Language:
English
Year of publication:
2023
Titel der Quelle:
Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2023) 137-163
Keywords:
Authors, Arab Attitudes
;
Antisemitism Public opinion
;
Jewish nationalism
;
Arab nationalism
;
Zionism Public opinion
;
Arab-Israeli conflict Public opinion
;
Islam Relations 20th century
;
Judaism
Abstract:
This chapter examines the ways in which Arab writers in the Levant and Egypt addressed the question of modern Antisemitism. It focuses on Arab writers who critiqued Antisemitism and called to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. I argue that during the Ottoman and interwar periods, new understandings of representative politics generated an interest in how members of different religions, including Jews, come to identify with their imagined national community. In this period, Middle Eastern Jews shaped discussions about Judaism and Islam, as they lived in Muslim empires and Arab nation-states and played a part in their cultures and literatures. Modern interpretations of the role of religion in Arab societies, shaped against the backdrop of European colonialism and its negative assessment of the Muslim faith, likewise inspired new imaginings of the close relationship between Judaism and Islam. The rise of the Zionist movement and the subsequent conflict with the Palestinian national movement, however, raised new ideas about the relationship between Zionism and Antisemitism. Particularly after 1948, Arab writers sought to define how the future Palestinian state would treat its Jewish citizens and debated whom should be considered an indigenous Middle Eastern Jew. A common argument in these circles was that the Palestinians, who were forced to leave their country, making way to Jewish refugees and victims of European persecution, had actually paid the price for European Antisemitism. Paradoxically, then, because the Palestinians perceived themselves as victims of the Jewish Question, in their discussions, the Jewish Question was very much alive and unresolved. Subsequently, Arab writers attempted to establish that Judaism is a religion rather than a nationality and explored what it meant to be a modern Jewish subject, as they investigated the meanings of being a modern Palestinian subject and an exilic Arab intellectual.
DOI:
10.1007/978-3-031-16266-4_7
URL:
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