Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] IN THE CLASSROOM 239
has not broadened or diversified the readership in question, whose demographic
profile, from my experience of public lectures, tends toward the
middle age and is mostly Jewish. And as for the complexity of the material,
the fact that the same readers keep buying new books dealing with the same
subject matter suggests that even the most deliberately accessible works
leave many questions unanswered for the lay audience, who is struggling to
absorb vast amounts of specialized information about the intellectual
sources and historical evolution of attitudes toward Jews.
One way of closing the gap that separates academics and intellectuals
from the general reader is by bringing the discussion into the classroom.
The obvious benefit is in the interactive nature of classroom experience.
The concepts and problems that the non-specialist audience might find too
challenging in the process of reading can be addressed in direct contact with
the instructor. And even though the students in the class still represent a
self-selected group, in the sense of choosing to enroll into an optional
course on the basis of pre-existing interest, there is another clear benefit of
introducing the material into classroom curricula: this is a way to reach a
demographic that otherwise remains untouched by book publishing, print or
electronic, namely, college-age young people who are much more ethnoculturally
and religiously heterogeneous than the typical readership of the
works discussed above. The process of translating a rich and complex intellectual
tradition into classroom material offers its own challenges and
rewards, which differ from those inherent in scholarly or publicistic writing—as
I have discovered by teaching, for the past eight years, an undergraduate
course entitled “The Imaginary Jew.”
The genesis and evolution of the image of the Jew—central to all
Christian and post-Christian European cultures, whence it migrates into
American and Muslim cultures (I have yet to see a convincing case for the
originality of the imaginary Jews populating the anti-Zionist rhetoric of
today’s Muslim world)—can be treated from different methodological
angles and by a wide range of specialists in the humanities and social sciences:
theologians, historians of ideas, literature and culture scholars, political
scientists. But no matter the academic specialization, the task requires
considerable interdisciplinary versatility, since it involves repeated crossing
of chronological, national, linguistic, generic, and methodological boundaries.
As a student of European literatures and cultures, I prefer to frame the
subject as a case history in the imaginative modeling of cultural difference,
wherein Jews figure as the paradigmatic Other of European cultures. Thus,
from the initial examination of the theology and psychology of Christian
anti-Judaism and its essential difference from the attitudes toward Jews in
pagan antiquity, I steer the discussion to the impact of theological anti-
Judaism on European arts and folklore; then follows the study of the sur-