Excursus on a History of Anti-Semitism

Strosberg underscores the necessity for an analysis of anti-Semitism grounded in historical context, navigating the tension between specific historical situations and overarching theories that often seem to demand transhistorical concepts. To that end, the author provides a series of historical moments of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism emphasizing the contingent and sometimes contradictory ways that Jewish questions are taken up as shapeshifting limit cases for central concepts like race, religion, nation, and gender within different historical epochs. It is the response to this historical shapeshifting and contradiction that seems to constellate disparate instances of anti-Semitism. Strosberg engages in debates surrounding the work of historian David Nirenberg. Drawing inspiration from the methodologies of early critical theorists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Nirenberg’s work offers a model for the study of anti-Semitism in terms of proteophobia.