JEWS5723 - The Dialectics of European Culture: Intellectuals and Other Jews 2023/24 Spring

The following course will analyse some of the complex ways in which 19^th and 20^th century Jews encountered Western culture and the modalities by which that culture variously sought to both integrate and reject them. We shall examine these complexities partly through the prism of some of the most important documents written by leading Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers of the time (eg. Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka and Sigmund Freud) and partly by examining some of the major social processes and political ideologies affecting this dialectic: acculturation and Bildung, nationalism and Zionism, anti-semitism and racism. We will conclude the course with Vienna as a case study in which all these encounters and processes were particularly intense and came to a head.