Professor David Nirenberg is a medievalist and intellectual historian whose work focuses on the interwoven histories of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. He is the 10th Director at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), a leading center for theoretical research across the sciences and humanities, in Princeton, New Jersey. Nirenberg was educated at Yale and Princeton Universities and held a number of positions at the University of Chicago including Dean of Divinity.

Nirenberg’s work explores the social interactions between members of the three big monotheist religions, the different ways in which the various religious traditions have figured in each other’s thought, and how violence shaped possibilities for coexistence. By rationally explaining these phenomena and placing them in political and economic contexts, Nirenberg shows ways for religions to coexist peacefully. The Faculty of Protestant Theology will therefore welcome Professor Nirenberg on May 14 to present him with the 2024 Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize.

Professor Nirenberg, do you have any personal connections with Tübingen?

My wife’s grandfather was a professor at Tübingen – Antonio Tovar was his name; and as a child she spent many of her summers there. And of course, Tübingen is a place that anyone who is interested in religion or philosophy – or in German culture in general – is very aware of. I have also met President Karla Pollmann, who was a member here at the Institute for Advanced Study.

The IAS is itself connected to Tübingen, in that many German exiles, refugees, scholars, were the founding generation of the Institute, and I’m eager to build on those connections. At a time when there is an extensive geopolitical fragmentation in the world, I think relations between places like the Institute and universities like Tübingen are all the more important.
As I think of it now, Antonio Tovar himself was an exile from Spain. Institutions like ours share the responsibility to support the movement of scholars across the world, and to create spaces for people with talent no matter where they come from.

Please tell us about your work

My work has always been about trying to show the ways in which anyone born into Christianity, Islam or Judaism or into any of the cultures descended from these traditions is always thinking in concepts, categories, ideals and pre-judgements that were shaped by the interaction of these three religions. This also applies to our secular world, because many secular movements are descended from these three religions. Think of German Idealism, or of Marxism, or of the Ba’athist movement in the Arab world.  
And so, across the history of these religions and across the history of our modern world too, in every moment, even when we don’t know it, how we think about the world, our present situation, is in part shaped by habits of thought formed by these religions. That’s something I’m always trying to show.

How do you define Anti-Judaism?

Anti-Judaism is how the world has learned to think about the challenges it faces in terms of Judaism – and has learned to think about the ways to confront and overcome those challenges in terms of the overcoming of Judaism. The reason that happened is because both Christianity and Islam understood themselves in relation to the Israelite tradition before them, but in a relation of difference and of superiority – meaning that their role was to understand correctly and to repurify or recover the true teaching which Judaism had either been incapable of seeing or had deliberately falsified.

These religions, which are the reservoir of our ideals, encoded within themselves an attitude towards Judaism which I call Anti-Judaism: the attitude that the challenges and the opportunities they face can best be understood in terms of Judaism. One of the things I’ve tried to do was show how both in Christian and Muslim sectarian struggles, all sides characterize the other – the one they’re trying to marginalize or cast as heretic – as Jews. So the Sunnis have said (this is an early Islamic moment), the Shia are the Jews of our community. And similarly, the Shia – as you can see in contemporary politics – try to represent Sunni leaders as allies of the Jews. Even within one polity, for example during the civil war in Syria, rival groups cast themselves as representatives of the pure teaching, and their rivals as allies of the Jews.

The power of Judaism as a weapon in intra-Muslim and intra-Christian struggles, as well as in struggles between ostensibly secular groups, is what has made Anti-Judaism so useful in so many different periods of history.

Will we see today’s conflicts differently when we look back in ten, 50, or 100 years?

I am sure we will. For example, in the 1930s, many people believed the Jews were the largest problem facing Europe and that overcoming the threat posed by Judaism was the greatest task that they could carry out. From the point of view of the National Socialists, Marxism and liberal capitalism were Jewish; from the point of view of many Marxists, capitalism was Jewish; it didn’t matter where you came from, it was plausible to many people that the Jews were the greatest threat facing their societies and that overcoming Judaism was what they needed to do. And because it was plausible so many people could be convinced to carry out the extermination of the Jews.

Ten, 50, and now almost 100 years later, very few people would agree that the Jews were really the greatest threat facing Europe at that time. Today we can see that what felt to people then as an urgent reality was in fact the product of a prejudiced world-view, deeply shaped by anti-Judaism. I am sure that the same applies to the present: whatever our certainties are today, they will look different from the perspective of the future.

But of course that process never stops. It is possible that - just as in the 1960s and 70s most historians came to believe that the Third Reich and European Anti-Semitism of the 1920s and 30s, 40s was not reflective of reality, of the power of the Jews, but of the power of prejudice – it is possible that people in some future might become convinced once again that, in fact, the Jews were the source of disorder in the world. That is why I think the work of the historian is so important. The past never ceases to exert influence on the present, and the work of subjecting our convictions in the present to the criticism of the past is never done.

That’s one of the things about Leopold Lucas that is so moving. He was someone who dedicated his life to thinking about the relationship between the religions, and how that shaped history, and how that understanding of history could affect his present world. He believed that understanding history differently would make a difference in the present. That is why he was so active in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, that’s why he taught History and why, in 1941, he went to Berlin to teach History and why he worked with Leo Baeck on a history of the Jews in Europe that could re-inform Europe after the hoped-for defeat of the Nazis, which he never lived to see. But I imagine he felt very differently in 1890 about the meaning and the possibilities of history, than he did in 1943, dying in Theresienstadt. We don’t have to wait ten, 50, 100 years. Even within one person and their lifetime, the meaning of history can change a great deal.

This interview was conducted by Amanda Crain