Good writers,bad Jews: the “Jewish Question” among Hungarian Jewish intellectuals of the interwar period

This paper investigates the perceived place of the Jewish writer in interwar Hungarian Jewish literature. Post-World War I Hungary suffered from the effects of a short-lived communist regime, and the Trianon Treaty by losing two-thirds of its territories and more than half of its population. Though previously Jewish communities had thrived in the country, these events caused resentment that manifested itself in the creation of anti-Semitic laws in 1920. Within this new context, assimilated liberal young Jewish writers posed the question of “what is a Jew,” reflecting on their Jewishness and Hungarianness at the same time and pondering about the value of each. They answered the question in their creative works, where they indirectly explored issues such as whether Jews are able to write Hungarian novels or whether only a Hungarian can do so; whether Jewish Hungarians could write Hungarian Jewish novels; whether Hungarianness and Jewishness are compatible or whether writing literature is preconditioned on identity. Through the lens of Aladár Komlós, this paper examines the way in which liberal and assimilated young Hungarian Jewish writers interpreted their place in Hungarian culture and society within the framework of these questions.     

Europe’s “New Jews”: France,Islamophobia, and Antisemitism in the Era of Mass Migration

Are Muslims the “new Jews” of Europe? The spectacle of Middle Eastern and African refugees shuttled by train from camp to squalid camp has understandably drawn parallels to the darkest pages in twentieth-century continental history. Such a historical comparison between Islamophobia and antisemitism, however, risks missing their ongoing interrelation. This article examines that interrelation, arguing that Islamophobia and antisemitism now most resemble each other as complementary mechanisms for diverting the anxieties bred by the global economic order. Antisemitism has long scapegoated the Jews for capitalism’s tendency to produce outsized winners. But there has been no comparably global shorthand for the anxiety prompted by capitalism’s losers—until now. Muslim refugees help give a name, Islam, to the masses seemingly encroaching from the margins of the world system. The result, I argue, is the hardening of Islamophobia and antisemitism into the inextricable poles of a reactionary worldview. Taking France as a case study, the article reads the burkini bans prompted by the July 2016 terror attack in Nice as an expression of middle-class fear about downward mobility. Targeted at both internal Muslim leisure and external Muslim encroachment, the bans evoke how European unease about globalization increasingly takes Islamophobic form. Such intolerance threatens not only to lodge Islamophobia at the heart of a reconstituted Europe but also to erode the vigilance against antisemitism once characteristic of the postwar European project.     

“On That Day,His Feet Will Stand on the Mount of Olives”: The Mount of Olives and Its Hero between Jews,Christians, and Muslims

This article examines the changing Jewish attitudes toward the Mount of Olives, and toward the identification of its “hero” to come in the last days, in relation to the mount’s changing jurisdiction under Roman, Byzantine, and Muslim authority. It illustrates how the Christian appropriation of biblical ideas about the mountain—transforming the ascent and future descent of the Shekhinah into the ascent and future descent of Jesus—led the Jews to abandon those notions, and how the Muslim conquest then brought about a reinvigoration and expansion of the mountain’s original associations among Jews by relocating the appearance of the Messiah as well as apocalyptic scenes on the mount. In the first of these developments, the Byzantine prohibition against Jews approaching Jerusalem led to a distancing of the Jewish people from the biblical and postbiblical traditions that had been connected with the Mount of Olives and its environs during the Second Temple period. Subsequently, the Muslim occupation of the area neutralized that tension, allowing Jews to return to the mountain and restoring the traditions associated with it to the Jewish consciousness. The reaffirmation of the Jewish connection with the Mount of Olives and its ancient association with the future hero may be seen in two developments that took place under Muslim rule: its choice as the location for a yearly Hoshana Rabbah ceremony and its renewed identification as the site for the resurrection of the dead at the End of Days.     

