Cosmopolitanism and Antisemitism

Cosmopolitanism advances a universalistic conception of humanity and ties it to the particular freedom and well-being of individuals. However, this book argues that universalism has shown two faces to Jews - an inclusive face that sees them as fellow human beings and reveals itself in magnificent discourses on Jewish emancipation, and a cruel judgmental face that abstracts and identifes 'the Jews' as the 'other' of the universal, which has long manifested itself in discriminatory discourse on 'the Jewish question'.Robert Fine and Philip Spencer track the shifting theoretical discourse of cosmopolitanism in and through its relationship to this question- from the French Enlightenment to contemporary scholarship, including recent work by Judith Butler. Their aim is to shed light on the dangers of 'unreflective cosmopolitanism' and to develop a more reflective mode of cosmopolitanism - a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges its own 'othering' tendencies and attempts to overcome these.The engaging and thought-provoking short book will appeal to a broad audience with interests in the relation of racism to antisemitism, European debates on Israel and cosmopolitan thinking in the social sciences and humanities.

Robert Fine is Professor Emeritus at Warwick University, UK

Philip Spencer is Professor and Director of the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Conflict and Mass Violence at Kingston University, UK