Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on Jews, Liberalism,
anti-Semitism, A Global History, a collection edited by Abigail Green and Simon Levy.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm the director here at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities.
It's a great pleasure to introduce the penultimate book at lunchtime of this academic year book at lunch time.
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?
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.
I'm delighted and for today to welcome Professor Green and Professor Salom to speak about their book.
Also on the panel, Professor Adam Sutcliffe and Dr. Kay Ireton, Jews, Liberalism, anti-Semitism.
A Global History explores how the emancipatory promise of liberalism, both shattered and structured by its exclusionary qualities,
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.
This volume, as its title suggests, takes a determinedly global approach.
It engages with accounts of recent historical work exploring issues of race discrimination and hybrid identity in colonial and post-colonial settings,
and in so doing, investigates how liberalism, citizenship, nationality, gender,
religion and race all functioned differently in different European Jewish heartlands in the
Mediterranean peripheries of Spain and the Ottoman Empire and in the North American Atlantic world.
I want to start by introducing the editors first and then the other members of our panel.
So first, Professor Abigail Green. I'll wait for her to come on screen.
So, Abigail, welcome. Abigail is professor of modern European History at Prisoners College here in Oxford.
Her research, her recent work focuses on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism.
She's currently completing a three year Lehmkuhl Senior Research Fellowship,
working on a new book tentatively entitled Children of 1848 Liberalism of the Jews From Revelations to Human Rights.
It was tentatively titled that about a week ago. I don't know whether it's changed since then.
I'm sure she'll tell us. Working in partnership with colleagues in the heritage sector,
she's also a leading major for leading a major four year HLC funded and supported project on Jewish country houses.
As I said, welcome, Abigail. Also editing this book is Professor Simon Levy Salamah.
Again, I'll wait until I see my associate professor of modern history at the University of Venice in Italy.
His fields of interest include the history of ideas, historiography and culture in Europe between the 19th and the 20th century is particular.
Focus is nationalism's and fascism in the history of the Jews and of anti-Semitism.
Amongst his many publications, there is most recently the Italian executioners, the genocide of Jews in Islam.
These then are editors. The other two members of today's panel are Professor Adam Sutcliffe's.
I'll wait until Adam arrives. Hello, Adam.
Professor of European History and co-director of the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King's College, London,
focussing on the intellectual history of Western Europe between approximately 60 and 50 in 1950,
and on the history of Jews due to Deism and Jewish non Jewish relations in Europe from 16 to the present.
Professor Sutcliffe's. Many publications include the wide ranging study entitled What Adieus for History, Peoplehood and Purpose.
And finally, but not least, Dr Kay Hirota Kay.
Hello, assistant professor and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at his university in Denmark's case for research,
lies at the intersection of political philosophy and intellectual history.
This particular focus is on theories of freedom and modern political thought.
And his book, Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin Freedom, Politics and Humanity, will be published by Princeton University Press this coming autumn.
So as you see, we have quite the panel today and we'll start the discussion with a brief reading
by Abigail from the book afterwards our commentators will present their thoughts.
Coming at it from their particular disciplines will then give Professor Shulem the chance to respond to some of the points raised before
entering into what promises to be a really interesting collective discussion during which would also address questions from the audience.
So please do put them in the Q&A box, ideally run on the track as we go along.
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.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, so I'm going to start things off by reading from the book.
So it's not quite the opening, but very near the opening page to, in fact,
explaining how the devastation that was the Holocaust could have emerged from the
heart of modern European civilisation remains a central problem in Jewish history.
And yet for the historical profession writ large, the frame of reference has shifted.
This book represents both a response to this development and an attempt to move beyond it.
We seek to reimagine a field shaped by European experiences and paradigms in the light
of a relatively recent historiographical moment that has quotes provincials Europe
and begun to explore issues of race discrimination and hybrid identities in colonial
and post-colonial settings without taking much account of Jews or the Holocaust.
In so doing, we aim to integrate some of the established preoccupations of Jewish historiography,
which have traditionally been studied in national, local and primarily European contexts.
With the new perspectives opened up by transnational history and the global and imperial time, the time is ripe for such a project.
The relationship between Jews, liberalism and anti-Semitism is a staple of modern Jewish history.
Peter Pulser first attempted to sketch the contours of this field in a properly historical manner when he argued in nineteen sixty four that,
quote, The dominant ideology of this period, as we have seen, was liberalism.
