Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

242 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:237
world), one walks a fine line between a scholarly analysis of historical facts
and a settling of scores with an adversary who is already down—a sterile
exercise, given the already long menu of grievances advanced since the
1960s against the White Eurocentric majority culture. I prefer to deal with
this matter in the introductory lecture by issuing an apology to those Christian
students whose religious sensibilities I might offend during the course.
Furthermore, throughout a course like this, one can never emphasize
enough the ambiguous role of Christianity, whose theology and teachings
are at once the necessary (albeit insufficient) cause for the modern plight of
European Jews and the main reason for the survival of Jews as the only
tolerated religious minority in pre-modern Europe—an essential theological
and psychological dualism that makes Judeophobia and Judeophilia two
sides of the same coin and is replicated today in the coexistence of negative
views of Israel in some confessions (e.g., the Presbyterians; the United
Church of Canada) with intense admiration in others (evangelical
Christians).
Another challenging pedagogical task is the cultivation of good habits:
given the course’s subject matter, this means scholarly distance from the
material and the resulting quest for terminological precision. Whatever their
ethno-cultural background might be, no students come to this course without
some familiarity with aspects of Judeophobia and antisemitism. Still,
the bulk of the material included in this course invariably turns out to be
highly offensive to the sensibilities of the twenty-somethings, who have
rarely confronted such triumphantly unselfconscious, undisguised, and systematic
religious, cultural, social, and racial bigotry. Even the students coming
from traditional Christian backgrounds and privy to the basic precepts
of Christian anti-Judaism—the replacement theology, the crime of deicide—are
clearly shocked by the rhetorical abuse, graphic imagery, and
violent implications both attributed to and directed against the Jews of the
European imagination. As a result, while students are not expected to come
to class with prior academic training in the subject matter, the course’s designation
at the third-year level ensures or implies that intellectual and emotional
maturity are required for working with such material; and I
consistently refuse to give lectures in high schools or to audiences with
significant numbers of young adults of high school age. (I do make one
concession in the course: allowing students to leave the classroom prior to
the analysis of the visual representations of the blood libel.) This issue of
intellectual and emotional maturity is important enough to be addressed in
the introductory lecture and emphasized throughout the course: students are
encouraged to suspend moralistic (and anachronistic) value judgments and
to take their distance from the material by treating it as a medical pathologist
would treat a cancerous tissue sample. After all, the story of the con-