340 Professor of European History and co-director of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King's College, London, 33 00:03:32,340 --> 00:03:37,260 focussing on the intellectual history of Western Europe between approximately 60 and 50 in 1950, 34 00:03:37,260 --> 00:03:44,160 and on the history of Jews due to Deism and Jewish non Jewish relations in Europe from 16 to the present. 35 00:03:44,160 --> 00:03:54,450 Professor Sutcliffe's. Many publications include the wide ranging study entitled What Adieus for History, Peoplehood and Purpose. 36 00:03:54,450 --> 00:04:00,880 And finally, but not least, Dr Kay Hirota Kay. 37 00:04:00,880 --> 00:04:10,810 Hello, assistant professor and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at his university in Denmark's case for research, 38 00:04:10,810 --> 00:04:15,040 lies at the intersection of political philosophy and intellectual history. 39 00:04:15,040 --> 00:04:18,790 This particular focus is on theories of freedom and modern political thought. 40 00:04:18,790 --> 00:04:28,520 And his book, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin Freedom, Politics and Humanity, will be published by Princeton University Press this coming autumn. 41 00:04:28,520 --> 00:04:33,800 So as you see, we have quite the panel today and we'll start the discussion with a brief reading 42 00:04:33,800 --> 00:04:38,690 by Abigail from the book afterwards our commentators will present their thoughts. 43 00:04:38,690 --> 00:04:45,920 Coming at it from their particular disciplines will then give Professor Shulem the chance to respond to some of the points raised before 44 00:04:45,920 --> 00:04:54,950 entering into what promises to be a really interesting collective discussion during which would also address questions from the audience. 45 00:04:54,950 --> 00:05:00,740 So please do put them in the Q&A box, ideally run on the track as we go along. 46 00:05:00,740 --> 00:05:07,850 But that's enough intro for me. So for now, I'll hand over to Abigail to get things going for real and disappear from your screens. 47 00:05:07,850 --> 00:05:16,970 Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, so I'm going to start things off by reading from the book. 48 00:05:16,970 --> 00:05:23,930 So it's not quite the opening, but very near the opening page to, in fact, 49 00:05:23,930 --> 00:05:27,890 explaining how the devastation that was the Holocaust could have emerged from the 50 00:05:27,890 --> 00:05:33,920 heart of modern European civilisation remains a central problem in Jewish history. 51 00:05:33,920 --> 00:05:40,310 And yet for the historical profession writ large, the frame of reference has shifted. 52 00:05:40,310 --> 00:05:46,580 This book represents both a response to this development and an attempt to move beyond it. 53 00:05:46,580 --> 00:05:53,240 We seek to reimagine a field shaped by European experiences and paradigms in the light 54 00:05:53,240 --> 00:05:59,300 of a relatively recent historiographical moment that has quotes provincials Europe 55 00:05:59,300 --> 00:06:06,050 and begun to explore issues of race discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial 56 00:06:06,050 --> 00:06:12,500 and post-colonial settings without taking much account of Jews or the Holocaust. 57 00:06:12,500 --> 00:06:19,280 In so doing, we aim to integrate some of the established preoccupations of Jewish historiography, 58 00:06:19,280 --> 00:06:25,430 which have traditionally been studied in national, local and primarily European contexts. 59 00:06:25,430 --> 00:06:35,720 With the new perspectives opened up by transnational history and the global and imperial time, the time is ripe for such a project. 60 00:06:35,720 --> 00:06:42,770 The relationship between Jews, liberalism and anti-Semitism is a staple of modern Jewish history. 61 00:06:42,770 --> 00:06:52,370 Peter Pulser first attempted to sketch the contours of this field in a properly historical manner when he argued in nineteen sixty four that, 62 00:06:52,370 --> 00:06:58,280 quote, The dominant ideology of this period, as we have seen, was liberalism. 63 00:06:58,280 --> 00:07:07,970 A study of the theoretical content of anti-Semitism will show us that it represented in the first place a reaction against this ideology. 64 00:07:07,970 --> 00:07:15,860 Then Imposer took a similar line, arguing that the place of Jews in modern German history was shaped above all by 65 00:07:15,860 --> 00:07:22,770 the conflict between liberalism and nationalism as fundamentally opposing forces. 66 00:07:22,770 --> 00:07:29,520 As products of the German Jewish symbiosis who fled their respective hometowns when the Nazis came to power, 67 00:07:29,520 --> 00:07:40,350 Pulser and Mozza believe that liberalism with which they identified and nationalism which had persecuted them, were fundamentally incompatible. 68 00:07:40,350 --> 00:07:46,080 This view reflected an understanding that nationalism was itself an ideology, 69 00:07:46,080 --> 00:07:52,830 not just a flexible political language that could sit within different ideological currents, 70 00:07:52,830 --> 00:07:57,780 most powerfully articulated in Hannah Arendt famous study of totalitarianism. 71 00:07:57,780 --> 00:08:04,170 It was both a response to the Holocaust and a product of the Cold War movement. 72 00:08:04,170 --> 00:08:12,310 30 years after Pulsers pioneering study, two landmark volumes redefines modern Jewish history for a generation. 73 00:08:12,310 --> 00:08:18,910 The contributions to assimilation and community and paths of emancipation 74 00:08:18,910 --> 00:08:23,920 represent the collective achievement of a new wave of revisionist historians, 75 00:08:23,920 --> 00:08:31,300 these volumes have stood the test of time, but they do not speak to the historical sensibilities of the twenty first century. 76 00:08:31,300 --> 00:08:36,820 Our task is to reconnect to the concerns of that historiographical generation and 77 00:08:36,820 --> 00:08:42,970 the pioneers that preceded it with those of our globalised and fragmented world. 78 00:08:42,970 --> 00:08:57,060 So I'm not going to pass over to Kay. OK, thanks, Abigail, and thanks also to the sports team for inviting me to this panel. 79 00:08:57,060 --> 00:09:01,140 I'm not a specialist on Jewish history. I am a political theorist. 80 00:09:01,140 --> 00:09:08,220 So what I'm going to do is to tell how this volume might appear to people with my disciplinary background. 81 00:09:08,220 --> 00:09:20,270 That is, those of us who are especially interested in the liberalism, part of the complicated story of Jews, liberalism and anti-Semitism. 82 00:09:20,270 --> 00:09:25,790 The study of liberalism has been a thriving area of research in recent years. 83 00:09:25,790 --> 00:09:30,470 Oxford can claim some credit for it, thanks largely to Professor Michael Freeden, 84 00:09:30,470 --> 00:09:37,520 who has done more than anybody else to establish the study of political ideologies as an academic discipline. 85 00:09:37,520 --> 00:09:45,530 His pioneering effort has been followed by a number of recent studies, many of which are discussed in this book. 86 00:09:45,530 --> 00:09:54,990 As I've given some on the right in the introductory chapter, the rapidly growing literature on liberalism tends to ignore Jewish contributions. 87 00:09:54,990 --> 00:09:58,280 Of course, individual Jewish figures are discussed, 88 00:09:58,280 --> 00:10:06,350 but their Jewishness is usually dismissed as irrelevant as a negligible piece of biographical information. 89 00:10:06,350 --> 00:10:16,070 In fact, if Jewish people appear collectively at all in the mainstream literature on liberalism, they typically do so in one of the two ways. 90 00:10:16,070 --> 00:10:22,460 First, they sometimes appear as beneficiaries of liberal reforms on this view. 91 00:10:22,460 --> 00:10:28,850 Jews enjoy the fruits of liberalism without doing much to contribute to its development. 92 00:10:28,850 --> 00:10:36,470 Second, do you sometimes appear because they are supposed to have posed a challenge to liberals here? 93 00:10:36,470 --> 00:10:41,570 Jews are understood in religious terms and the question that liberals faced was 94 00:10:41,570 --> 00:10:46,580 whether this religious minority could be accommodated in a liberal polity. 