Cosmopolitanism and the Jews

最近，世界主义已经成为西方社会包容性和多样性的一个关键词，在西方，社会越来越多地受到移民、跨国和散居过程的影响。这个项目认为，从现代性早期开始，犹太人就代表了世界主义的典范，因为他们被视为超越国界的民族。今天，他们基本上已经从画面中消失了，但仍然在关于世界主义的学术话语的重写本中。虽然“世界主义者”的问题以一种复仇的方式回到了社会科学和政治舞台（以关于人口流动及其城市化的辩论的形式），但很少有人关注这个概念是何时以及如何演变的。我和我的合著者，Sander L. Gilman教授（埃默里大学）一起呈现的是一个案例研究和历史：现代对移民和人民跨界自由流动的焦虑的起源，以及民族国家和这些个人赋予这种运动的意义。这段历史与当代德国和英国关于移民的辩论，以及更广泛地说，与我们全球化的世界直接相关。在我们之前的个人工作和研究合作的基础上，我们目前的项目在全球视角下研究德国犹太人世界主义的轨迹。我的ahrc资助的专著《魔像归来》（2011）研究了从19世纪的德国到最近出现的全球化犹太文化形式的现代犹太流行文化，认为这些都伴随着一种新的世界主义犹太意识。我们联合组织的会议（2008年）和随后共同编辑的《全球化时代的犹太文化》（2011年）从跨学科的角度探讨了这些联系。拟议的研究计划和相关的影响活动将使我能够与教育，艺术和政治领域的主要从业者建立联系，并在学术界内外建立我作为知识领袖的声誉。我们计划中的研究将德国犹太人的例子作为世界主义的典型案例研究，它以复杂的方式在西半球和其他地方发挥作用。我们从这样一个前提出发：讲德语的犹太人既是世界主义者的缩影，他们自己也为这个概念贡献了丰富的文学和理论著作。我们质疑犹太人是如何成为康德和费希特的特殊普遍性的世界主义辩证法的试金石的。概念化研究的整体范围和计划的个别章节，我们正在寻求资金，以支持详细的研究和实际写作的工作。我们认为，无根的犹太人、陌生人或贱民、世界主义者和国际主义者构成了犹太人流动性和流动性的二分意象的一部分。我们试图证明这些观念是如何在启蒙运动和随之而来的民族主义和种族主义思想中得到巩固的。我们的研究将分析这些犹太人形象的内在不稳定性，展示它们是如何助长反犹主义话语的，但也似乎是对犹太人的生产性观念。我们认为，这些观念在20世纪初犹太人本身就是世界主义者的观念中达到顶峰，并在意识形态上支持了纳粹和斯大林主义对犹太人的迫害。专注于自我认同的德国犹太作家参与现代犹太文化和政治话语在19世纪和20世纪，我们想探索如何犹太人的流动性和流动性的概念在社会变革的特定背景下产生。我们提出了历史矛盾的应用这些关于犹太人的想法，以个别作者和他们的工作的指示性案例研究。

Cosmopolitanism has recently become a keyword in envisioning productive types of inclusivity and diversity in the West, where societies are increasingly shaped by migration, transnational and diasporic processes. This project contends that from early modernity onwards, Jews represented the paradigm of the cosmopolitan because they were seen as a people beyond borders. Today, they have largely vanished from the picture but remain in the palimpsest of academic discourse about the cosmopolitan.While the issue of the cosmopolitan has returned with a vengeance to the social sciences and to the political arena (in the shape of debates about the movement of people and their urbanisation) little attention has been given to when and how this concept evolved. What I am presenting with my co-author, Prof. Sander L. Gilman (Emory University), is a case study and a history: the origin of the modern anxiety about immigration and the free flow of peoples across boundaries, and the meanings that nation states and these individuals attach to such movement pro and contra. This history has direct relevance to contemporary debates on migration in Germany and the UK, and our globalising world more broadly.Building on our previous individual work and research collaborations, our current project examines the trajectory of German-Jewish cosmopolitanism in global perspective. My AHRC-funded monograph The Golem Returns (2011) had studied modern Jewish popular culture from 1800s Germany to the recent emergence of globalised forms of Jewish culture, arguing that these were accompanied by a new cosmopolitan Jewish awareness. Our jointly organised conference (2008) and following co-edited volume on Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalization (2011) explored these connections in interdisciplinary perspective. The proposed research programme and associated impact activities will enable me to network with key practitioners in the education, arts and politics, and develop my reputation as an intellectual leader within academia and beyond.Our planned study explores the German-Jewish example as an exemplary case study of cosmopolitanism, which works itself out in complex ways across the Western hemisphere and beyond. We set out from the premise that German-speaking Jews both epitomized the figure of the cosmopolitan and themselves contributed a rich body of literary and theoretical writing on this concept. We question how Jews were and are made to function as the litmus test of Kant's and Fichte's cosmopolitanist dialectic of particularist universality. Having conceptualised the overall scope of the study and planned individual chapters, we are seeking funding to support for the detailed research and actual writing of the work.We argue that the rootless Jew, the stranger or pariah, the cosmopolitan and the internationalist form part of the dichotomous imagery attached to Jewish mobility and fluidity. We seek to demonstrate how these notions consolidated during the Enlightenment and ensuing nationalist and racial thought. Our study will analyse the inherent instability of these images of the Jews, showing how they served to fuel antisemitic discourses, but also seemingly productive notions of the Jews. These perceptions, we contend, culminated in the early 20th-century perception of the Jews as cosmopolitans per se and served to ideologically underpin the Nazi and Stalinist persecutions of Jews.Focussing on self-identified German-Jewish writers participating in modern Jewish cultural and political discourses during the 19th and 20th centuries, we want to explore how concepts of Jewish mobility and fluidity arose in particular contexts of social change. We present the historically ambivalent application of these ideas about the Jews to indicative case studies of individual authors and their work.