A study of the theoretical content of anti-Semitism will show us that it represented in the first place a reaction against this ideology.
Then Imposer took a similar line, arguing that the place of Jews in modern German history was shaped above all by
the conflict between liberalism and nationalism as fundamentally opposing forces.
As products of the German Jewish symbiosis who fled their respective hometowns when the Nazis came to power,
Pulser and Mozza believe that liberalism with which they identified and nationalism which had persecuted them, were fundamentally incompatible.
This view reflected an understanding that nationalism was itself an ideology,
not just a flexible political language that could sit within different ideological currents,
most powerfully articulated in Hannah Arendt famous study of totalitarianism.
It was both a response to the Holocaust and a product of the Cold War movement.
30 years after Pulsers pioneering study, two landmark volumes redefines modern Jewish history for a generation.
The contributions to assimilation and community and paths of emancipation
represent the collective achievement of a new wave of revisionist historians,
these volumes have stood the test of time, but they do not speak to the historical sensibilities of the twenty first century.
Our task is to reconnect to the concerns of that historiographical generation and
the pioneers that preceded it with those of our globalised and fragmented world.
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.
I'm not a specialist on Jewish history. I am a political theorist.
So what I'm going to do is to tell how this volume might appear to people with my disciplinary background.
That is, those of us who are especially interested in the liberalism, part of the complicated story of Jews, liberalism and anti-Semitism.
The study of liberalism has been a thriving area of research in recent years.
Oxford can claim some credit for it, thanks largely to Professor Michael Freeden,
who has done more than anybody else to establish the study of political ideologies as an academic discipline.
His pioneering effort has been followed by a number of recent studies, many of which are discussed in this book.
As I've given some on the right in the introductory chapter, the rapidly growing literature on liberalism tends to ignore Jewish contributions.
Of course, individual Jewish figures are discussed,
but their Jewishness is usually dismissed as irrelevant as a negligible piece of biographical information.
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.
First, they sometimes appear as beneficiaries of liberal reforms on this view.
Jews enjoy the fruits of liberalism without doing much to contribute to its development.
Second, do you sometimes appear because they are supposed to have posed a challenge to liberals here?
Jews are understood in religious terms and the question that liberals faced was
whether this religious minority could be accommodated in a liberal polity.
In both cases, the liberal conversation about citizenship, toleration, equality,
and the song is alleged to have happened independently of Jewish life.
I've given Somalis by the policy, the powerful challenge to the supposed security facility.
It discusses various roles that it is actively played in the development of liberalism from its earliest days to the present.
I cannot give a summary of the rich and varied stories told in a book,
partly because Jewish liberals have often vigorously disagreed with each other, but also because the book covers a very large geographical area.
The scope of the attack is indeed a little overwhelming as readers are presented
with histories of Jewish communities from Istanbul and OHAN to Vienna,
Milan, Cincinnati and Jamaica.
But if the book at such induces a sense of disorientation, that is entirely appropriate because one of its goals is precisely to broaden,
diversify and globalised our understanding of both liberalism and the Jewish history as our togetherness more nicely put it.
The book aims to provincials Europe in a key.
One important feature of the book I want to highlight is that it needs appraises nor condemns liberalism in a simplistic way.
Unsurprisingly, liberalism is sometimes discussed in a positive light.
In Chapter 11, for example, are discusses how several distinctly Jewish communities creatively appropriated the liberal
principles of the rule of law to fight the notorious blood libel accusations in Damascus in 1840.
But sometimes liberalism is discussed from a more critical angle, for example,
similar slum's chapter considers how the liberal critique of dictatorial power inadvertently contributed to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Jews active roles in the development of liberalism are similarly discussed in an normatively complicated manner.
Simply put,
Jews rules are complicated because liberalism itself is known to be complicated if Jews are played key roles in some of its crowning achievement.
Some of the crowning achievement of liberalism, they also played important roles in some of its failings.
Overall, this volume of always both liberal triumphalism and the crude anti liberalism incorporating a range of perspectives in a balanced manner.
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,
but time is limited, so I'd like to end my remarks with a question.
The question is about the audience of the book. I understand that the primary target audience are specialists in Jewish history
and I have no doubt that they will read the book and discuss it for years to come.
But the book is clearly intended to reach a wider audience, including social scientists doing research on various minority groups.
In fact, the book invites us to think comparatively about the Jewish experience because the dialectic of
inclusion and exclusion that have confronted Jewish people have also confronted other minority groups,
operate in very different ways. I think this is an important invitation,
and I do hope that scholars outside as well as inside the community of Jewish historians will undertake such a comparative study.
