Editorial

Editorial for Vol 33, Issue 1 Editorial for Vol. 33 Issue 1 of Nordisk Judaistik / Scandinavian Jewish Studies

Editorial

Editorial for the Volume 34, Issue 2Editorial for Issue 34, Volume 2

Trender i modernt franskt-judiskt tänkande

The Jewish community in today’s France is the biggest in Europe and the third biggest in the world (next to the USA and Israel) with more than 600 000 members. The French Jews were the first in Europe to be emancipated and they showed strong assimilationistic tendencies, but during the second half of the 20th century, they developed a strong and proud Jewish identity. The Jewish community is, however, deeply divided: mainly into secular Jews and into religious Jews who are moving in the direction of a stricter Orthodoxy. The towering figure in modern French-Jewish thinking is Emmanuel Lévinas, the well-known Lithuanian-born philosopher. Among his disciples one can find such secular Jews as Alain Finkielkraut and such Ultra-Orthodox ones as the former Maoist Benny Lévy. The most important thinker within the centrist modern Orthodox position is Shmuel Trigano, a prolific Sephardic Jew born in Algeria. The Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel have raised the question of the French tradition of reducing religion into a private thing. Many defend the French republican model with a secular state granting freedom of religion to individuals, while other look for a more communitarian and collective way of expressing Jewishness in France. This debate between “republicans” and “contrarevolutionairies” was particularly heated on the occasion of the bicentennary of the French revolution in 1989

Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, Scholem. Fyra tyska judar och första världskriget

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 was seen in Germany as the final test for its Jewry. The Jews had an opportunity to prove that they were good German citizens by acting loyally and patriotically as the rest of the population and would thus, hopefully, make an end to German anti-Semitism. This essay attempts to analyse the attitudes of four prominent German Jews to the war. Hermann Cohen appeared as a super-patriot appealing to the Jews of other countries for solidarity with Germany and trying to show the deep affinity between Germanism and Judaism. Martin Buber first supported the German cause, but gradually grew more critical of it. The war came to signify a dramatic shift in his thinking: away from his earlier mystical thought to his insistence on dialogue. Franz Rosenzweig similarly experienced a great change. He developed away from rationalism and Hegelianism while serving in the German army in the Balkans. Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem was an opponent of the war from the very beginning. As a radical Zionist he despised German Jewry, which he considered to be ideologically bankrupt, and had no sympathies for the German cause or for the Jewish support of it

Erich Fromm och Gersholm Scholem: analys av en ovänskap

Erich Fromm and Gershom Scholem met each other in Frankfurt in the early 1920’s. Both were young, intelligent and ambitious and would later become famous celebrities, Fromm as a psychoanalyst and social critic, Scholem as a pioneering historian of Jewish mysticism. But they did not become friends. Rather the opposite, one can say that a certain animosity arose between the two. Scholem has published nasty comments on Fromm. In one Fromm was quite unjustly called a “psychoanalytical Bolshevik”. Scholem’s claim that Fromm was an enthusiastic Trotskyist is not correct either, although Fromm expressed some admiration of Trotsky as a person. Fromm, on the other hand, did not publicly (only in a letter) comment Scholem as a person, but criticized his theories on messianism on some points. The question why the two felt an antipathy towards each other is not easy to answer. On some issues they had different views, which of course is not a sufficient reason not to be friends. The fact that they developed along contrary lines (Scholem from assimilatory tendencies to conscious Judaism and Zionism, and Fromm from orthodoxy to non-theism and anti-Zionism) might have been of importance. And finally, some reasons for the fact that certain persons just don’t fit together are not possibly to determinate

Den banala debatten: Hanna Arendt i Jerusalem

Few books within the field of Jewish studies have caused so much anger and intense debate as Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. The author was considered to be a self-hating Jew because she accused the Jewish leaders during the Holocaust for having complied with Nazi orders and thus having facilitated the mass murder. Her view of the personality of Eichmann was considered to be wrong, and her way of writing was seen as inappropriate in its lack of humility in dealing with an issue like the Holocaust. Although much of the critique was unfair, Arendt’s non-diplomatic style of writing contributed to the negative reactions

Daniel Boyarin, The No-State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto

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Magnificent work on Swedish-Armenian relations (Ann Grönhammar, Drömmen om Armenien: Armenier och svenskar under tusen år, Medströms Bokförlag, Stockholm 2021)

The reviewer presents the content of the work of Ann Grönhammar on relations between Sweden and Armenia, beginning from cloudy – from the perspective of sources – times of Vikings who wandered as far as the Caucasus, through significantly better documented episodes from the 17th century, until the beginning of the 20th century. The reviewer indicates Polish threads, resulting from the existence of the Armenian diaspora in Poland as the nearest to Sweden from a geographical point of view. Furthermore, the reviewer emphasises the advantages of the work, i.e. usage of many sources, including unpublished ones, as well as iconographic material from different archival, library and museum collections

Svante Hansson in memoriam

Nekrolog över Svante Hansson (1938-2023).Nekrolog över Svante Hansson (1938-2023