“A new book in Jewish affairs begins”: Maurice de Hirsch and the waning power of Jewish philanthropy at the Fin-de-Siècle

This article looks at Jewish responses to the death of the banker, railroad entrepreneur, and philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch in 1896, the same year that Theodor Herzl published his Jewish State. Examining printed eulogies and obituaries that appeared in Jewish newspapers, from Eastern Europe to France, and from Germany to the Ottoman Empire, the article demonstrates how contemporaries understood the passing of Baron Hirsch as the end of a golden age of Jewish philanthropy. While they celebrated the legacy of the late benefactor, the leaders of Jewish public opinion across Europe realized that the challenges that began to undermine the liberal order established in the century of emancipation were calling for a political response that philanthropy could no longer offer.     

Freud’s “Project”, Distributed Systems,and Solipsism

Abstract

This paper discusses Freud’s model of the psychical apparatus in the “Project”, and concludes that it is a remarkably sophisticated work which even today is still highly relevant to neuropsychological theorising. Freud rejects the notion that what happens in the brain can be clearly localised in space and time. This anticipates the notion of a distributed system found in recent developments in computing (“neural networks”) and in Derrida’s conception of systems characterised by différance. Every part of such a system is constituted by its relation to the rest of the system. Although such systems are spatio-temporal, processes occurring in them cannot be pinpointed in space and time. Against the common charge that Freud has a passive hydraulic-reflex model of the psychical apparatus, the authors argue that Freud presents it as an open, complex, self-organising system. Ricoeur’s (1972) claim that the model of the psychical apparatus in the “Project” is essentially solipsistic, is accordingly rejected.

In conclusion the authors explain why they prefer the model in the “Project” to the more linear model found in Ch. VII of the Traumdeutung.     

Translation and introduction: Alexandre Koyré’s “Hegel at Jena”

This is a translation of Alexandre Koyré’s important, but overlooked essay “Hegel à Iéna.” The essay originally appeared in Alexandre Koyré, Etudes d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1961). A contribution to the philosophy of time, this essay had a profound but generally unrecognized influence on Alexander Kojève, Jean Hyppolite and Jacques Derrida.     

“If you’d wiggled A,then B would’ve changed”

This paper deals with the truth conditions of conditional sentences. It focuses on a particular class of problematic examples for semantic theories for these sentences. I will argue that the examples show the need to refer to dynamic, in particular causal laws in an approach to their truth conditions. More particularly, I will claim that we need a causal notion of consequence. The proposal subsequently made uses a representation of causal dependencies as proposed in Pearl (2000) to formalize a causal notion of consequence. This notion inserted in premise semantics for counterfactuals in the style of Veltman (1976) and Kratzer (1979) will provide a new interpretation rule for conditionals. I will illustrate how this approach overcomes problems of previous proposals and end with some remarks on remaining questions.     

“The Lord Was with Them,and They Were Not Found Out”: Jews,Christians, and the Veneration of Saints in Medieval Ashkenaz

This study takes a fresh look at the tale of Rabbi Amram of Mainz, which appears in both Gedalyah ibn Ya?ya’s Hebrew Shalshelet haqabbalah (Venice, 1587) and the Yiddish Mayse bukh (Basel, 1602). Based on the legend of Saint Emmeram of Regensburg, the tale has long been considered a classic case of Jewish narrative borrowing from Christian hagiography. Drawing on both literary and archival sources of both Christian and Jewish provenance to place the tale in its local context, the article shows that the legend’s narrators in fact appropriated the Christian saint in a very sophisticated way. Rather than simply dressing a Jewish hero in a Christian plot, they implied that their own, clearly derivative version was the one containing ultimate religious truth and that the ostensibly more successful Christian cult was a fraud. They thus used their intimate knowledge of Christian legendry to beat the church with its own weapons. In this sense, the narrative does testify to the great attraction that the veneration of saints must have held for medieval Jews; at the same time, it is a monument to its narrators’ sense of self-preservation in the face of the Christian master narrative so dominant in medieval Europe.     