But will they actually do so? Well, they could reach the wider audience that it dissolves.
I think there are grounds for both optimism and pessimism. Much of my optimism comes from the recent global turn in the humanities,
where a new generation of scholars are doing innovative research connecting different parts of the world that used to be studied separately.
My pessimism, on the other hand, comes from my belief that academia does not provide a sufficient incentive for time consuming interdisciplinary work,
and most of us are just too busy trying to keep up with new publications in our respective disciplines.
So my question for Abigail and Simon is how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the
prospect of the book reaching a wide audience and stimulating prostacyclin conversation?
And if you share a slight sense of pessimism with me,
what do you think we can do to make things better and facilitate a interaction across disciplinary divides?
But that's out there, and next, Adam will give his comments on the.
Hello, everyone can hear me and see me, I hope.
Well, so Kay is the liberalism person on the panel, I guess I'm the juice person, so to speak.
But nonetheless, I'm going to start my comments with the question, what is liberalism?
Or to rephrase that in a flagrantly question begging form, how liberal is it?
Or was it history over the past couple of decades influenced by the global
and critical trends and scholarship and in the light above all of liberalism,
deep imprecation with imperialism historians consensus answer to the second question has become not much.
Jews have historically been closely linked with liberalism,
Jewish emancipation was the Obama campaign of the liberal drive towards a more secular and principled shaping of European politics,
which was used in 19th century Europe, widely seen as the most fervent enthusiasts for liberal institutions and values,
and the rise of political anti-Semitism as Abigail's extract that she read out highlighted
has commonly been interpreted as quite essentially a rejection of liberalism.
So where do these interpretations of the Jewish past fit with this more critical reappraisal of liberalism?
This, as I see it, is the core question of Abigail Green and Simon Selim's ambitious, admirable and stimulating volume.
The notion of a synergy between Jews and liberalism, as Abigail very powerfully puts it in her chapter, is here, subjected, as it were,
to a 17 chapter stress test in the light of recent historiographical trends,
enabling us to assess to what extent we need to revise our understanding of the relationship between liberalism and Jewish history.
I can't possibly mention all the goodies in this collection, which ranges widely in time and place, as Chiaretti said,
from just to take some tantalising outriders from the liberal look of Sephardic male fashions of dress in the early 19th century Caribbean
through to the distinctive place of gentry nationalism in the imperial liberal thought of Lewis mania and the immigration story in Britain.
So I'll limit myself to touching briefly on two of the book's five sections.
The first and the last. The first one titled The Limits of Liberalism.
And that speaks very directly to those historiographical trends I've just been talking about.
Both the Somoza's left looking at the late, late nineteenth century Romania and Algeria,
and similar to Sullom discussing the eighteen seventy three pamphlet,
The Conquest of the World by Jews, by women,
by an English convert to Islam showed fervent hostility to Jews could indeed coexist with a wider embrace of liberal political values.
And this is very interesting and important for us to know.
But I'm not entirely sure whether filing this awareness under the limits of liberalism is quite adequate.
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,
it's liberalism, as it were, that needs to take the strain by being recognised as well, less liberal, to put it very crudely.
Shouldn't we also, though, we think, anti-Semitism as a more complex and varied phenomenon which needs to be understood,
particularly in places like Romania and other highly polarised societies discussed by left,
needs to be understood in relation to particular local economic and cultural realities of Jewish non Jewish relations.
The final section opens with Abigail Green's tracing, I'm guessing,
as a sort of anticipation of the book we were told about in the introduction tracing of the long afterlife of eighteen forty eight,
which she sees as the crystallising moment of Jewish liberal Cinergy in the close interplay
between Jewish and liberal political causes throughout the humanitarian activism of the 20th
century and the final two chapters of the book broadly aligned with her argument and trace
distinctively Jewish currents of liberalism forward into the interwar period and the Cold War.
I didn't directly disagree with anything in these three essays, all or three, which I think are really interesting and stimulating.
But I do have some nagging questions which I'm going to offer now in the spirit of friendly provocation.
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.
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?
Jews certainly punched above. They want weight in socialist and communist movements that were often the leading adversaries of liberalism.
And what about the relationship, close relationship between Jews and capitalism?
To what extent is that intertwined in shaping aspects of Jewish liberalism?
And where does Judaism or religion fit in this story?
