Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Editor's Introduction Catherine Chatterley, Founding Editor-in-Chief In 2018, there was a significant rise in antisemitic violence. In France, there was a 74% increase in antisemitic incidents (from 311 to 541), including the torture and murder of an 85 year old Holocaust survivor (Mireille Knoll). Germany has just reported a 10 year record high of 1,646 antisemitic acts in 2018, in which 43 people were wounded. In the UK, 1,652 antisemitic incidents were recorded with 123 classified as violent (the total number is a 16% increase from the previous year). Canada reports that 2017 was the second consecutive year in which record numbers were reached: 1,752 antisemitic incidents (16 violent acts; 327 acts of vandalism; and 1409 acts of harassment). And, of course, the murder of 11 Jews (and wounding of another six) at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 was the deadliest act of antisemitic violence in American history. There is growing agreement that the main sources of antisemitic violence in the Western world today are on the far-right, the far-left, and within Islamic supremacist circles. Unfortunately, it takes an upsurge in physical violence against Jews for people to recognize the threatening nature of antisemitism. However, few people seem to be willing to make the connection between the escalating rhetorical assault on Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish state since the new millennium and this increase in physical violence. This is perhaps something for scholars to consider as well—the connections between thoughts, words, and actions. In this issue of Antisemitism Studies, Sina Arnold and Jana König address the subject of rising antisemitism in Germany through an examination of refugee attitudes toward Jews, Judaism, Israel, and the Holocaust. Arnold and König foreground the diversity of experience among their interviewees and refuse to make assumptions about their attitudes based on their religious background. [End Page 1] Comparing the findings of their survey research to other German data, the authors discover a range of attitudes among recent refugees and conclude that researchers should not simply assume that the results of attitudinal surveys among newly arrived refugees are synonymous with those of German-born Muslims. The year 2017 was the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, sparked by Martin Luther's storied nailing of his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Luther's relationship to the Jewish people has come under greater scrutiny in the last several decades. Thomas Kaufmann, a leading historian of this subject, examines Luther's theological attitudes toward Jews in the context of his own time and also how those attitudes were received by Germans later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shift in thinking about Jews between young and old Luther is explained with reference to specific developments in Luther's life and career. Kaufmann concludes with an analysis of the embrace of Luther by racist antisemites in later centuries, including the Nazi Party. Is antisemitism a metaphysical phenomenon? Jean Axelrad Cahan argues that antisemitism is not metaphysical by nature, against the suggestions of other scholars like Robert Wistrich and David Patterson. Instead, she suggests that antisemitism, like other forms of hatred, can be explained historically. The motivations of antisemites are varied and do include religious beliefs (even the Nazis used religious themes and imagery), but that does not make antisemitism a sacral or metaphysical phenomenon. Cahan examines the concept of political religion, and the scholarship on twentieth century totalitarianism, to help explain many of the obsessive and relentlessly destructive aspects of antisemitism used by others to argue for its metaphysical quality. Irven Resnick offers an analysis of a number of blood libel stories, including one recorded by the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré describing both ritual murder and cruentation, in which the corpse of a murder victim spontaneously effuses blood in the presence of the murderer. This is the first story to appeal to the phenomenon of cruentation in order to indict Jews for a ritual murder. [End Page 2] More importantly, Resnick argues that Thomas's story provides an essential element in the evolution of the ritual murder accusation—in addition to killing Christian children, Jews are...