David Nirenberg’s Followers (39)

David Nirenberg

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http://www.davidnirenberg.com/

Genre

History, Religion

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I have spent most of my intellectual life shuttling between the micro and the macro, trying to understand how life and ideas shape and are shaped by each other. One stream of my work has approached these questions through religion, focusing on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In later projects I explored the work that “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” do as figures in each oth I have spent most of my intellectual life shuttling between the micro and the macro, trying to understand how life and ideas shape and are shaped by each other. One stream of my work has approached these questions through religion, focusing on the ways in which Jewish, Christian, and Islamic cultures constitute themselves by interrelating with or thinking about each other. My first book, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, studied social interaction between the three groups within the context of Spain and France in order to understand the role of violence in shaping the possibilities for coexistence. In later projects I explored the work that “Judaism,” “Christianity,” and “Islam” do as figures in each other’s thought. One product of that approach, focused on art history, was (jointly with Herb Kessler) Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (2011). In Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2013), I attempted to apply the methodology to a very longue durée, studying the work done by pagan, Christian, Muslim, and secular thinking about Jews and Judaism in the history of ideas. More or less simultaneously in Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism Medieval and Modern (2014), I tried to bring the social into conversation with the hermeneutic, in order to show how, in multireligious societies, interactions between lived experiences and conceptual categories shape how adherents of all three religions perceive themselves and each other. Then in Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics (2015), I focused on how thinking about Judaism shaped the ways in which Christian cultures could imagine the possibilities and limits of community and communication.

Beginning with my book Anti-Judaism, which stretched from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century in order to try to understand the work done by a family of concepts across history, I have tried to cultivate a new approach to the “long history” of ideas. My most recent book, Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, written in collaboration with Ricardo Nirenberg (a mathematician who happens also to be my father), follows this path as well. It explores the long history of the various types of sameness that underpin the claims of different forms of knowledge (from poetry and dreams, to monotheism, math, and physics), using these to think critically about the powers and the limits of the sciences and the humanities. I am now at work on the long history of yet another family of concepts, namely the inter-connected history of race and religion from the Neolithic to the present. ...more

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Average rating: 4.16 · 885 ratings · 124 reviews · 20 distinct works • Similar authors

	Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition 4.31 avg rating — 450 ratings — published 2013 — 16 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Communities of Violence 4.07 avg rating — 354 ratings — published 1996 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today 3.61 avg rating — 31 ratings — published 2014 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Uncountable: A Philosophical History of Number and Humanity from Antiquity to the Present by David Nirenberg, Ricardo L. Nirenberg 3.88 avg rating — 17 ratings — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics 3.83 avg rating — 6 ratings — published 2015 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Development of Jewish Culture in Spain liked it 3.00 avg rating — 2 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition 1st by Nirenberg, David (2014) Paperback it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Ebraico, un concetto politico. Una critica della teologia politica (Meme - goWare) really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 1 rating — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Rassendenken und Religion im Mittelalter: Über Ideen zur somatischen Reproduktion von Ähnlichkeit und Differenz (Das mittelalterliche Jahrtausend 10) (German Edition) by David Nirenberg, Karin Wördemann (translator) 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today Neighboring Faiths (Hardback) - Common by David Nirenberg, Unknown Author 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Quotes by David Nirenberg (?)

“The Revolution that began in France in 1789 sought to cast off all chains of faith and custom, marching into Paris with promises of freedom and the radical improvement of the world through reason. Yet many resisted this promise, or proclaimed it false. Unchecked by faith, they prophesied, reason would prove a more terrible tyrant than God, pitilessly reducing every soul to self-interested calculation and utility, and destroying the possibility of community based on love of God, of neighbor, or of any higher good.”
― David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

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“11 It is my sense—and I do not insist that you agree—that at this particular moment, and on these particular questions, the peril of fantasizing our freedom from the past is great. The “critical thinkers” of our present age increasingly reject the possibility that history can tell us anything vital about many of the questions that seem most pressing to us. Particularly on the questions with which this book is concerned, many see the mere invocation of the past as a symptom of special pleading (as, for example, when histories of anti-Semitism or the Holocaust are invoked to silence criticism of the State of Israel).”
― David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

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David Nirenberg’s Followers (39)

David Nirenberg

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Topics Mentioning This Author

Combine Editions
David Nirenberg’s books