Author: Michele Battini File Type: pdf In Socialism of Fools, Michele Battini focuses on the critical moment during the Enlightenment in which anti-Jewish stereotypes morphed into a sophisticated, modern social anti-Semitism. He recovers the potent anti-Jewish, anticapitalist propaganda that cemented the idea of a Jewish conspiracy in the European mind and connects it to the atrocities that characterized the Jewish experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Beginning in the eighteenth century, counter-Enlightenment intellectuals and intransigent Catholic writers singled out Jews for conspiring to exploit self-sustaining markets and the liberal state. These ideas spread among socialist and labor movements in the nineteenth century and intensified during the Long Depression of the 1870s. Anti-Jewish anticapitalism then migrated to the Habsburg Empire with the Christian Social Party to Germany with the Anti-Semitic Leagues to France with the nationalist movements and to Italy, where Revolutionary Syndicalists made anti-Jewish anticapitalism the basis of an alliance with the nationalists. Exemplified best in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous document that leaked Jewish plans to conquer the world, the Jewish-conspiracy myth inverts reality and creates a perverse relationship to historical and judicial truth. Isolating the intellectual roots of this phenomenon and its contemporary resonances, Battini shows us why, so many decades after the Holocaust, Jewish people continue to be a powerful political target.**ReviewA lucid, passionate book on a deeply disturbing subject and a thoughtful analysis of left-wing anti-Semitism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Michele Battinis nuanced historical approach is a welcome antidote to a deeply rooted perception of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism (different but undoubtedly related phenomena) as transhistorical entities.(Carlo Ginzburg, University of California, Los Angeles) Offering learned readings of a wide array of sources in the aftermath of Jewish emancipation, Socialism of Fools persuasively situates the eras anti-Semitic ideas and movements within the larger context of Europes economic, social, and political transformations and offers a provocative coda about current conundrums.(Ira I. Katznelson, author of Desolation and Enlightenment Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (Columbia University Press).) This is an extraordinarily interesting and original book that will appeal to historians, political theorists, and scholars of cultural studies, religion, and Jewish studies. Battini engages with the vast primary and secondary literature with such mastery that he leaves the reader feeling well and truly informed.(Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University) Socialism of Fools is an erudite and important book on the nature of modern anti-Semitism as seen through the words, thoughts, and ideas of anti-Semites. Thoughtful, insightful, enlightened, and based on intense scholarship, Battinis voice is much needed in the context of current debates on the history of anti-Semitism.(Robert Fine, University of Warwick) About the Author Michele Battini is professor of modern history and the history of politics at the University of Pisa, and 2015 visiting professor at Columbia University of New York and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Author: Katharina Schutz Zell File Type: pdf Imbued with character and independence, strength and articulateness, humor and conviction, abundant biblical knowledge and intense compassion, Katharina Schutz Zell (14981562) was an outspoken religious reformer in sixteenth-century Germany who campaigned for the right of clergy to marry and the responsibility of lay peoplewomen as well as mento proclaim the Gospel. As one of the first and most daring models of the pastors wife in the Protestant Reformation, Schutz Zell demonstrated that she could be an equal partner in marriage she was for many years a respected, if unofficial, mother of the established church of Strasbourg in an age when ecclesiastical leadership was dominated by men.Though a commoner, Schutz Zell participated actively in public life and wrote prolifically, including letters of consolation, devotional writings, biblical meditations, catechetical instructions, a sermon, and lengthy polemical exchanges with male theologians. The complete translations of her extant publications, except for her longest, are collected here in Church Mother, offering modern readers a rare opportunity to understand the important work of women in the formation of the early Protestant church.ReviewThe Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series allows little-known womens voices to be heard, with translations of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European texts. The approach is feminist, and each volume is prefaced with a historical account of the systematic oppression and frustration of women. - Maya Slater, Times Literary Supplement About the AuthorElsie McKee is professor of church history at Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the editor of the collected works of Katharina Schutz Zell in German and author of the companion biographical volume.