Nov 14: Meir Amor, "The Non-Obvious Judaic Roots of Occidental Citizenship.”

The next Canadian Jewish Studies Forum continues in the Religion Department Seminar Room with the following presentations on

November 14: Meir Amor, "The Non-Obvious Judaic Roots of Occidental Citizenship.”

Please note that the session will begin at 9:30 instead of 10:00 so that participants can also attend the Confino lecture (details below).

Location: 2050 McKay Street, room R-103

Abstract

Rather than looking for citizenship’s logic in a hypothesized or presumed “state of nature” non-obvious sociology argues that society (or group membership) is rooted in emotional ties and religious rituals. This claim is well articulated in Durkheimian sociology. Such an implicit emotional perception is also buried in Max Weber’s occidental citizenship theory. Weber tied citizenship’s development in general and modern occidental citizenship in particular to specific mixture of emotional ties and monotheistic religious theological logics. Such theodicies have similar, though variable, tendencies toward rationalization and democratization of God’s grace as a universally open path to salvation. 

Such developments were clearly apparent in Jewish theodicy. The Jewish god was a god of a confederacy of clans. Its authority over all other gods was undisputable. Its relations to the confederacy were rooted in a unique “Berith” and political “ethics” regulating the confederacy of tribes. The “Berith” was struck between the people at large and the confederacy’s god. It was civic-political in nature while retaining religious flare. God and the people were the two signatories and sides of these unique contractual relations.

This perception also shaped Christian theodicy facilitating the emergence of Occidental citizenship centuries later. Judaism “feathered the bed for the Christian mission” says Weber. Citizenship as a secular institution indicating formal membership in states is therefore, rooted in these religious but also civic-political processes.  

Citizenship, nation, state and nation-state became central concepts in modern world history. The constitutive abstract principle of national ideology claims that the political and the national units should be congruent in order to form a nation-state. Full correspondence between “state” and “nation” rarely – or never – occurs in history. More often, the political frame (the state) includes “strangers” who belong to “other” nations, ethnicities, and economic and political groups. Furthermore, frequently not all “nationals” belong to the same “state” and since nations are narrated rather than experienced, the tension between narration and experience tends to produce atrocities and human rights abuses in real experienced lives.  

Most perceive human rights to be a celebratory moral demand presented by modernity and derived from the effort to assert universal moral claims. In contrast, non-obvious sociology argues that problematizing human rights highlights modernity’s failures – not its successes. Whereas most would emphasize the continuity and convergence of citizenship and human rights, non-obvious sociology emphasizes the rupture, discrepancy and conflict between them. These are major current day political issues; the sociological perspective has insightful and refreshing ideas to say about them. 

On November 14, the Institute will co-sponsor the following lecture:

A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide

Prof. Alon Confino History Department University of Virginia/ Ben-Gurion University about his recently published book: “A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)

Friday, November 14, 2014 from 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.
Concordia University, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West, LB-1014

Please note the following sessions:

• December 8 : Pierre Anctil, "L’évêque, le maire et les Juifs; la crise de la synagogue de Québec, 1941-44"
• January 9: Sharon Gubbay Helfer, "The Jewish Community of Sherbrooke, Quebec"
• March 13: Chantal Ringuet, "Transmissions et héritages de la Shoah aujourd'hui"