So the danger, it seems to me, in plucking out Jewish liberalism after special attention is that it can lead to a rather congratulatory
narrative in which Jews are presented not so much in the in their cacophonous diversity,
but as at their core, progressive contributors to liberalism's noble causes.
I also think that the symbolism of Jewish causes within liberalism seems at least a significant,
maybe much more significant than Jewish liberal agency protection of Jews typically matter to liberals for reasons that were ultimately rooted,
I think, in Christian messianism. Jewish political leaders for Montefiore and Commutative Zionist movement became adept
at appealing to the Semitic tendencies that I think were very important in liberalism.
And given that anti-Semitism is one of the key terms of the book.
I think that filer's Semitism in liberalism or perhaps should be given a bit more attention.
And finally, what about Zionism?
This central stand of modern Jewish politics does appear a couple of times in the book, but it isn't central by any means.
Liberal Zionism, though, is certainly today the most discussed strain of Jewish liberalism as particularly Jewish.
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,
even if they didn't describe themselves as such,
have almost always been outweighed by rival socialist religious revisionists and ultra nationalist Zionist movements.
So when I got to the afterword and Samuel Moylan's comments there in the afterword,
who I normally agree with, I was really startled in order to read him.
Right. And I presume this was written in the twilight of the Trump era.
He wrote, quote, In Israel and the United States, trailed far behind by a handful of other states,
Jews are provided with unprecedentedly safe liberal citizenship.
Well, I guess he's thinking of something rather different by liberalism than I am,
because I can think of several places where liberalism seems far more secure than in the United States and Israel.
It's synergise today are surely very clearly with illiberal ethno nationalism, Jewish liberalism.
Insofar as contemporary Jewish politics is mainstream, Jewish politics is oriented around support for Israel.
That liberalism seems to me in very profound crisis. And despite the many strengths of this volume,
I feel it doesn't really help us as much as it might have done to explain how we have reached this point.
So those are my questions and provocations I had over to Simon.
Now, who will answer them? Thank you very much, first of all,
to Torch and University of Oxford for organising this this event and to Karuta and Adam Sutcliff for their contribution,
their provocative questions and their generous reading of the volume, of course,
I have five minutes to answer to all the important questions that were raised.
And I think this is too much of a task.
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
from Mendelssohn and modern Jewish history and the history of ideas that have read the book and ask the important questions.
I think we could go back since one of the presences in the book is also Hannah Arendt as a
Jew and perhaps somebody who in part at least recognised herself in a liberal tradition.
Certainly this was true of Berlin. But if we stick to our answer, many will recall the opening of the Origins of Totalitarianism,
Chapter one in which she in which Honorine talks of the unsettling nature of the fact that the small,
the seemingly small and unimportant Jewish question or Jewish problem has generated in the 19th and especially the 20th century.
Well, the movements and developments that then culminated in the machinery of destruction of the final solution,
this is one of the elements which we put at the centre of our concerns.
And we opened the book looking at what almost Funkenstein has called the dialectics of assimilation.
Having in mind, of course, at the same time, the dialectic of enlightenment, which was written at the centre of the was the Holocaust,
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.
The problem is that the promises of mass of enlightenment, the promises of liberalism, the promises of emancipation,
actually, and put the Jewish community at the centre of a very complex process and experience, which represents,
in a sense, in hindsight, that the good and bad conscience of Europe and to this positive and negative process and to this dialectic,
the Jews have participated in the first person, both as actors, including as a nationalist.
And this is even more so to much later in the second half of the 20th century,
as Adam was pointing to in the form of the Zionist ethno nationalist ethno nationalism.
And the trouble is, it has generated the and and also, of course,
as victims of these processes that through anti-Semitism and I cannot answer the Kantian question with which Adam Sutcliff began,
what is liberalism, not what is enlightenment, but what is liberalism and what are the limits of liberalism?
If I can combine the questions by Keith and Adam.
Yes, we have tried to look at the exclusionary nature of liberalism,
and we indeed hope that this effort may be of interest and can be applied as is already the case,
because we were able to avail yourself of an existing literature to other experiences of religious cultural minority in Europe and well,
well beyond it. So I entirely agree that the synergy of Jews and liberalism, as Adam was pointing out there, is a problematic one.
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.
That was my modest contribution to that, to the volume and the projector and my personal interest in my work.
And I think that the Jewish contribution to liberalism cannot be.
And is too often idealised that there is a progressive contribution.
