Summary
The nineteenth-century Jewish scholarly movement which, in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, asserted Jewish presence in a hostile scientific environment by refuting antisemitic professors’ arguments and methodology — the tradition in which Peretz places Franz Oppenheimer’s counterattack on racial theorists (PDF p.103-105).
Details
- Its core aspect from its conception was to assert Jewish presence together with fighting the rise of scientific antisemitism, aiming for a prejudice-free scientific discourse about Jews and Judaism in which Jews also held intellectual authority, to dispel doubts of Jewish suitability for citizenship (PDF p.104).
- Susannah Heschel’s phrase, as quoted by Peretz: its “subversive quality … directed as it was at undermining the configurations that mark the history of the Christian West” (PDF p.103).
- It was formed as a reaction to the rejection of Jews by the German national movement and strove to restore Jewish pride — the same injured pride which eventually brought Oppenheimer’s generation to Zionism (PDF p.104).
- Oppenheimer used not only its vocabulary — “Germanomania”, Saul Ascher’s coinage — but also its methodology against antisemites and racial theorists (PDF p.105).
Related pages
Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Franz Oppenheimer, Saul Ascher, Homo meditarraneus, Antisemitism