“I Suck at Everything”: Crime,Arrest, and the Generality of Failure

In this article, we advance the idea that getting arrested amounts to “failing at crime.” And akin to the notion of the generality of deviance—where those who engage in any given form of criminal behavior are also likely to engage in a wide array of other problematic behaviors—we examine whether failing at crime (getting arrested) is associated with other forms of life failure. Using data from multiple waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, our results reveal that, independent of one’s level of self-reported criminal behavior and other key potential confounders (IQ and self-control), being arrested is a significant predictor of a host of life failures related to education, employment, relationships, and health. The key implication of our study is that it highlights the need to develop a theory of the “generality of failure.”     

Weber’s law,the “near miss,” and binaural detection

Weber functions (ΔI/I in dB) for gated 250-Hz tones were studied for monaural and several binaural stimulus configurations (homophasic, and antiphasic with varying phase angle for addition of signal to masker). The various cues for discrimination of signal plus masker from masker alone are functions of intensity increments at one or both ears, an intensity increment at one ear coupled with a decrement at the other, or the introduction of a phase difference between the ears. The decline of the Weber fraction with increasing masker level (the “near miss” to Weber’s law) was confirmed for monaural discrimination over the entire 40-dB range, and a similar rate of decline was found for various binaural stimuli over the lower half of that range. The data also confirm the individual differences found in other studies for sensitivity favoring either interaural amplitude or interaural phase shifts.     

“It’s Not Like Judgment Day”: Public Understanding of and Reactions to Personalized Genomic Risk Information

The value of genomic risk assessment depends upon patients making appropriate behavioral changes in response to increased risk leading to disease prevention and early detection. To date, few studies have investigated consumers’ response to personalized genomic disease risk information. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 60 adults participating in the Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative. The interviews took place after receiving results providing genomic and other risk information for up to eight common complex diseases. We found that participants were most likely to recall results which conferred an increased risk or those of particular personal interest. Participants understood the multi-factorial nature of common complex disease, and generally did not have negative emotional responses or overly deterministic perceptions of their results. Although most participants expressed a desire to use results to improve their health, a minority had actually taken action (behavior change or shared results with their doctor) at the time of the interview. These results suggest that participants have a reasonable understanding of genomic risk information and that provision of genomic risk information may motivate behavior change in some individuals; however additional work is needed to better understand the lack of change seen in the majority of participants.     

Enoch’s “Taking-Morality-Seriously Thought” Unpacked and at Work in the Argument from Impartiality

After a brief outline of Enoch’s defense of robust realism in his Taking Morality Seriously (§ 1), I focus on Enoch’s taking-morality-seriously thought by making explicit the assumptions I see involved in it (§ 2). Enoch’s argument from impartiality is then reconstructed (§ 3) to show how these assumptions are at work (§ 4). Next (§§ 5 and 6), I explain the reasons why Enoch does not succeed in converting these assumptions into a positive argument for the thesis implied by robust realism that there is a moral objectivity. Finally (§ 7), I conclude that the critical analysis provided casts a shadow on the reliability of the taking-morality-seriously thought as a basis of a theoretical inquiry into the nature of morality.     

“One’s an Illusion: Organisms,Reference, and Non-Eliminative Nihilism”

Philosophia - Gabriele Contessa has recently introduced and defended a view he calls ‘non-eliminative nihilism’. Non-eliminative nihilism (NEN, henceforth) is the conjunction of...     

Information theory,evolutionary computation,and Dembski’s “complex specified information”

Intelligent design advocate William Dembski has introduced a measure of information called “complex specified information”, or CSI. He claims that CSI is a reliable marker of design by intelligent agents. He puts forth a “Law of Conservation of Information” which states that chance and natural laws are incapable of generating CSI. In particular, CSI cannot be generated by evolutionary computation. Dembski asserts that CSI is present in intelligent causes and in the flagellum of Escherichia coli, and concludes that neither have natural explanations. In this paper, we examine Dembski’s claims, point out significant errors in his reasoning, and conclude that there is no reason to accept his assertions.