Jews and Gentiles

<p>Studies of the Jewish experience among peoples with whom they live share some similarities with the usual histories of anti-Semitism but also some differences. When the focus is on anti-Semitism Jewish history appears as a record of unmitigated hostility against the Jewish people and of passivity on their part. However as Werner J. Cahnman demonstrates in this posthumous volume Jewish-Gentile relations are far more complex. There is a long history of mutual contacts positive as well as antagonistic even if conflict continues to require particular attention.</p><p>Cahnman's approach while following a historical sequence is sociological in conception. From Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages into the era of emancipation and the Holocaust and finally to the present American and Israeli scene there are basic similarities and various dissimilarities all of which are described and analyzed. Cahnman tests the theses of classical sociology implicitly yet unobtrusively. He traces the socio-economic basis of human relations which Marx and others have emphasized and considers Jews a marginal trading people in the Park-Becker sense. Simmel and Toennies he shows understood Jews as strangers and intermediaries. While Cahnman shows that Jews were not pariahs as Max Weber thought he finds a remarkable affinity to Weber's Protestantism-capitalism argument in the tension of Jewish-Christian relations emerging from the bitter theological argument over usury.</p><p>The primacy of Jewish-Gentile relations in all their complexity and variability is essential for the understanding of Jewish social and political history. This volume is a valuable contribution to that understanding.</p>