Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The “Jew,” the Nation and Assimilation: The Old Testament and the Fashioning of the “Other” in German and Dutch Protestant Thought

The “Jew,” the Nation and Assimilation: The Old Testament and the Fashioning of the “Other” in... AbstractThis article discusses a reorientation of supersessionist postures in German and Dutch Protestant reflection on emerging nation states in the nineteenth-century. Historically, Christian thought often othered “the Jew” as the “nascent Christian.” Since the seventeenth-century, Protestant theologians also entertained the possibility of theological othering on the basis of the legalism of the Mosaic covenant, of which ancient biblical Israel and its cultural liturgies were regarded as a token. In the context of the modern nation, German and Dutch Protestant thought entertained this typological othering of biblical nationhood to construct the modern Jew as “Gentile” to the modern nation. As “Gentile,” “the Jew” remains the embodiment of the ultimate other, yet as “nascent Christian,” modern Jews begin to face an unrelenting demand to assimilate. This conundrum contributed to a fundamental tension in the imaginary of the nation, namely between patterns of othering and structures of belonging, echoing far beyond antisemitism, and especially in patterns of othering that are inherent to racism and Islamophobia. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the Bible and its Reception de Gruyter

The “Jew,” the Nation and Assimilation: The Old Testament and the Fashioning of the “Other” in German and Dutch Protestant Thought

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/the-jew-the-nation-and-assimilation-the-old-testament-and-the-GTzKeV0dt0

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2021 Mariëtta van der Tol, published by De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2329-4434
eISSN
2329-4434
DOI
10.1515/jbr-2021-0013
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses a reorientation of supersessionist postures in German and Dutch Protestant reflection on emerging nation states in the nineteenth-century. Historically, Christian thought often othered “the Jew” as the “nascent Christian.” Since the seventeenth-century, Protestant theologians also entertained the possibility of theological othering on the basis of the legalism of the Mosaic covenant, of which ancient biblical Israel and its cultural liturgies were regarded as a token. In the context of the modern nation, German and Dutch Protestant thought entertained this typological othering of biblical nationhood to construct the modern Jew as “Gentile” to the modern nation. As “Gentile,” “the Jew” remains the embodiment of the ultimate other, yet as “nascent Christian,” modern Jews begin to face an unrelenting demand to assimilate. This conundrum contributed to a fundamental tension in the imaginary of the nation, namely between patterns of othering and structures of belonging, echoing far beyond antisemitism, and especially in patterns of othering that are inherent to racism and Islamophobia.

Journal

Journal of the Bible and its Receptionde Gruyter

Published: Oct 26, 2021

Keywords: nation; Jew; gentile; racial othering; assimilation

There are no references for this article.