Antisemitism And Islamophobia In Europe

This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Crusades until the twenty-first century in the principal flashpoints of the two racisms. With case studies ranging from the Balkans to the UK, the contributors take the debate away from politicised polemics about whether or not Muslims are the new Jews. Much previous scholarship and public discussion has focused on comparing European ideas about Jews and Judaism in the past with contemporary attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. This volume rejects this approach. Instead, it interrogates how the dynamic relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia has evolved over time and space. The result is the uncovering of a previously unknown story in which European ideas about Jews and Muslims were indeed connected, but were also ripped apart. Religion, empire, nation-building, and war, all played their part in the complex evolution of this relationship. As well as a study of prejudice, this book also opens up a new area of inquiry: how Muslims, Jews, and others have responded to these historically connected racisms. The volume brings together leading scholars in the emerging field of antisemitism-Islamophobia studies who work in a diverse range of disciplines: anthropology, history, sociology, critical theory, and literature. Together, they help us to understand a Europe in which Jews and Arabs were once called Semites, and today are widely thought to be on two different sides of the War on Terror.

The apparent resurgence of hostility toward Jews has been a prominent theme in recent discussions of Europe; at the same time, the adversities faced by the continent's Muslim population have received increasing attention. In Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Matti Bunzl offers a historical and cultural clarification of the key terms in these ongoing problems. Arguing against the common impulse to analogize anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, it instead offers a framework that locates the two phenomena in different projects of exclusion. According to Bunzl, anti-Semitism was invented in the late nineteenth century to police the ethnically pure nation-state. Islamophobia, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the present, marshaled to safeguard a supranational Europe. With the declining importance of the nation-state, traditional anti-Semitism has run its historical course, while Islamophobia threatens to become the defining condition of the new, unified Europe. By ridding us of misapprehensions, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia enables us to see these forces anew.

The treatment of Muslims is the touchstone of contemporary European racism across its many nations and localities. We make a definitive case for two arguments in this book: firstly, the recognition of the accelerating and pervasive nature of Islamophobia in this region; and secondly, recognition that this process is being, can be, and will be challenged by counter-narratives that make the claim for Muslim humanity, plurality, space and justice. This book draws on new evidence from eight national contexts to provide an innovative kit of counter-narratives, which were presented and well received at the European Parliament in September 2018, and subsequently launched across Europe in national workshops in selected states. A synergy between leading academic researchers and the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Countering Islamophobia in Europe will be of value to EU institutions, governments and policy-makers, NGOs and media organisations, as well as researchers of multiculturalism, Islam, Muslims and immigration.

The growing threat of antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia within the European political landscape poses urgent and difficult questions. These questions concern both commonalities and connections between these forms of prejudice and persecution, and differences regarding their discursive functions and the image of the ‘other’ they project. In this volume we interrogate the specific forms antiracism and anti-antisemitism take in the public sphere, their representation in scholarly discourses, and the fact that they increasingly seem to be at home in separate, and sometimes antagonistic, political and academic camps. We also address the conceptual resources and research tools required to study the unity that lies behind these varied phenomena. This collection has a new introduction and brings together papers that arose out of discussions in the European Sociological Association Network on Racism and Antisemitism, published in European Societies. The chapters relate to current issues in the area of racism and anti-Semitism such as the notable impact of the Israel-Palestine conflict on antisemitism in Europe, the contested ‘antizionist’ humour of Dieudonné in France, relations between antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes in Italy and Spain, the problem of antisemitic reactions to Islamophobia in Arab media, the historical relation of antisemitism to other kinds of racism in German literary discourse and how their study can be instructive for the investigation of antisemitism and Islamophobia today, the difficulties Marxists internationally have faced in addressing concerns about antisemitism, and current disconnections between racism and antisemitism in the human sciences. These papers raise fundamental issues of understanding the modern world. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Studies.

This cross-national analysis of Islamophobia looks at these questions in an innovative, even-handed way, steering clear of politically-correct cliches and stereotypes. It cautions that Islamophobia is a serious threat to European values and norms, and mus

Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. Looking for insights into the views and rationales of young Muslims toward Jews, Günther Jikeli and his colleagues interviewed 117 ordinary Muslim men in London (chiefly of South Asian background), Paris (chiefly North African), and Berlin (chiefly Turkish). The researchers sought information about stereotypes of Jews, arguments used to support hostility toward Jews, the role played by the Middle East conflict and Islamist ideology in perceptions of Jews, the possible sources of antisemitic views, and, by contrast, what would motivate Muslims to actively oppose antisemitism. They also learned how the men perceive discrimination and exclusion as well as their own national identification. This study is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe.

This book presents a critical and empirically informed examination of Islamophobia and related issues of racism and nationalism in Germany today, with particular attention to the East/West distinction. The authors, representing several disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and media and literary studies, situate the topic in the global and German context of the 2015-16 "migration crisis" and its aftermath, and of the ongoing transformations seen in the postsocialist regions of the European Union. Since the 2015-16 "refugee crisis," illiberal leaders and parties within Europe have instrumentalized Islamophobia in an attempt to dislodge the traditional political elites. Strikingly, such illiberal movements have been most successful in the formerly socialist areas of the EU. This is mirrored within Germany itself, where political formations with an Islamophobic agenda remain more popular in the East than in the West. This volume examines the reasons for this difference, including not only the ideological heritage of Soviet-dominated socialism but also the effects of western interventions in the formerly socialist areas in and beyond Germany since the end of the Cold War. Some Islamophobic and other hateful tendencies were in fact introduced from, and continue to prosper also, in the West. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

This book, the first to explore the politics of definitions from an interdisciplinary perspective, encourages readers to reconsider the value and limits of definitions in confronting antisemitism and Islamophobia. In recent years, definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia have become central to the struggle to combat the hostility, harassment and discrimination experienced by Jews and Muslims. Yet these definitions have also provoked fierce controversy: critics have questioned whether they are fit for purpose, or have criticised them as unwelcome attempts to restrict freedom of expression. In this edited collection, historians, social scientists and philosophers reflect on definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia in both the past and the present. Its contributors investigate the different historical contexts which have shaped definitions and examine their different political purposes and meanings, as well as addressing contemporary debates, and identifying ways for us to move beyond our current impasse. This book therefore provides a broad and new perspective from which to comprehend present day minority politics.