Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] IN THE CLASSROOM 241
Week 8. The secular recoding of the imaginary Jews. Primary readings:
Ivan Turgenev’s “The Hapless Girl”; Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in
Music.”
Week 9. Antisemitism. Primary readings: Anton Chekhov’s “Mire” and
“Rothschild’s Fiddle”; excerpts from H. S. Chamberlain’s Foundations of
the Nineteenth Century. Secondary readings: Excerpts from Leon
Poliakov’s The Aryan Myth; a selection of essays by Sander Gilman; and
other choices.
Week 10. Antisemitism. Primary readings: Karl Marx, “On the Jewish
Question”; Fedor Dostoevsky, “The Jewish Question”; The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.
Week 11. Assimilation and its discontents. Primary readings: Isaac
Babel’s, “Awakening” and “My First Goose”; Osip Mandel’shtam’s The
Noise of Time; excerpts from Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. Secondary
readings: Excerpts from Sander Gilman’s Difference and Pathology
and The Jew’s Body.
Week 12. Assimilation and its discontents. Primary reading: Vladimir
Zhabotinsky’s The Five. Secondary readings: Excerpts from Michael
Stanislawski’s Zionism and the Fin de Siècle.
The readings in literary fiction reflect my individual research interests,
so that many authors on the list (Gogol’, Turgenev, Babel’, Mandel’shtam)
could be easily replaced by their English, French, or German peers (e.g.,
Dickens, George Eliot, Zola, Proust, Kafka). In addition, a significant number
of works of visual and plastic arts from appropriate historical periods
and all European national traditions are incorporated in each weekly lecture
and discussion. 2
The course usually attracts twenty to forty upper-level undergraduates.
No amount of prior study can adequately prepare them for the challenge of
the historical, cultural, and generic diversity of the material, although all
foreign-language texts are read in English translation. An additional challenge
posed by the material, this time for the instructor, is the central place
of Christianity in the story of Europe’s imaginary Jews. The challenge is of
a pedagogical rather than methodological nature. In the ideological atmosphere
of today’s North American campuses, Christianity (unlike other
religious traditions) is a readily available boogeyman and too easy a target.
By focusing on the history of Christian anti-Judaism and the socio-cultural
attitudes it engendered before WWII (and continues to do so in parts of the
2. These are drawn from many sources, including: Henry Claman’s Jewish
Images in the Christian Church (2000); Ruth Mellinkoff’s Outcasts (1993); Heinz
Schreckenberg’s The Jews in Christian Art (1996); Wolfgang Seiferth’s Synagogue
and Church in the Middle Ages (1970); and Isaiah Shachar’s The Judensau (1974).