In November, the Harvard University Press will release “The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France” by Ethan B. Katz (University of Cincinnati). The publisher’s description follows:
Headlines from France suggest that Muslims have renewed an age-old struggle against Jews and that the two groups are once more inevitably
at odds. But the past tells a different story. The Burdens of Brotherhood is a sweeping history of Jews and Muslims in France from World War I to the present. Here Ethan Katz introduces a richer and more complex world that offers fresh perspective for understanding the opportunities and challenges in France today.
Focusing on the experiences of ordinary people, Katz shows how Jewish–Muslim relations were shaped by everyday encounters and by perceptions of deeply rooted collective similarities or differences. We meet Jews and Muslims advocating common and divergent political visions, enjoying common culinary and musical traditions, and interacting on more intimate terms as neighbors, friends, enemies, and even lovers and family members. Drawing upon dozens of archives, newspapers, and interviews, Katz tackles controversial subjects like Muslim collaboration and resistance during World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish participation in French colonialism, the international impact of the Israeli–Arab conflict, and contemporary Muslim antisemitism in France.
We see how Jews and Muslims, as ethno-religious minorities, understood and related to one another through their respective relationships to the French state and society. Through their eyes, we see colonial France as a multiethnic, multireligious society more open to public displays of difference than its postcolonial successor. This book thus dramatically reconceives the meaning and history not only of Jewish–Muslim relations but ultimately of modern France itself.
about the social conditions which had resulted from more than a century of industrialization. Seeking God’s Kingdom examines the work of Welsh Nonconformity’s four main protagonists of social thinking: David Miall Edwards, Thomas Rees, Herbert Morgan and John Morgan Jones. It explores the ways in which they were influenced by European intellectual and philosophical ideas, showing how religion was reinterpreted by them to promote social improvement, and the book assesses the strengths and weaknesses of their approach. Archetypal theological liberals rather than specifically social gospellers, their conclusions were undermined towards the end of the period by changes and developments in the current of European religious thought. This is a comprehensive and fascinating study of liberal theology’s attempt to come to terms with the demands and challenges of an industrialized society.