95 00:10:46,580 --> 00:10:51,830 In both cases, the liberal conversation about citizenship, toleration, equality, 96 00:10:51,830 --> 00:11:00,270 and the song is alleged to have happened independently of Jewish life. 97 00:11:00,270 --> 00:11:06,180 I've given Somalis by the policy, the powerful challenge to the supposed security facility. 98 00:11:06,180 --> 00:11:14,370 It discusses various roles that it is actively played in the development of liberalism from its earliest days to the present. 99 00:11:14,370 --> 00:11:17,880 I cannot give a summary of the rich and varied stories told in a book, 100 00:11:17,880 --> 00:11:28,530 partly because Jewish liberals have often vigorously disagreed with each other, but also because the book covers a very large geographical area. 101 00:11:28,530 --> 00:11:33,300 The scope of the attack is indeed a little overwhelming as readers are presented 102 00:11:33,300 --> 00:11:38,100 with histories of Jewish communities from Istanbul and OHAN to Vienna, 103 00:11:38,100 --> 00:11:41,040 Milan, Cincinnati and Jamaica. 104 00:11:41,040 --> 00:11:50,790 But if the book at such induces a sense of disorientation, that is entirely appropriate because one of its goals is precisely to broaden, 105 00:11:50,790 --> 00:11:58,380 diversify and globalised our understanding of both liberalism and the Jewish history as our togetherness more nicely put it. 106 00:11:58,380 --> 00:12:05,090 The book aims to provincials Europe in a key. 107 00:12:05,090 --> 00:12:14,510 One important feature of the book I want to highlight is that it needs appraises nor condemns liberalism in a simplistic way. 108 00:12:14,510 --> 00:12:19,340 Unsurprisingly, liberalism is sometimes discussed in a positive light. 109 00:12:19,340 --> 00:12:27,320 In Chapter 11, for example, are discusses how several distinctly Jewish communities creatively appropriated the liberal 110 00:12:27,320 --> 00:12:34,130 principles of the rule of law to fight the notorious blood libel accusations in Damascus in 1840. 111 00:12:34,130 --> 00:12:40,190 But sometimes liberalism is discussed from a more critical angle, for example, 112 00:12:40,190 --> 00:12:50,400 similar slum's chapter considers how the liberal critique of dictatorial power inadvertently contributed to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. 113 00:12:50,400 --> 00:12:57,530 Jews active roles in the development of liberalism are similarly discussed in an normatively complicated manner. 114 00:12:57,530 --> 00:12:58,640 Simply put, 115 00:12:58,640 --> 00:13:08,270 Jews rules are complicated because liberalism itself is known to be complicated if Jews are played key roles in some of its crowning achievement. 116 00:13:08,270 --> 00:13:14,660 Some of the crowning achievement of liberalism, they also played important roles in some of its failings. 117 00:13:14,660 --> 00:13:27,690 Overall, this volume of always both liberal triumphalism and the crude anti liberalism incorporating a range of perspectives in a balanced manner. 118 00:13:27,690 --> 00:13:36,000 So these are some of the strengths of the book, and I can go on to list more strength to tell how much I enjoyed reading it, 119 00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:42,250 but time is limited, so I'd like to end my remarks with a question. 120 00:13:42,250 --> 00:13:49,570 The question is about the audience of the book. I understand that the primary target audience are specialists in Jewish history 121 00:13:49,570 --> 00:13:54,420 and I have no doubt that they will read the book and discuss it for years to come. 122 00:13:54,420 --> 00:14:02,910 But the book is clearly intended to reach a wider audience, including social scientists doing research on various minority groups. 123 00:14:02,910 --> 00:14:09,780 In fact, the book invites us to think comparatively about the Jewish experience because the dialectic of 124 00:14:09,780 --> 00:14:16,980 inclusion and exclusion that have confronted Jewish people have also confronted other minority groups, 125 00:14:16,980 --> 00:14:22,570 operate in very different ways. I think this is an important invitation, 126 00:14:22,570 --> 00:14:31,330 and I do hope that scholars outside as well as inside the community of Jewish historians will undertake such a comparative study. 127 00:14:31,330 --> 00:14:39,760 But will they actually do so? Well, they could reach the wider audience that it dissolves. 128 00:14:39,760 --> 00:14:47,830 I think there are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. Much of my optimism comes from the recent global turn in the humanities, 129 00:14:47,830 --> 00:14:56,900 where a new generation of scholars are doing innovative research connecting different parts of the world that used to be studied separately. 130 00:14:56,900 --> 00:15:06,350 My pessimism, on the other hand, comes from my belief that academia does not provide a sufficient incentive for time consuming interdisciplinary work, 131 00:15:06,350 --> 00:15:13,730 and most of us are just too busy trying to keep up with new publications in our respective disciplines. 132 00:15:13,730 --> 00:15:18,740 So my question for Abigail and Simon is how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the 133 00:15:18,740 --> 00:15:24,170 prospect of the book reaching a wide audience and stimulating prostacyclin conversation? 134 00:15:24,170 --> 00:15:27,170 And if you share a slight sense of pessimism with me, 135 00:15:27,170 --> 00:15:36,710 what do you think we can do to make things better and facilitate a interaction across disciplinary divides? 136 00:15:36,710 --> 00:15:46,240 But that's out there, and next, Adam will give his comments on the. 137 00:15:46,240 --> 00:15:50,410 Hello, everyone can hear me and see me, I hope. 138 00:15:50,410 --> 00:15:57,700 Well, so Kay is the liberalism person on the panel, I guess I'm the juice person, so to speak. 139 00:15:57,700 --> 00:16:02,440 But nonetheless, I'm going to start my comments with the question, what is liberalism? 140 00:16:02,440 --> 00:16:07,510 Or to rephrase that in a flagrantly question begging form, how liberal is it? 141 00:16:07,510 --> 00:16:13,870 Or was it history over the past couple of decades influenced by the global 142 00:16:13,870 --> 00:16:18,010 and critical trends and scholarship and in the light above all of liberalism, 143 00:16:18,010 --> 00:16:25,640 deep imprecation with imperialism historians consensus answer to the second question has become not much. 144 00:16:25,640 --> 00:16:28,820 Jews have historically been closely linked with liberalism, 145 00:16:28,820 --> 00:16:36,530 Jewish emancipation was the Obama campaign of the liberal drive towards a more secular and principled shaping of European politics, 146 00:16:36,530 --> 00:16:43,670 which was used in 19th century Europe, widely seen as the most fervent enthusiasts for liberal institutions and values, 147 00:16:43,670 --> 00:16:49,370 and the rise of political anti-Semitism as Abigail's extract that she read out highlighted 148 00:16:49,370 --> 00:16:54,770 has commonly been interpreted as quite essentially a rejection of liberalism. 149 00:16:54,770 --> 00:17:01,490 So where do these interpretations of the Jewish past fit with this more critical reappraisal of liberalism? 150 00:17:01,490 --> 00:17:09,530 This, as I see it, is the core question of Abigail Green and Simon Selim's ambitious, admirable and stimulating volume. 151 00:17:09,530 --> 00:17:17,930 The notion of a synergy between Jews and liberalism, as Abigail very powerfully puts it in her chapter, is here, subjected, as it were, 152 00:17:17,930 --> 00:17:23,480 to a 17 chapter stress test in the light of recent historiographical trends, 153 00:17:23,480 --> 00:17:32,300 enabling us to assess to what extent we need to revise our understanding of the relationship between liberalism and Jewish history. 