This has also existed in the form of not Zionism and and progressive socialists, liberal forms of of of Zionism.
We have said that in previous events around this book, the book launch held in London about a month ago,
that's when the Jewish experience become becomes a state entity.
The promise of liberalism is remains that unachieved or worse, is that turned upside down.
So I agree that ah, this we haven't perhaps a that in the volume.
Surprisingly, we haven't we don't devote a chapter to the Holocaust itself.
So there are many sort of dark or dead that NGOs or uncovered chapters,
I hope as a curator saying that we have given a contribution to a historic cessation of this process of beyond idealisation,
beyond a critique of liberalism and the Jewish experience, an attack on it or beyond that,
the victim and the victim paradigm that the lachrymose version of Jewish history and I entirely agree with Adam Sutcliffe's invitation to
historic size and contextualise both the liberal and the both the experience of liberalism and the Jews and the experience of anti-Semitism.
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,
if we insist on the lesson of history through institutionalisation.
Thank you. I now turn the floor to Q&A, I think.
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,
we should probably start by giving you some sort of right of reply beyond your reading.
At the beginning, there were some terrific questions, responses from both Kate and from Adam.
I don't know if you and of course, Simon, thank you for your initial response.
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.
I do, actually, um, I think maybe I want to just pick up on on this point Adam raised about liberal Zionism,
because I think maybe Adam has a more benign view of liberalism than I do in the sense that as a 19th century historian,
I see liberal liberalism and nationalism as being deeply fused.
I've got no difficulty in seeing people like Trischka as working completely within a liberal tradition.
I think that's also the message of Lisa Lefse book that these been not book the chapter that the these Romanian,
Jewish and not the Romanian nationalists, people like Bresciano are absolutely liberal nationalists in a quite aggressive way.
And I was very persuaded by Osam, who read the chapter on the Young Turks, that if we didn't think globally about liberalism,
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.
For instance, the young the Young Turks chapter engages with Buttinsky as a kind of Jewish liberal,
which is certainly not something which I think you would do. So I suppose I'm just picking up on that point.
So for me, an important aspect which emerged in the book was that we have to think about these other liberalism's.
We can't just look at the kind of progressive left liberalism as which we will engage with.
Thank you, Adam. John, to reply to that, yes, I think that's very interesting, but I guess the question then that's well,
there are a couple of questions about posing and what isn't liberalism.
What is what is liberal going against in the 19th century to become so capacious
that it essentially is the overwhelming consensus of politics in that time?
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.
And if you look I mean, working on building on, say, Albert Lindemans,
writing on Romanian anti-Semitism and the fact that many Jews in Germany had arrived
relatively recently were very focussed in in urban areas and with particular economic netsch,
the rent, the rhetoric of anti-Semitism is very similar then I would say to economic might, well, not economic migrants so much,
but foreigners who should not be considered of in the same way as locals in mainstream politics today.
So what that really does then is to rethink anti-Semitism and to show how some of the ideas
that we tend to when we use the word Semitism in the context of Romania in the 19th century,
as was done at the time, it brings this instantaneous recall and shudder and highways to Holocaust of associations.
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.
Foreigners in much of the world in mainstream politics today.
The other response is surely within the Jewish sphere, particularly within Zionism,
there have been bitter arguments between at the very least, one would say, the more liberal Jews and the more nationalist Jews.
And I would see going back to, say, Automan, his polemics against Claude Multiforme in England,
liberal Judaism as the beginnings of more than a century of Zionism in various ways,
putting itself forward as a movement of self-assertion, of Jewish self-interest,
of nationalism, opposed to a set of universalist values identified with liberalism.
And so that internal argument within Judaism, which has now been won mostly in the Jewish sphere by the right,
by anti liberals, I think that's a really to me,
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.
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.
One of the things we talk about in the in the introduction is the difference between
looking primarily at the Jewish narrative as the focus of experience or taking a view
which looks at the relationship between Jews and other people say this kind of I know
you think the kind of particularism vs. universalism is kind of the key challenge,
but I would say that. It's you don't just want to think about it as an internal Jewish debate,
because in most places before the foundation of the state of Israel is taking place in conversation with other contexts and groups, of course.
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.
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,
which was widely discussed worldwide,
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.
And so it makes anti Judaism a persistent category and filter through which the West has looked at the the Jewish questions, et cetera.
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,
since that's a centuries long tradition, while liberalism, one cannot be dated back before local.
