Abstract
Erasmus’ mind on the “other” and the Jew in particular was very much integrated in current attitudes. Grading and degrading of peoples were imbedded in Erasmus’ mind. As far as Jews, or even new Christians, were concerned, it was difficult to separate religion from ethnicity. Thus, a racial attitude, or proto-racial, was easily developed. Various expressions of Erasmus, of the aforesaid combination—a religious/theological core and racial manifestations or implications—are of this sort.
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Notes
- 1.
Erika Rummel, “Humanists, Jews and Judaism,” in Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett (eds.), Jews, Judaism and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 13.
- 2.
Moshe Zimmermann, Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 89, 95 and 112: “It is not absolutely certain that Marr coined the term “anti-Semitism,” but it is very likely.”; Robert Wistrich, “Antisemitism as a Radical Ideology,” Jerusalem Quarterly 28 (1983), 83–86; idem, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010), 108.
- 3.
The term denotes the once-regnant view of a unified and coherent historiographical perspective that emerged out of the founding generation of scholars of the Institute of Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, e.g., Shmuel Almog (see next note). They shared a belief in the continuity and immanent causality of Jewish history. See David N. Myers, “Was There a ‘Jerusalem School’? An Inquiry into the First Generation of Historical Researchers at the Hebrew University,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994): 66–92; idem, “Is There Still a ‘Jerusalem School?’ Reflections on the State of Jewish Historical Scholarship in Israel,” Jewish History (2009) 23: 389–406.
- 4.
To mention just a few examples of such uses: Victor Tcherikover, Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, translated by S. Applebaum (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1959; 5th reprinting, 1979), 364: “[…] the anti-Semitic literature which flourished at the end of the Hellenistic period…”. On p. 365 Tcherikover uses also “ancient anti-Semitism”; Jerry L. Daniel, “Anti-Semitism in the Hellenistic-Roman Period,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 98 (1979): 45–65; Louis H. Feldman, Studies in Hellenistic Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 277, 289; Robert S. Wistrich (ed.), Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia (London: Routledge, 2013), 74 (Antisemitism and Other -isms in the Greco- Roman World); Menahem Stern, “Antisemitism in Rome,” in Shmuel Almog (ed.), Antisemitism Through the Ages, Translated by Nathan H. Reisner. Vidal Sasoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (New York: Pergamon Press, 1988), 13–25; Moshe David Herr, “The Sages’ Reaction to Antisemitism in the Hellenistic-Roman World,” in idem, Antisemitism Through the Ages, 27–32.
- 5.
Jonathan Adams and Cordelia Heß (eds.), The Medieval Roots of Antisemitism: Continuities and Discontinuities from the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Routledge, 2018), 7–8 (Introduction).
- 6.
See Oberman, The Impact of the Reformation, 164. See also Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. 314, who argues that antisemitism, and not just anti-Judaism, existed long before the modern era (Cited by Oberman, The Impact of the Reformation, 164 n. 71).
- 7.
Ep 2093: 50–63: “Porro, quum triplex sit nobilitatis genus, unum quod contigit natiuitate; alterum quod parit liberalium disciplinarum cognitio; tertium exirinia virtus et ingentia in remp. merita; perspicuum est eum inter nobiles esse nobilissimum, qui circulum hunc suis numeris absolverit […]” Nobilitas sanguinis is mentioned further on.
- 8.
CWE 27, 312; ASD IV-2 87: “[…] si Regum liberi intra ditionis fines elocentur, aut si quem libeat finitimis adjungere, spes omnibus successionis praecisa esto.”
- 9.
See n. 34, Chapter 1.
- 10.
CWE 27, 255; ASD IV-1 18: “Equidem optarim principem natum et educatum apud eos, quibus sit imperaturus, quod optime coeat et coalescat amicitia, quoties a natura profiscitur initium benevolentiae […] Ea res geminum adferet commodum, nam et princeps propensior erit in suos et omnino magis pro suis habebit et populus magis ex animo fauebit et lubentius agnoscet suum principem. Et haec de causa non perinde mihi probantur receptae iam principum cum exteris et maxime cum semotis nationibus affinitates. Magnam vim ad benevolentiam conciliandam habet genus et patria et veluti quidam communis utrisque genius. Huius bonam perire partem necesse est germanum illum ac natiuum affectum confundente matrimoniorum mixture.”
- 11.
See notes 13–14, Chapter 12.
- 12.
The Bible provides us with such descriptive cases. The command upon the chosen people to annihilate the people of Amalek (Deuteronomy, 25, 19), is a religious one, more so a Godly one. “Therefore it shall be, when the Lord thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.” Yet, this command has racial manifestations and implications: it is a command to commit genocide. The literature is immense. I chose to point to a few non-apologetic and non-quibbling studies that do not refrain from defining it as a racial genocide: Michael J. Harris, Divine Command Ethics: Jewish and Christian Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2004), 135, 145; Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (New York: CSHL Press, 2001), 20. For a broader perspective and with relation to other Biblical cases of “group destruction”: Louis H. Feldman, “Remember Amalek!”: Vengeance, Zealotry, and Group Destruction in the Bible According to Philo, Pseudo-Philo, and Josephus (Jerusalem: Jewish Institute of Religion. Hebrew Union College Press, 2004). Ezra’s plan to rip the gentile women from their Jewish husbands and their children and to send them away, and its execution, had a religious core, Godly actually (Ezra, 9, 1–2): “The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites, have not separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to their abominations […] For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands […]” Religious in core, this plan is of racial manifestations and implications: the gentile women were not, and could not become, part of the “holy seed.” See also Ezra, 10, 10–12; Philip Y. Yoo, Ezra and the Second Wilderness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), esp. 158–201; Katherine E. Southwood, Ethnicity and the Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9–10: An Anthropological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 73–122.
- 13.
Rubiés, “Were Early Modern Europeans Racist?” 47.
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Ron, N. (2019). Methodological Remarks. In: Erasmus and the “Other”. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24929-8_8
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