154 00:17:32,300 --> 00:17:37,880 I can't possibly mention all the goodies in this collection, which ranges widely in time and place, as Chiaretti said, 155 00:17:37,880 --> 00:17:48,080 from just to take some tantalising outriders from the liberal look of Sephardic male fashions of dress in the early 19th century Caribbean 156 00:17:48,080 --> 00:17:59,870 through to the distinctive place of gentry nationalism in the imperial liberal thought of Lewis mania and the immigration story in Britain. 157 00:17:59,870 --> 00:18:03,440 So I'll limit myself to touching briefly on two of the book's five sections. 158 00:18:03,440 --> 00:18:08,780 The first and the last. The first one titled The Limits of Liberalism. 159 00:18:08,780 --> 00:18:13,820 And that speaks very directly to those historiographical trends I've just been talking about. 160 00:18:13,820 --> 00:18:19,550 Both the Somoza's left looking at the late, late nineteenth century Romania and Algeria, 161 00:18:19,550 --> 00:18:23,960 and similar to Sullom discussing the eighteen seventy three pamphlet, 162 00:18:23,960 --> 00:18:26,480 The Conquest of the World by Jews, by women, 163 00:18:26,480 --> 00:18:36,920 by an English convert to Islam showed fervent hostility to Jews could indeed coexist with a wider embrace of liberal political values. 164 00:18:36,920 --> 00:18:39,260 And this is very interesting and important for us to know. 165 00:18:39,260 --> 00:18:47,150 But I'm not entirely sure whether filing this awareness under the limits of liberalism is quite adequate. 166 00:18:47,150 --> 00:18:55,400 I feel as a suggestion in the way this is framed by the book that when we face the apparent oxymoron of liberal anti-Semitism, 167 00:18:55,400 --> 00:19:02,660 it's liberalism, as it were, that needs to take the strain by being recognised as well, less liberal, to put it very crudely. 168 00:19:02,660 --> 00:19:10,010 Shouldn't we also, though, we think, anti-Semitism as a more complex and varied phenomenon which needs to be understood, 169 00:19:10,010 --> 00:19:14,750 particularly in places like Romania and other highly polarised societies discussed by left, 170 00:19:14,750 --> 00:19:23,630 needs to be understood in relation to particular local economic and cultural realities of Jewish non Jewish relations. 171 00:19:23,630 --> 00:19:27,710 The final section opens with Abigail Green's tracing, I'm guessing, 172 00:19:27,710 --> 00:19:34,400 as a sort of anticipation of the book we were told about in the introduction tracing of the long afterlife of eighteen forty eight, 173 00:19:34,400 --> 00:19:41,300 which she sees as the crystallising moment of Jewish liberal Cinergy in the close interplay 174 00:19:41,300 --> 00:19:46,370 between Jewish and liberal political causes throughout the humanitarian activism of the 20th 175 00:19:46,370 --> 00:19:52,580 century and the final two chapters of the book broadly aligned with her argument and trace 176 00:19:52,580 --> 00:19:58,470 distinctively Jewish currents of liberalism forward into the interwar period and the Cold War. 177 00:19:58,470 --> 00:20:05,360 I didn't directly disagree with anything in these three essays, all or three, which I think are really interesting and stimulating. 178 00:20:05,360 --> 00:20:10,580 But I do have some nagging questions which I'm going to offer now in the spirit of friendly provocation. 179 00:20:10,580 --> 00:20:20,360 And they really relate to what's perhaps left out and thereby is emphasised by the framing of the book and its ending in particular. 180 00:20:20,360 --> 00:20:29,030 Firstly, I'd like to ask, where does liberalism sit alongside the many other synergies, as it were, that have been identified with modern Jews? 181 00:20:29,030 --> 00:20:37,880 Jews certainly punched above. They want weight in socialist and communist movements that were often the leading adversaries of liberalism. 182 00:20:37,880 --> 00:20:41,480 And what about the relationship, close relationship between Jews and capitalism? 183 00:20:41,480 --> 00:20:46,640 To what extent is that intertwined in shaping aspects of Jewish liberalism? 184 00:20:46,640 --> 00:20:51,680 And where does Judaism or religion fit in this story? 185 00:20:51,680 --> 00:20:59,750 So the danger, it seems to me, in plucking out Jewish liberalism after special attention is that it can lead to a rather congratulatory 186 00:20:59,750 --> 00:21:05,840 narrative in which Jews are presented not so much in the in their cacophonous diversity, 187 00:21:05,840 --> 00:21:15,130 but as at their core, progressive contributors to liberalism's noble causes. 188 00:21:15,130 --> 00:21:23,380 I also think that the symbolism of Jewish causes within liberalism seems at least a significant, 189 00:21:23,380 --> 00:21:31,900 maybe much more significant than Jewish liberal agency protection of Jews typically matter to liberals for reasons that were ultimately rooted, 190 00:21:31,900 --> 00:21:40,330 I think, in Christian messianism. Jewish political leaders for Montefiore and Commutative Zionist movement became adept 191 00:21:40,330 --> 00:21:46,540 at appealing to the Semitic tendencies that I think were very important in liberalism. 192 00:21:46,540 --> 00:21:51,340 And given that anti-Semitism is one of the key terms of the book. 193 00:21:51,340 --> 00:21:57,550 I think that filer's Semitism in liberalism or perhaps should be given a bit more attention. 194 00:21:57,550 --> 00:22:00,280 And finally, what about Zionism? 195 00:22:00,280 --> 00:22:09,250 This central stand of modern Jewish politics does appear a couple of times in the book, but it isn't central by any means. 196 00:22:09,250 --> 00:22:18,160 Liberal Zionism, though, is certainly today the most discussed strain of Jewish liberalism as particularly Jewish. 197 00:22:18,160 --> 00:22:27,580 And it is also today, at best, I would say, on life support in historical terms, the currents within Zionism that might be designated liberal, 198 00:22:27,580 --> 00:22:29,650 even if they didn't describe themselves as such, 199 00:22:29,650 --> 00:22:37,720 have almost always been outweighed by rival socialist religious revisionists and ultra nationalist Zionist movements. 200 00:22:37,720 --> 00:22:42,430 So when I got to the afterword and Samuel Moylan's comments there in the afterword, 201 00:22:42,430 --> 00:22:47,530 who I normally agree with, I was really startled in order to read him. 202 00:22:47,530 --> 00:22:52,090 Right. And I presume this was written in the twilight of the Trump era. 203 00:22:52,090 --> 00:22:59,320 He wrote, quote, In Israel and the United States, trailed far behind by a handful of other states, 204 00:22:59,320 --> 00:23:05,740 Jews are provided with unprecedentedly safe liberal citizenship. 205 00:23:05,740 --> 00:23:11,740 Well, I guess he's thinking of something rather different by liberalism than I am, 206 00:23:11,740 --> 00:23:18,980 because I can think of several places where liberalism seems far more secure than in the United States and Israel. 207 00:23:18,980 --> 00:23:25,990 It's synergise today are surely very clearly with illiberal ethno nationalism, Jewish liberalism. 208 00:23:25,990 --> 00:23:34,900 Insofar as contemporary Jewish politics is mainstream, Jewish politics is oriented around support for Israel. 209 00:23:34,900 --> 00:23:41,200 That liberalism seems to me in very profound crisis. And despite the many strengths of this volume, 210 00:23:41,200 --> 00:23:47,770 I feel it doesn't really help us as much as it might have done to explain how we have reached this point. 211 00:23:47,770 --> 00:23:51,850 So those are my questions and provocations I had over to Simon. 212 00:23:51,850 --> 00:24:04,500 Now, who will answer them? Thank you very much, first of all, 213 00:24:04,500 --> 00:24:16,110 to Torch and University of Oxford for organising this this event and to Karuta and Adam Sutcliff for their contribution, 214 00:24:16,110 --> 00:24:20,670 their provocative questions and their generous reading of the volume, of course, 215 00:24:20,670 --> 00:24:27,460 I have five minutes to answer to all the important questions that were raised. 