But it's clear to me that, yes, we we have to be very careful.
But after all the need for contextualisation.
So the situation is also in the context of a hallahan because of that you were bringing up the item because, after all,
was one of the few who picture that and was able to see a Jewish and an Arab Arab presence in Palestine,
in his gays, in the Zionist writings that one of the few in the Zionist movement large at least as far as I know.
So, I mean, there were elements of Lockean toleration in his gaze, perhaps.
Thank you. I wonder if I could bring Kay back into this discussion partly by picking up now, this may not work.
So just tell me if this is not something you've thought about. But I was struck by one theme that emerged today,
which was that once liberalism gets bound up with a particular state project, then it becomes something different.
And I wonder if that's something that you, as a political philosopher have thought about is a kind of the shift.
I mean, obviously, one talk particularly about the state of Israel,
but one could also talk more broadly as to whether liberalism is, in a sense, always coming at it.
From your understanding of the kind of minority you talked about, minorities, but in particular political parties.
And I wondered whether if liberalism was always on the side of minority and if that then shifted once it
became a state project to whether I'm just going up a garden path that is not particularly useful here.
Do you have any thoughts on that? But I think it's probably true that liberalism changes if.
It transforms itself from a kind of grassroots popular movement, as it were, into something else,
which is a state ideology, but I think that is just true about political ideology.
I mean, if you think about socialism or communism or conservatism, all of those other ideologies,
they do change depending on whether they have power or they don't.
So I think in that sense, it's true what you said is true, but it's not unique to liberalism.
But I was interested in something slightly different about Atom's comments, not on individual comments, but the way Adam raised those questions.
It seems to me that the other might have a slightly more kind of president presentist approach when reading this book.
I think it seems like you are thinking about how this book might be viewing contemporary issues in the 21st century for us.
My impression is that Simon and Abigail are trying to do something a lot more contextualised and to try to think
about different context in which we can think about this set of issues on induce liberalism and antisemitism.
And I wonder if the kind of a little difference between you might emerge from this, some contextual versus presentist approach to history.
Out of you, would you like to respond to that, your your muted?
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.
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.
And that seems to be, to my mind, clearly delighted by a book that approaches the present, comes very,
very close and it's detailed discussion and has an afterword that does discuss the present.
So. And also the topic of liberalism, it seems to me this is a word that is so central to our political debate today,
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.
So I'd like to sort of turn your question to me into a question to Abigail and Simon and say, well,
what is the politics of how you are trying to get us to think about liberalism in your book?
And you talk to a girl about venomously, for example, and people indeed who were committed to liberalism and so on,
and I guess in a sense saw their historical work was a fortification of the value of German Jewish
universalist liberalism against the horrors of nationalism that reach their apogee with the Holocaust.
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.
But to what is that right. And if so, to what end?
What do you want us to do with thinking about liberalism more critically?
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.
And in a way, that's the merit of a collaborative projects,
so someone like Malarky Cohen has a very different politics from, I don't know, Matt Silva or Simon, in fact, will be.
So in that sense, I don't think we could identify.
Maybe that's maybe it's because it's not a single author, the book, it doesn't have that kind of politics.
But perhaps that's also its merit, because I think in the conclusion I mean, the conclusion,
the introduction, you know, we sat for six months putting this book together with these people.
We spoke to them every week. So we know where they disagree with us.
But I think, you know,
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.
So in that sense, I think it would be you know, we're not a group of I mean,
we're a group of people from all over the world dealing with different kinds of liberal
politics in a contextualised way and different kinds of nationalist politics in that context.
You know, I mean, when we were there was when Trump came to power, actually.
So that was very much a context. But people, you know, had different kinds of anxiety, I suppose, and I have to say,
when I was editing chapters, I tended to ask people to remove, you know, some people,
particularly the people writing about the modern era, tended to end with slightly pious comments,
questions and comments about what might Jewish liberals do now.
And I tended to remove them because I just didn't think that was actually the point of the volume.
So I think it's harder for a conservative volume which has, what,
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.
And you're on your own to have a kind of collective politics, but I don't know that that devalues.
And I pick up on this notion of the kind of the collective volume idea,
but also the different internal differences between different communities to pick up one of the questions that come in.
This is from Mark Arseholes are asking, could you briefly compare?
I think I mean, generically, the approach of the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities to the concept of Jewish liberal nationalism.
In other words, is there something that one can say that distinguishes those two as two different approaches?
And this question is both pre and post.
