The New Anti-Semitism in Europe: The Islamic Dimension of,and Jewish Belonging in,the EU

This article examines the sense of Jewish vulnerability and exclusion in Europe that has resulted from manifestations, and Jewish perceptions, of the “new anti-Semitism,” and the role of Islamic communities in Europe in propagating this form of hatred of Jews. First emerging in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, and tied in with the Middle East conflict, anger at Israel is directed at Diaspora Jewish communities. This “new anti-Semitism” targets the Jewish collective with the characteristics of anti-Semitism previously aimed at individual Jews. The article focuses on the wave of anti-Semitism that erupted as a result of the 2014 Israeli–Hamas War. Based on an analysis of European Jewish communities, it considers the active part played by European Muslim communities in perpetrating the new anti-Semitism. Using an analysis of survey data, emigration statistics and newspaper opinion articles by leading European Jewish intellectuals, the article considers how the new anti-Semitism is adversely affecting Jewish–Muslim relations and the concomitant sense of “belonging” of European Jewry. The article considers what is required to overcome the new anti-Semitism propagated by Muslim communities to restore a greater sense of Jewish belonging to, and identification with, Europe.     

Medicine as Enlightenment cure: Benedetto Frizzi, physician to eighteenth-century Italian Jewish society

This article examines modern Jewish doctors and the Enlightenment in action through its analysis of Dr. Benedetto Frizzi (1756–1844) as an Enlightenment Jewish physician and public intellectual in Habsburg northern Italy. Frizzi sought to spread the new Enlightenment gospel of polizia medica—public health policy or social medicine—that he learned from its pioneering exponent, Dr. Johann Peter Frank, his teacher at the University of Pavia. Frizzi dispensed Enlightenment medicine for the benefit of the state and society in general, as well as Jewish society and culture in particular, for he saw himself as both public health crusader and doctor-priest ministering to his own people. His commitments to Enlightenment science and rationalism led him to criticize Jewish social practices harshly even as he creatively reinterpreted classic Jewish texts; accordingly, Frizzi was regarded in some quarters as subversive, while in others as an apologetic defender of Jews and Judaism. Situating Frizzi within the traditions of Jewish as well as European Enlightenment physicians, this article raises broader questions about religion and secularism in the modern discourse of medicalized Judaism.     

The philosophy of science in Eastern Europe a concise survey

Journal for General Philosophy of Science - An introductory article, giving first a short historical exposition of philosophical thinking in Russia and Czechoslovakia. Second, basic trends in the...