216 00:24:27,460 --> 00:24:31,560 And I think this is too much of a task. 217 00:24:31,560 --> 00:24:46,140 This is not a surprise, as we have the scholars of our and Berlin like karuta and a major expert of the Enlightenment tradition from starting at least 218 00:24:46,140 --> 00:24:57,330 from Mendelssohn and modern Jewish history and the history of ideas that have read the book and ask the important questions. 219 00:24:57,330 --> 00:25:08,190 I think we could go back since one of the presences in the book is also Hannah Arendt as a 220 00:25:08,190 --> 00:25:16,650 Jew and perhaps somebody who in part at least recognised herself in a liberal tradition. 221 00:25:16,650 --> 00:25:24,270 Certainly this was true of Berlin. But if we stick to our answer, many will recall the opening of the Origins of Totalitarianism, 222 00:25:24,270 --> 00:25:34,690 Chapter one in which she in which Honorine talks of the unsettling nature of the fact that the small, 223 00:25:34,690 --> 00:25:44,280 the seemingly small and unimportant Jewish question or Jewish problem has generated in the 19th and especially the 20th century. 224 00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:56,490 Well, the movements and developments that then culminated in the machinery of destruction of the final solution, 225 00:25:56,490 --> 00:26:02,810 this is one of the elements which we put at the centre of our concerns. 226 00:26:02,810 --> 00:26:11,130 And we opened the book looking at what almost Funkenstein has called the dialectics of assimilation. 227 00:26:11,130 --> 00:26:22,650 Having in mind, of course, at the same time, the dialectic of enlightenment, which was written at the centre of the was the Holocaust, 228 00:26:22,650 --> 00:26:36,330 was taking place, of course, not in Europe, but it was written in California, in Malibu, actually in Wilder, in the emigre German Jewish community. 229 00:26:36,330 --> 00:26:45,060 The problem is that the promises of mass of enlightenment, the promises of liberalism, the promises of emancipation, 230 00:26:45,060 --> 00:26:57,150 actually, and put the Jewish community at the centre of a very complex process and experience, which represents, 231 00:26:57,150 --> 00:27:09,810 in a sense, in hindsight, that the good and bad conscience of Europe and to this positive and negative process and to this dialectic, 232 00:27:09,810 --> 00:27:20,970 the Jews have participated in the first person, both as actors, including as a nationalist. 233 00:27:20,970 --> 00:27:27,210 And this is even more so to much later in the second half of the 20th century, 234 00:27:27,210 --> 00:27:34,170 as Adam was pointing to in the form of the Zionist ethno nationalist ethno nationalism. 235 00:27:34,170 --> 00:27:40,950 And the trouble is, it has generated the and and also, of course, 236 00:27:40,950 --> 00:27:51,870 as victims of these processes that through anti-Semitism and I cannot answer the Kantian question with which Adam Sutcliff began, 237 00:27:51,870 --> 00:27:58,380 what is liberalism, not what is enlightenment, but what is liberalism and what are the limits of liberalism? 238 00:27:58,380 --> 00:28:03,780 If I can combine the questions by Keith and Adam. 239 00:28:03,780 --> 00:28:09,330 Yes, we have tried to look at the exclusionary nature of liberalism, 240 00:28:09,330 --> 00:28:18,210 and we indeed hope that this effort may be of interest and can be applied as is already the case, 241 00:28:18,210 --> 00:28:30,140 because we were able to avail yourself of an existing literature to other experiences of religious cultural minority in Europe and well, 242 00:28:30,140 --> 00:28:39,090 well beyond it. So I entirely agree that the synergy of Jews and liberalism, as Adam was pointing out there, is a problematic one. 243 00:28:39,090 --> 00:28:48,000 I am, as I said before, and I, I always say jokingly to my co-editor of More Interested in the Bad Guys and I meaning the antisemite. 244 00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:57,510 That was my modest contribution to that, to the volume and the projector and my personal interest in my work. 245 00:28:57,510 --> 00:29:01,880 And I think that the Jewish contribution to liberalism cannot be. 246 00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:09,260 And is too often idealised that there is a progressive contribution. 247 00:29:09,260 --> 00:29:20,840 This has also existed in the form of not Zionism and and progressive socialists, liberal forms of of of Zionism. 248 00:29:20,840 --> 00:29:29,790 We have said that in previous events around this book, the book launch held in London about a month ago, 249 00:29:29,790 --> 00:29:36,860 that's when the Jewish experience become becomes a state entity. 250 00:29:36,860 --> 00:29:45,950 The promise of liberalism is remains that unachieved or worse, is that turned upside down. 251 00:29:45,950 --> 00:29:54,020 So I agree that ah, this we haven't perhaps a that in the volume. 252 00:29:54,020 --> 00:29:59,390 Surprisingly, we haven't we don't devote a chapter to the Holocaust itself. 253 00:29:59,390 --> 00:30:08,690 So there are many sort of dark or dead that NGOs or uncovered chapters, 254 00:30:08,690 --> 00:30:20,870 I hope as a curator saying that we have given a contribution to a historic cessation of this process of beyond idealisation, 255 00:30:20,870 --> 00:30:30,110 beyond a critique of liberalism and the Jewish experience, an attack on it or beyond that, 256 00:30:30,110 --> 00:30:43,370 the victim and the victim paradigm that the lachrymose version of Jewish history and I entirely agree with Adam Sutcliffe's invitation to 257 00:30:43,370 --> 00:30:53,750 historic size and contextualise both the liberal and the both the experience of liberalism and the Jews and the experience of anti-Semitism. 258 00:30:53,750 --> 00:31:06,050 And I think we will be able to build a stronger experience of liberalism and a stronger Jewish experience if we are interested in that, 259 00:31:06,050 --> 00:31:12,950 if we insist on the lesson of history through institutionalisation. 260 00:31:12,950 --> 00:31:23,160 Thank you. I now turn the floor to Q&A, I think. 261 00:31:23,160 --> 00:31:36,720 That's right. Thank you so much, Simon. I think at this stage we should invite everybody back to the to the screen and I suppose Abigael, 262 00:31:36,720 --> 00:31:42,000 we should probably start by giving you some sort of right of reply beyond your reading. 263 00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:50,100 At the beginning, there were some terrific questions, responses from both Kate and from Adam. 264 00:31:50,100 --> 00:31:54,730 I don't know if you and of course, Simon, thank you for your initial response. 265 00:31:54,730 --> 00:32:00,120 But again, I don't know if you want to add anything at this stage before we sort of move into a more of a free for all. 266 00:32:00,120 --> 00:32:11,040 I do, actually, um, I think maybe I want to just pick up on on this point Adam raised about liberal Zionism, 267 00:32:11,040 --> 00:32:19,560 because I think maybe Adam has a more benign view of liberalism than I do in the sense that as a 19th century historian, 268 00:32:19,560 --> 00:32:24,780 I see liberal liberalism and nationalism as being deeply fused. 269 00:32:24,780 --> 00:32:32,160 I've got no difficulty in seeing people like Trischka as working completely within a liberal tradition. 270 00:32:32,160 --> 00:32:39,690 I think that's also the message of Lisa Lefse book that these been not book the chapter that the these Romanian, 271 00:32:39,690 --> 00:32:49,200 Jewish and not the Romanian nationalists, people like Bresciano are absolutely liberal nationalists in a quite aggressive way. 272 00:32:49,200 --> 00:32:56,670 And I was very persuaded by Osam, who read the chapter on the Young Turks, that if we didn't think globally about liberalism, 273 00:32:56,670 --> 00:33:07,890 we have to look at these other liberalism's, which are more nationalist in a way which we can identify, I think, more clearly with the Israeli right. 274 00:33:07,890 --> 00:33:16,530 For instance, the young the Young Turks chapter engages with Buttinsky as a kind of Jewish liberal, 275 00:33:16,530 --> 00:33:22,290 which is certainly not something which I think you would do. So I suppose I'm just picking up on that point. 