It's asking a lot, but I'm wondering if one of you might want to take it on.
I would leave that answer to Abigail, but I wanted to answer first briefly to Adam's maternal question,
if I may have called and wanted to do so as somebody with an interest in the history of the surrogacy and say,
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.
But actually I have in mind the George Morsey,
who with his own biography and autobiography that is a supremely incarnated by his own autobiography, Confronting History.
And he's stereographic production.
And there you see both the idealisation of the German Jewish experience through the reconstruction of the building of the German
Jews and of the end of the German Jewish symbiosis and the constant preoccupation with the haunting question about the Holocaust,
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?
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.
And it's interesting,
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,
I guess because the Holocaust is the opposite, the most tragic opposite to liberalism.
But at the same time, we have interrogated liberalism and anti-Semitism,
avoiding teleology with that question in mind, as every I think historian and citizen has to do.
And we have still looked beyond the Holocaust of the Cold War,
that aspect of Zionism at the fact that the Holocaust that produced the millions of deaths and also
produced a Jewish statehood with its own problems and new challenges for Jewish for the Jewish experience.
Again, that paradoxically intertwining or unsurprisingly, perhaps because we don't believe that history is the history of freedom,
facing, again, the questions of liberalism and particularism, minority rights, that toleration and violence.
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,
if only to say that I think we all can textualists actually.
So we deal with those groups as big blocks, because I think you would find that the view of Eastern European as well.
As as Adam suggested, there are different currents within all kinds of Zionism,
but also the Ashkenazi community we might be talking about in the case of Montefiore,
but I'm sure we could identify as Zionists, quite reasonable, for example, in Britain.
And then you you would have other other voices in America, like maybe Brandeis and so on.
So I think it's really hard to generalise. And I would emphasise that Sephardic World is also extremely fragmented and different.
And so people have different attitudes depending on where they are.
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.
If I may. Just something about this Ashkenazi and Sephardic divide.
It applies perhaps less to the modern period. But we have tried to challenge the relatively Ashkenazi centric perspective on modern history,
which has been promoted by the centrality of German Jewish scholars in the Jewish historiography by
bringing in next to the Francophone Sephardic and Ashkenazi experience of the French emancipation,
the mostly Ashkenazi experience of the German heartlands, the German speaking languages heartlands of Europe, Ashkenazi experience.
We have brought in Spain.
We have brought in the Ottoman Empire in which the Safadi Milia prevails and has produced the different forms of engagement with liberalism,
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,
which are mostly Safadi and are sort of generally excluded in the mainstream outlook or gaze
on the modern Jewish and even the early model Jewish experience in Jewish historiography.
Yes, I think I think that's clearly I mean, just as a complete novice really to this area,
it was one of the most striking things about the book that your sense of global.
Also, I don't want to overstate this, but in a sense, deconstructive to some degree, the opposition between Sephardic and Ashkenazi,
in a way with that, or he didn't want to lead with that as a kind of primary primary narrative about Jewish identity.
But, Adam, you've been waiting patiently for a while, so I'll bring you back in here.
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,
because it's interesting that I think in some way the reason maybe the Holocaust is haunted like a ghost over your book.
You didn't address it. Full-frontal is that its intention with the global aspirations of the book?
Because, of course, the Holocaust happened in Europe is centred around German history and has been central to the extremely Germanic centric,
Western European centric narratives of Jewish history that we're trying to move away from.
And Sephardic Jews mostly or entirely heroic in places like Greece.
But by and large, the Holocaust didn't happen to them. And so.
Thinking about the strands of of of of Jewish thought in relation to politics and liberalism,
the Holocaust does not actually loom centrally for all Jews in the same way, to say the very least, and indeed also liberalism.
The book very nicely brings out how the Ottoman Empire was influenced by liberalism in an important way.
But nonetheless, Sephardic Israelis arriving there from North Africa will certainly sort of Iraq and Afghanistan
were not touched by liberalism in anything like the same degree as Western European Jews.
The same could be said indeed for Russian Jews, whether the brush with liberalism was much lighter.
And this is why in Israeli politics, liberalism, as I would see it, has been aligned with a sort of.
Some German Western European labour Zionist current that is now squeezed to a miniscule fraction of the political spectrum in in Israel,
I mean, Jews in Israel is not liberal. Abigail, you'd like to come back?
We've got about five more minutes. I think so, yeah.
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,
because it seems to be that Republicanism, which I do think is in liberal Republican, was was very important in 1848, actually.
