Annotation
Course Description
The course is based on the thesis that the way we represent the others say more about us than them. The images of the others help us understand and thus constitute ourselves and make sense of the larger world. Drawing on the books of David Nirenberg and Ivan Kalmar the thesis is exemplified by the Western discourses about the Jews and Muslims. The course covers those periods of Western history in which the major stereotypes about Judaism and Islam were forged: it begins in the times of early Christianity which emerged out of the struggle over the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and ends up in the age of Enlightenment in which Reason tried to free itself from the tutelage of Revelation. The course will show changes but also recurrent patterns in the imagination of the two important “Others of Europe” across several historical eras.