276 00:33:22,290 --> 00:33:30,750 So for me, an important aspect which emerged in the book was that we have to think about these other liberalism's. 277 00:33:30,750 --> 00:33:38,810 We can't just look at the kind of progressive left liberalism as which we will engage with. 278 00:33:38,810 --> 00:33:46,070 Thank you, Adam. John, to reply to that, yes, I think that's very interesting, but I guess the question then that's well, 279 00:33:46,070 --> 00:33:49,400 there are a couple of questions about posing and what isn't liberalism. 280 00:33:49,400 --> 00:33:53,780 What is what is liberal going against in the 19th century to become so capacious 281 00:33:53,780 --> 00:34:00,800 that it essentially is the overwhelming consensus of politics in that time? 282 00:34:00,800 --> 00:34:06,440 I think this but I think within that vein that you're suggesting, I mean, I would have liked Lisa left to go go further. 283 00:34:06,440 --> 00:34:09,740 And if you look I mean, working on building on, say, Albert Lindemans, 284 00:34:09,740 --> 00:34:15,080 writing on Romanian anti-Semitism and the fact that many Jews in Germany had arrived 285 00:34:15,080 --> 00:34:21,170 relatively recently were very focussed in in urban areas and with particular economic netsch, 286 00:34:21,170 --> 00:34:29,480 the rent, the rhetoric of anti-Semitism is very similar then I would say to economic might, well, not economic migrants so much, 287 00:34:29,480 --> 00:34:44,930 but foreigners who should not be considered of in the same way as locals in mainstream politics today. 288 00:34:44,930 --> 00:34:48,980 So what that really does then is to rethink anti-Semitism and to show how some of the ideas 289 00:34:48,980 --> 00:34:54,050 that we tend to when we use the word Semitism in the context of Romania in the 19th century, 290 00:34:54,050 --> 00:35:01,280 as was done at the time, it brings this instantaneous recall and shudder and highways to Holocaust of associations. 291 00:35:01,280 --> 00:35:15,720 I would like to see the book bring home to the extent to which, in fact, those rhetoric's are very familiar in sort of liberal thought towards. 292 00:35:15,720 --> 00:35:22,290 Foreigners in much of the world in mainstream politics today. 293 00:35:22,290 --> 00:35:28,920 The other response is surely within the Jewish sphere, particularly within Zionism, 294 00:35:28,920 --> 00:35:37,110 there have been bitter arguments between at the very least, one would say, the more liberal Jews and the more nationalist Jews. 295 00:35:37,110 --> 00:35:45,550 And I would see going back to, say, Automan, his polemics against Claude Multiforme in England, 296 00:35:45,550 --> 00:35:54,090 liberal Judaism as the beginnings of more than a century of Zionism in various ways, 297 00:35:54,090 --> 00:35:58,140 putting itself forward as a movement of self-assertion, of Jewish self-interest, 298 00:35:58,140 --> 00:36:07,020 of nationalism, opposed to a set of universalist values identified with liberalism. 299 00:36:07,020 --> 00:36:16,230 And so that internal argument within Judaism, which has now been won mostly in the Jewish sphere by the right, 300 00:36:16,230 --> 00:36:19,380 by anti liberals, I think that's a really to me, 301 00:36:19,380 --> 00:36:29,660 that's the really important story about Jews and liberalism in the from the latest from the trenches from the 20th century to the present. 302 00:36:29,660 --> 00:36:40,690 Go for. Abby, I can see you about to respond. Well, I could respond, but other people may have things to say, so I suppose. 303 00:36:40,690 --> 00:36:45,010 One of the things we talk about in the in the introduction is the difference between 304 00:36:45,010 --> 00:36:52,090 looking primarily at the Jewish narrative as the focus of experience or taking a view 305 00:36:52,090 --> 00:36:56,470 which looks at the relationship between Jews and other people say this kind of I know 306 00:36:56,470 --> 00:37:03,610 you think the kind of particularism vs. universalism is kind of the key challenge, 307 00:37:03,610 --> 00:37:11,700 but I would say that. It's you don't just want to think about it as an internal Jewish debate, 308 00:37:11,700 --> 00:37:25,130 because in most places before the foundation of the state of Israel is taking place in conversation with other contexts and groups, of course. 309 00:37:25,130 --> 00:37:37,700 Yes, I wanted to say that I agree with Adams warning about not using liberalism as a blanket concept that can sort of include too many things. 310 00:37:37,700 --> 00:37:49,400 And this is perhaps true also, as he was warning us of antisemitism, and I recently discussed then the book of David Nierenberg, anti Judaism, 311 00:37:49,400 --> 00:37:52,940 which was widely discussed worldwide, 312 00:37:52,940 --> 00:38:01,220 and to do those in the Western tradition around for being part of this risk as it goes back to the Christian roots of anti-Semitism. 313 00:38:01,220 --> 00:38:11,490 And so it makes anti Judaism a persistent category and filter through which the West has looked at the the Jewish questions, et cetera. 314 00:38:11,490 --> 00:38:22,910 And so there are elements of the risk of, well, even bigger risks in the case of using a blanket concept of anti-Semitism or anti Judaism, 315 00:38:22,910 --> 00:38:34,100 since that's a centuries long tradition, while liberalism, one cannot be dated back before local. 316 00:38:34,100 --> 00:38:39,650 But it's clear to me that, yes, we we have to be very careful. 317 00:38:39,650 --> 00:38:44,550 But after all the need for contextualisation. 318 00:38:44,550 --> 00:38:51,170 So the situation is also in the context of a hallahan because of that you were bringing up the item because, after all, 319 00:38:51,170 --> 00:39:01,700 was one of the few who picture that and was able to see a Jewish and an Arab Arab presence in Palestine, 320 00:39:01,700 --> 00:39:11,390 in his gays, in the Zionist writings that one of the few in the Zionist movement large at least as far as I know. 321 00:39:11,390 --> 00:39:24,330 So, I mean, there were elements of Lockean toleration in his gaze, perhaps. 322 00:39:24,330 --> 00:39:32,510 Thank you. I wonder if I could bring Kay back into this discussion partly by picking up now, this may not work. 323 00:39:32,510 --> 00:39:37,770 So just tell me if this is not something you've thought about. But I was struck by one theme that emerged today, 324 00:39:37,770 --> 00:39:47,400 which was that once liberalism gets bound up with a particular state project, then it becomes something different. 325 00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:55,530 And I wonder if that's something that you, as a political philosopher have thought about is a kind of the shift. 326 00:39:55,530 --> 00:39:58,060 I mean, obviously, one talk particularly about the state of Israel, 327 00:39:58,060 --> 00:40:05,360 but one could also talk more broadly as to whether liberalism is, in a sense, always coming at it. 328 00:40:05,360 --> 00:40:12,030 From your understanding of the kind of minority you talked about, minorities, but in particular political parties. 329 00:40:12,030 --> 00:40:17,760 And I wondered whether if liberalism was always on the side of minority and if that then shifted once it 330 00:40:17,760 --> 00:40:23,970 became a state project to whether I'm just going up a garden path that is not particularly useful here. 331 00:40:23,970 --> 00:40:33,600 Do you have any thoughts on that? But I think it's probably true that liberalism changes if. 332 00:40:33,600 --> 00:40:41,070 It transforms itself from a kind of grassroots popular movement, as it were, into something else, 333 00:40:41,070 --> 00:40:45,360 which is a state ideology, but I think that is just true about political ideology. 334 00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:51,510 I mean, if you think about socialism or communism or conservatism, all of those other ideologies, 335 00:40:51,510 --> 00:40:56,160 they do change depending on whether they have power or they don't. 336 00:40:56,160 --> 00:41:06,150 So I think in that sense, it's true what you said is true, but it's not unique to liberalism. 