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
is really a liberal or whether she's a Republican and how one can interpret her Republicanism.
And I think that is actually maybe relevant also to the other liberalism's and maybe to the situation in Israel.
Because I do want to point out that, I mean,
a lot of those liberal nationalisms from 1848 did not turn out very well, and that's part of that dynamic.
So I really think that I'm obviously much more sceptical than Adams about the universalist kind of more theoretical dimensions of liberalism.
I think liberalism is always about citizenship and then often linked to Republicanism, which can have a much more aggressive political aspect.
OK, you've been asked whether you might give us a few thoughts on Republicanism in this context.
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,
because there is a way of understanding which says liberalism and Republicanism are basically kind of rivals.
They are opposed to each other.
But there is another way of understanding it, which is to think of them as kind of brothers or cousins.
They. Come from similar sources emerged in response to overlapping events, and I think once again,
in contemporary political theory, there are different versions of liberalism.
For example, one is one thing which is very different from the explosion,
which came from historical work, and some Republican are more liberal than others.
And that is true of contemporary political theory and also true of more historical versions of Republicanism.
So I think it would perhaps have been interesting if there was another chapter on liberal Republicanism and the Jews in the book,
because I think what? You would be interested in is this version of Republicanism that is very hard to separate from liberalism,
and it once again is a kind of general phenomenon in that often different ideologies have so much overlap,
it's really difficult to distinguish between the two.
Do you think about socialism and liberalism in some versions of liberalism comes very, very close to socialism and likewise,
some version of balance of liberalism comes very close to a version of Republicanism.
I said, well, OK, thank you so much, I mean, that in a sense, this is part of the point of these sessions,
especially for those of us who are not experts in the field,
is to have a kind of mini tutorial like this on various different aspects of the questions.
We are running out of time,
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.
I'll start perhaps I'll go sort of in reverse order. I'll start with a reverse order.
Just simply put on my screen, Adam, do you wish to say things, as it were, by way of conclusion?
I don't have a final thought.
I've been thinking about I think I'm certainly sceptical about the universalistic claims of of of liberalism.
Absolutely. And I very much appreciate how the book demonstrates that.
My question is what one does with that politically and intellectually, because we need to then think,
you know, what sort of alternative politics and political theory would be,
want to recommend that in some way addresses what we see as the problems or the hypocrisies of women want to frame it,
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.
Thank you. OK, did you want to say anything by way of conclusion of Feiwel or with your mini tutorial enough for us?
No, I just very briefly, my kind of entry point to Jewish history has been hung around who of course,
has a very European and a very German perspective on Jewish history.
So reading this book has really been interesting because it broadens my intellectual horizons.
Thank you very much for that. Thank you.
Simon. Yes, well, I wanted to reply to that as a historian of the Holocaust in Italy, I, of course,
disagree that your sympathetic observation that the Holocaust is mainly African experience because,
of course, not only Italy, but the grief the Greek Judaism was wiped out.
And after all, Amarant has taught us that the origins of terrorism there is also imperialism.
So the global perspective is not necessarily pushing us in the direction of avoiding the questions about the Holocaust.
Thank you. But in response to one of the questions in the in the chat as well, Abigail,
you get the last word, partly because well, because your place to not fit this is not an event,
but also because it seems to me that one or two of the things that have emerged here by way of questions, of food,
for thought, for whatever your next book is, in other words, the Republicanism question the where does this go?
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.
But I just wondered if you wanted to just conclude our reflections here today.
Thank you. Well, yes, I think about Republicanism all the time, actually,
and I am wondering about the relationship between Hannah Arendt's Republicanism and 1848, in fact.
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
experts in Jewish history that this is something which is relevant also to the study of liberalism more generally.
And obviously, I don't know how we might do it, but that was our intention, I suppose, publishing it in the palgrave.
Critical studies of Semitism and racism is one way of kind of broadening the horizon.
But obviously we hope that, you know,
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,
as well as somebody who works in French. I'm used to thinking of books, as I say, good to think with.
And it seems to me that this is clearly a book that is good to think with,
to argue with, and that's going to be part of its strength wherever it finds readers.
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.
Thank you all for coming. Thank you, especially to our panellists for a really rich and generous discussion.
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.
And it's Patrick McGuinness who will be talking about his book, Real Oxford with the historian and also with Dr Jake Wadham.
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.
Thank you very much again to our speakers and thank you all for coming. Goodbye.