337 00:41:06,150 --> 00:41:18,990 But I was interested in something slightly different about Atom's comments, not on individual comments, but the way Adam raised those questions. 338 00:41:18,990 --> 00:41:29,010 It seems to me that the other might have a slightly more kind of president presentist approach when reading this book. 339 00:41:29,010 --> 00:41:35,310 I think it seems like you are thinking about how this book might be viewing contemporary issues in the 21st century for us. 340 00:41:35,310 --> 00:41:41,190 My impression is that Simon and Abigail are trying to do something a lot more contextualised and to try to think 341 00:41:41,190 --> 00:41:48,630 about different context in which we can think about this set of issues on induce liberalism and antisemitism. 342 00:41:48,630 --> 00:42:00,170 And I wonder if the kind of a little difference between you might emerge from this, some contextual versus presentist approach to history. 343 00:42:00,170 --> 00:42:06,050 Out of you, would you like to respond to that, your your muted? 344 00:42:06,050 --> 00:42:17,420 Yes, that's interesting. Thank you. I hope I'm a presentist in the sense that I'm trying to subordinate to thinking about the past, to the present. 345 00:42:17,420 --> 00:42:27,080 But I am presentist. But I think we all should be and must be in that our history is interesting and important in how it relates to the present. 346 00:42:27,080 --> 00:42:33,050 And that seems to be, to my mind, clearly delighted by a book that approaches the present, comes very, 347 00:42:33,050 --> 00:42:39,050 very close and it's detailed discussion and has an afterword that does discuss the present. 348 00:42:39,050 --> 00:42:47,870 So. And also the topic of liberalism, it seems to me this is a word that is so central to our political debate today, 349 00:42:47,870 --> 00:42:56,100 it is not an option to be somehow sort of Olympian neutral about it, I think meaningfully as a scholar and as a thinking person. 350 00:42:56,100 --> 00:43:02,330 So I'd like to sort of turn your question to me into a question to Abigail and Simon and say, well, 351 00:43:02,330 --> 00:43:07,310 what is the politics of how you are trying to get us to think about liberalism in your book? 352 00:43:07,310 --> 00:43:16,760 And you talk to a girl about venomously, for example, and people indeed who were committed to liberalism and so on, 353 00:43:16,760 --> 00:43:25,070 and I guess in a sense saw their historical work was a fortification of the value of German Jewish 354 00:43:25,070 --> 00:43:31,290 universalist liberalism against the horrors of nationalism that reach their apogee with the Holocaust. 355 00:43:31,290 --> 00:43:42,930 But we still have still been with us since. You're moving, I think, to a more critical way of thinking about liberalism, I think. 356 00:43:42,930 --> 00:43:47,180 But to what is that right. And if so, to what end? 357 00:43:47,180 --> 00:43:57,630 What do you want us to do with thinking about liberalism more critically? 358 00:43:57,630 --> 00:44:07,840 Abigale, see what I mean? Well, I was just going to say that I actually think the politics of the different contributions to this volume were varied. 359 00:44:07,840 --> 00:44:11,110 And in a way, that's the merit of a collaborative projects, 360 00:44:11,110 --> 00:44:23,080 so someone like Malarky Cohen has a very different politics from, I don't know, Matt Silva or Simon, in fact, will be. 361 00:44:23,080 --> 00:44:29,350 So in that sense, I don't think we could identify. 362 00:44:29,350 --> 00:44:35,380 Maybe that's maybe it's because it's not a single author, the book, it doesn't have that kind of politics. 363 00:44:35,380 --> 00:44:40,910 But perhaps that's also its merit, because I think in the conclusion I mean, the conclusion, 364 00:44:40,910 --> 00:44:47,320 the introduction, you know, we sat for six months putting this book together with these people. 365 00:44:47,320 --> 00:44:51,940 We spoke to them every week. So we know where they disagree with us. 366 00:44:51,940 --> 00:44:53,200 But I think, you know, 367 00:44:53,200 --> 00:45:04,640 there was a clear sense that there were certain themes which emerge and where we did find common ground and sometimes were surprised to do so. 368 00:45:04,640 --> 00:45:08,180 So in that sense, I think it would be you know, we're not a group of I mean, 369 00:45:08,180 --> 00:45:12,020 we're a group of people from all over the world dealing with different kinds of liberal 370 00:45:12,020 --> 00:45:16,740 politics in a contextualised way and different kinds of nationalist politics in that context. 371 00:45:16,740 --> 00:45:21,080 You know, I mean, when we were there was when Trump came to power, actually. 372 00:45:21,080 --> 00:45:33,090 So that was very much a context. But people, you know, had different kinds of anxiety, I suppose, and I have to say, 373 00:45:33,090 --> 00:45:38,430 when I was editing chapters, I tended to ask people to remove, you know, some people, 374 00:45:38,430 --> 00:45:44,010 particularly the people writing about the modern era, tended to end with slightly pious comments, 375 00:45:44,010 --> 00:45:47,550 questions and comments about what might Jewish liberals do now. 376 00:45:47,550 --> 00:45:53,880 And I tended to remove them because I just didn't think that was actually the point of the volume. 377 00:45:53,880 --> 00:45:57,840 So I think it's harder for a conservative volume which has, what, 378 00:45:57,840 --> 00:46:07,440 60 different contributors who didn't know each other in advance to have and some of whom weren't actually there for the whole period. 379 00:46:07,440 --> 00:46:15,030 And you're on your own to have a kind of collective politics, but I don't know that that devalues. 380 00:46:15,030 --> 00:46:21,360 And I pick up on this notion of the kind of the collective volume idea, 381 00:46:21,360 --> 00:46:28,650 but also the different internal differences between different communities to pick up one of the questions that come in. 382 00:46:28,650 --> 00:46:32,730 This is from Mark Arseholes are asking, could you briefly compare? 383 00:46:32,730 --> 00:46:41,970 I think I mean, generically, the approach of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities to the concept of Jewish liberal nationalism. 384 00:46:41,970 --> 00:46:47,400 In other words, is there something that one can say that distinguishes those two as two different approaches? 385 00:46:47,400 --> 00:46:53,630 And this question is both pre and post. 386 00:46:53,630 --> 00:46:57,050 It's asking a lot, but I'm wondering if one of you might want to take it on. 387 00:46:57,050 --> 00:47:05,150 I would leave that answer to Abigail, but I wanted to answer first briefly to Adam's maternal question, 388 00:47:05,150 --> 00:47:12,440 if I may have called and wanted to do so as somebody with an interest in the history of the surrogacy and say, 389 00:47:12,440 --> 00:47:23,150 since the name of Mossie was brought up and it's the case, the references to murder, most of the story of a German Jewish economy. 390 00:47:23,150 --> 00:47:26,120 But actually I have in mind the George Morsey, 391 00:47:26,120 --> 00:47:37,130 who with his own biography and autobiography that is a supremely incarnated by his own autobiography, Confronting History. 392 00:47:37,130 --> 00:47:40,490 And he's stereographic production. 393 00:47:40,490 --> 00:47:50,480 And there you see both the idealisation of the German Jewish experience through the reconstruction of the building of the German 394 00:47:50,480 --> 00:47:59,930 Jews and of the end of the German Jewish symbiosis and the constant preoccupation with the haunting question about the Holocaust, 395 00:47:59,930 --> 00:48:13,610 which also says that in every in each of my pages, behind each of my pages of my historical over is the question why the Holocaust? 396 00:48:13,610 --> 00:48:24,350 And I think this is in part true of this volume, that one of the haunting ghosts of the volume is in one of the missing chapter is the Holocaust. 397 00:48:24,350 --> 00:48:25,250 And it's interesting, 398 00:48:25,250 --> 00:48:35,750 we have we haven't found an author who explicitly has devoted and we haven't looked for an author who would deal with this question in and of itself, 399 00:48:35,750 --> 00:48:44,900 I guess because the Holocaust is the opposite, the most tragic opposite to liberalism. 400 00:48:44,900 --> 00:48:48,830 But at the same time, we have interrogated liberalism and anti-Semitism, 401 00:48:48,830 --> 00:48:59,420 avoiding teleology with that question in mind, as every I think historian and citizen has to do. 402 00:48:59,420 --> 00:49:05,310 And we have still looked beyond the Holocaust of the Cold War, 403 00:49:05,310 --> 00:49:12,710 that aspect of Zionism at the fact that the Holocaust that produced the millions of deaths and also 404 00:49:12,710 --> 00:49:24,380 produced a Jewish statehood with its own problems and new challenges for Jewish for the Jewish experience. 405 00:49:24,380 --> 00:49:33,500 Again, that paradoxically intertwining or unsurprisingly, perhaps because we don't believe that history is the history of freedom, 406 00:49:33,500 --> 00:49:50,440 facing, again, the questions of liberalism and particularism, minority rights, that toleration and violence. 407 00:49:50,440 --> 00:50:02,320 OK, thank you. So I think we were we were also OK, but to Abby, I wonder if I should have a go at the question about Sephardim and Ashkenazim, 408 00:50:02,320 --> 00:50:06,730 if only to say that I think we all can textualists actually. 409 00:50:06,730 --> 00:50:18,410 So we deal with those groups as big blocks, because I think you would find that the view of Eastern European as well. 410 00:50:18,410 --> 00:50:23,000 As as Adam suggested, there are different currents within all kinds of Zionism, 411 00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:28,370 but also the Ashkenazi community we might be talking about in the case of Montefiore, 412 00:50:28,370 --> 00:50:36,480 but I'm sure we could identify as Zionists, quite reasonable, for example, in Britain. 413 00:50:36,480 --> 00:50:43,460 And then you you would have other other voices in America, like maybe Brandeis and so on. 414 00:50:43,460 --> 00:50:51,560 So I think it's really hard to generalise. And I would emphasise that Sephardic World is also extremely fragmented and different. 415 00:50:51,560 --> 00:50:55,790 And so people have different attitudes depending on where they are. 416 00:50:55,790 --> 00:51:05,340 I'm not competent to talk about the evolution in the state of Israel after 1948, but obviously that's not the subject of this book. 417 00:51:05,340 --> 00:51:11,360 If I may. Just something about this Ashkenazi and Sephardic divide. 418 00:51:11,360 --> 00:51:25,280 It applies perhaps less to the modern period. But we have tried to challenge the relatively Ashkenazi centric perspective on modern history, 419 00:51:25,280 --> 00:51:34,460 which has been promoted by the centrality of German Jewish scholars in the Jewish historiography by 420 00:51:34,460 --> 00:51:46,410 bringing in next to the Francophone Sephardic and Ashkenazi experience of the French emancipation, 421 00:51:46,410 --> 00:51:57,590 the mostly Ashkenazi experience of the German heartlands, the German speaking languages heartlands of Europe, Ashkenazi experience. 422 00:51:57,590 --> 00:51:58,970 We have brought in Spain. 423 00:51:58,970 --> 00:52:10,610 We have brought in the Ottoman Empire in which the Safadi Milia prevails and has produced the different forms of engagement with liberalism, 424 00:52:10,610 --> 00:52:22,490 both coming from the context in which Jews operated and from interpretations of the Jews by the Jews of the liberal experiences in those contexts, 425 00:52:22,490 --> 00:52:31,820 which are mostly Safadi and are sort of generally excluded in the mainstream outlook or gaze 426 00:52:31,820 --> 00:52:39,410 on the modern Jewish and even the early model Jewish experience in Jewish historiography. 427 00:52:39,410 --> 00:52:46,220 Yes, I think I think that's clearly I mean, just as a complete novice really to this area, 428 00:52:46,220 --> 00:52:51,320 it was one of the most striking things about the book that your sense of global. 429 00:52:51,320 --> 00:52:59,330 Also, I don't want to overstate this, but in a sense, deconstructive to some degree, the opposition between Sephardic and Ashkenazi, 430 00:52:59,330 --> 00:53:04,670 in a way with that, or he didn't want to lead with that as a kind of primary primary narrative about Jewish identity. 431 00:53:04,670 --> 00:53:08,450 But, Adam, you've been waiting patiently for a while, so I'll bring you back in here. 432 00:53:08,450 --> 00:53:14,180 I just wanted to jump in picking up on what someone said about the Holocaust and maybe tying it back to this Ashkenazic Sephardic question, 433 00:53:14,180 --> 00:53:20,720 because it's interesting that I think in some way the reason maybe the Holocaust is haunted like a ghost over your book. 434 00:53:20,720 --> 00:53:27,200 You didn't address it. Full-frontal is that its intention with the global aspirations of the book? 435 00:53:27,200 --> 00:53:36,560 Because, of course, the Holocaust happened in Europe is centred around German history and has been central to the extremely Germanic centric, 436 00:53:36,560 --> 00:53:42,290 Western European centric narratives of Jewish history that we're trying to move away from. 437 00:53:42,290 --> 00:53:47,240 And Sephardic Jews mostly or entirely heroic in places like Greece. 438 00:53:47,240 --> 00:53:54,960 But by and large, the Holocaust didn't happen to them. And so. 439 00:53:54,960 --> 00:54:02,040 Thinking about the strands of of of of Jewish thought in relation to politics and liberalism, 440 00:54:02,040 --> 00:54:12,690 the Holocaust does not actually loom centrally for all Jews in the same way, to say the very least, and indeed also liberalism. 441 00:54:12,690 --> 00:54:20,220 The book very nicely brings out how the Ottoman Empire was influenced by liberalism in an important way. 442 00:54:20,220 --> 00:54:29,430 But nonetheless, Sephardic Israelis arriving there from North Africa will certainly sort of Iraq and Afghanistan 443 00:54:29,430 --> 00:54:34,170 were not touched by liberalism in anything like the same degree as Western European Jews. 444 00:54:34,170 --> 00:54:43,440 The same could be said indeed for Russian Jews, whether the brush with liberalism was much lighter. 445 00:54:43,440 --> 00:54:55,710 And this is why in Israeli politics, liberalism, as I would see it, has been aligned with a sort of. 446 00:54:55,710 --> 00:55:08,730 Some German Western European labour Zionist current that is now squeezed to a miniscule fraction of the political spectrum in in Israel, 447 00:55:08,730 --> 00:55:18,310 I mean, Jews in Israel is not liberal. Abigail, you'd like to come back? 448 00:55:18,310 --> 00:55:21,460 We've got about five more minutes. I think so, yeah. 449 00:55:21,460 --> 00:55:29,980 Well, I suppose in a way related to that, I wondered if you could talk to us a bit about Republicanism and how that relates to liberalism, 450 00:55:29,980 --> 00:55:40,930 because it seems to be that Republicanism, which I do think is in liberal Republican, was was very important in 1848, actually. 451 00:55:40,930 --> 00:55:50,200 But it's, you know. Maybe so I suppose I'd like to talk as we have had a conversation with Kay about whether Arinze 452 00:55:50,200 --> 00:55:55,030 is really a liberal or whether she's a Republican and how one can interpret her Republicanism. 453 00:55:55,030 --> 00:56:04,270 And I think that is actually maybe relevant also to the other liberalism's and maybe to the situation in Israel. 454 00:56:04,270 --> 00:56:07,090 Because I do want to point out that, I mean, 455 00:56:07,090 --> 00:56:13,450 a lot of those liberal nationalisms from 1848 did not turn out very well, and that's part of that dynamic. 456 00:56:13,450 --> 00:56:24,730 So I really think that I'm obviously much more sceptical than Adams about the universalist kind of more theoretical dimensions of liberalism. 457 00:56:24,730 --> 00:56:35,740 I think liberalism is always about citizenship and then often linked to Republicanism, which can have a much more aggressive political aspect. 458 00:56:35,740 --> 00:56:42,640 OK, you've been asked whether you might give us a few thoughts on Republicanism in this context. 459 00:56:42,640 --> 00:56:54,490 I have one or two minutes. It's a bit difficult, but I think the important question here is the how different Republicanism is from liberalism, 460 00:56:54,490 --> 00:57:00,490 because there is a way of understanding which says liberalism and Republicanism are basically kind of rivals. 461 00:57:00,490 --> 00:57:04,330 They are opposed to each other. 462 00:57:04,330 --> 00:57:10,330 But there is another way of understanding it, which is to think of them as kind of brothers or cousins. 463 00:57:10,330 --> 00:57:20,710 They. Come from similar sources emerged in response to overlapping events, and I think once again, 464 00:57:20,710 --> 00:57:23,890 in contemporary political theory, there are different versions of liberalism. 465 00:57:23,890 --> 00:57:28,390 For example, one is one thing which is very different from the explosion, 466 00:57:28,390 --> 00:57:37,120 which came from historical work, and some Republican are more liberal than others. 467 00:57:37,120 --> 00:57:43,540 And that is true of contemporary political theory and also true of more historical versions of Republicanism. 468 00:57:43,540 --> 00:57:53,110 So I think it would perhaps have been interesting if there was another chapter on liberal Republicanism and the Jews in the book, 469 00:57:53,110 --> 00:58:03,810 because I think what? You would be interested in is this version of Republicanism that is very hard to separate from liberalism, 470 00:58:03,810 --> 00:58:11,490 and it once again is a kind of general phenomenon in that often different ideologies have so much overlap, 471 00:58:11,490 --> 00:58:13,380 it's really difficult to distinguish between the two. 472 00:58:13,380 --> 00:58:20,970 Do you think about socialism and liberalism in some versions of liberalism comes very, very close to socialism and likewise, 473 00:58:20,970 --> 00:58:30,510 some version of balance of liberalism comes very close to a version of Republicanism. 474 00:58:30,510 --> 00:58:38,100 I said, well, OK, thank you so much, I mean, that in a sense, this is part of the point of these sessions, 475 00:58:38,100 --> 00:58:41,310 especially for those of us who are not experts in the field, 476 00:58:41,310 --> 00:58:47,460 is to have a kind of mini tutorial like this on various different aspects of the questions. 477 00:58:47,460 --> 00:58:48,510 We are running out of time, 478 00:58:48,510 --> 00:58:58,380 but I want to give people a chance to say one or two more things if they are feeling very strongly that they need to know what to do. 479 00:58:58,380 --> 00:59:04,590 I'll start perhaps I'll go sort of in reverse order. I'll start with a reverse order. 480 00:59:04,590 --> 00:59:10,530 Just simply put on my screen, Adam, do you wish to say things, as it were, by way of conclusion? 481 00:59:10,530 --> 00:59:13,830 I don't have a final thought. 482 00:59:13,830 --> 00:59:20,820 I've been thinking about I think I'm certainly sceptical about the universalistic claims of of of liberalism. 483 00:59:20,820 --> 00:59:31,810 Absolutely. And I very much appreciate how the book demonstrates that. 484 00:59:31,810 --> 00:59:38,710 My question is what one does with that politically and intellectually, because we need to then think, 485 00:59:38,710 --> 00:59:44,050 you know, what sort of alternative politics and political theory would be, 486 00:59:44,050 --> 00:59:48,670 want to recommend that in some way addresses what we see as the problems or the hypocrisies of women want to frame it, 487 00:59:48,670 --> 01:00:00,340 of actually existing liberalism in most of its forms? I absolutely I'm sceptical about the claims often made in its name that are not delivered. 488 01:00:00,340 --> 01:00:09,430 Thank you. OK, did you want to say anything by way of conclusion of Feiwel or with your mini tutorial enough for us? 489 01:00:09,430 --> 01:00:15,490 No, I just very briefly, my kind of entry point to Jewish history has been hung around who of course, 490 01:00:15,490 --> 01:00:18,610 has a very European and a very German perspective on Jewish history. 491 01:00:18,610 --> 01:00:23,890 So reading this book has really been interesting because it broadens my intellectual horizons. 492 01:00:23,890 --> 01:00:28,240 Thank you very much for that. Thank you. 493 01:00:28,240 --> 01:00:35,490 Simon. Yes, well, I wanted to reply to that as a historian of the Holocaust in Italy, I, of course, 494 01:00:35,490 --> 01:00:43,830 disagree that your sympathetic observation that the Holocaust is mainly African experience because, 495 01:00:43,830 --> 01:00:49,080 of course, not only Italy, but the grief the Greek Judaism was wiped out. 496 01:00:49,080 --> 01:00:58,020 And after all, Amarant has taught us that the origins of terrorism there is also imperialism. 497 01:00:58,020 --> 01:01:10,480 So the global perspective is not necessarily pushing us in the direction of avoiding the questions about the Holocaust. 498 01:01:10,480 --> 01:01:17,320 Thank you. But in response to one of the questions in the in the chat as well, Abigail, 499 01:01:17,320 --> 01:01:24,040 you get the last word, partly because well, because your place to not fit this is not an event, 500 01:01:24,040 --> 01:01:31,510 but also because it seems to me that one or two of the things that have emerged here by way of questions, of food, 501 01:01:31,510 --> 01:01:36,550 for thought, for whatever your next book is, in other words, the Republicanism question the where does this go? 502 01:01:36,550 --> 01:01:42,700 Next question and so on. You don't have to answer. You don't have to answer all of these questions in your next book. 503 01:01:42,700 --> 01:01:47,850 But I just wondered if you wanted to just conclude our reflections here today. 504 01:01:47,850 --> 01:01:52,890 Thank you. Well, yes, I think about Republicanism all the time, actually, 505 01:01:52,890 --> 01:02:01,620 and I am wondering about the relationship between Hannah Arendt's Republicanism and 1848, in fact. 506 01:02:01,620 --> 01:02:11,190 But I think to conclude, I want to come back to the question Kay raised at the beginning about how we might persuade people who aren't 507 01:02:11,190 --> 01:02:21,720 experts in Jewish history that this is something which is relevant also to the study of liberalism more generally. 508 01:02:21,720 --> 01:02:31,170 And obviously, I don't know how we might do it, but that was our intention, I suppose, publishing it in the palgrave. 509 01:02:31,170 --> 01:02:38,130 Critical studies of Semitism and racism is one way of kind of broadening the horizon. 510 01:02:38,130 --> 01:02:41,170 But obviously we hope that, you know, 511 01:02:41,170 --> 01:02:53,520 you and anybody else who's watching might wish to engage with it and use it as a way of thinking about it with your students, 512 01:02:53,520 --> 01:03:00,150 as well as somebody who works in French. I'm used to thinking of books, as I say, good to think with. 513 01:03:00,150 --> 01:03:03,960 And it seems to me that this is clearly a book that is good to think with, 514 01:03:03,960 --> 01:03:10,020 to argue with, and that's going to be part of its strength wherever it finds readers. 515 01:03:10,020 --> 01:03:20,310 I hope that today we might have found a few more amongst the people who regularly turn up to listen to a book at lunch time. 516 01:03:20,310 --> 01:03:28,560 Thank you all for coming. Thank you, especially to our panellists for a really rich and generous discussion. 517 01:03:28,560 --> 01:03:35,160 And may I remind everybody else that our next book at lunch time and the final one for this year is in two weeks time. 518 01:03:35,160 --> 01:03:45,810 And it's Patrick McGuinness who will be talking about his book, Real Oxford with the historian and also with Dr Jake Wadham. 519 01:03:45,810 --> 01:03:54,120 And we hope one of the person to be confirmed as yet. So do come back in a couple of weeks time when we think about real Oxford, but for today. 520 01:03:54,120 --> 01:04:04,101 Thank you very much again to our speakers and thank you all for coming. Goodbye.