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Arendt's apparent exclusion of violence from politics — her definitionally-enforced distinction — actually linked politics and war together in a historically and conceptually rich relationship. She criticized the dominant Western traditions of social and political thought for borrowing their models of politics from the realm of organised violence, of command and obedience. But it is her political thought that is deeply influenced by the enduring significance of war. It may be necessary now, more than ever, to learn how to think with Arendt, a time that has delivered us moral and political catastrophes, which while not exceeding her day, strongly resemble and are directly linked to those she directly confronted. Postcolonial conflicts, revolutions and occupations, wars of annihilation and crimes against humanity, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and accusations of Islamo-fascism — these are among the social forces relating and separating peoples and states through organised violence.

The slow motion retreat from peasant and artisan ruralism underpinned an institutional immobilism mastered by a new professional political class of meritocratic barristers and businessmen. Politicized industrial relations and prominence of anarcho-syndicalist militancy in the weak trade unions led to general strikes becoming a mobilizing myth. Anticlericalism pursued the separation of Church and State, while anti-Semitism exploded in the Dreyfus Affair.

The conclusion delineates the 19th-century boundaries of American religious pluralism. Those limits emerged most clearly in the persistence of anti-Semitism, the violence inflicted upon Mormons in western New York, Illinois, and Missouri, and the vitriolic common school debates of 1840 and 1841, which pitted New York’s Roman Catholic leaders against the Protestant-dominated Public School Society. In the case of the Mormons and the Catholics, especially, the 18th-century formula of equal rights for private worship and public inclusion failed. Anonymous living in the increasingly populous cities and the vast expanses of cheap land in the west allowed religious groups to avoid integration. Meanwhile, the continued dominance of Calvinist Protestantism made such isolation attractive. Yet, an important precedent had already been set. The success that early Americans had in maintaining civil peace and encouraging cooperative endeavors between different religious groups provided a reassuring template for future encounters with diversity.

This chapter looks at the portraits of Judas that emerge from the Gospel accounts, particularly of Jesus' passion. It examines his roles in the Jesus movies, with emphasis on films in which the relationship between Judas and Jesus is explored in some depth. As one of the few Gospel characters who undergoes emotional development — from devotion to betrayal to remorse to suicide — Judas holds great promise for filmmakers seeking to inject passion and drama into their Jesus biopics. Most pressing is the question of motivation: Why did Judas betray Jesus? Underlying this issue is an even more tantalizing question: What was the nature of Judas's personal relationship with Jesus?

The biopic genre requires that the hero confront hostility and opposition. The Gospels point to a bewildering array of Jewish groups who are hostile to Jesus: scribes, elders, chief priests, Herodians (Mark 3:6), Pharisees, and Sadducees. But during Jesus' ministry, it is the Pharisees who constitute Jesus' most implacable opposition. Were the Pharisees merely another long-gone 1st-century Jewish sect, their portrayal would pose no problem for filmmakers. While the Pharisees are no longer in existence as such, they are nevertheless considered within the Jewish tradition to be the forerunners of the rabbis who shaped Jewish belief and practice as they are still known today. The filmmaker's dilemma arises from this contradiction between the Pharisees' hateful role as Jesus' enemies within the Christian scriptures and their heroic place in Jewish tradition. The danger is that in portraying the Pharisees as Jesus' harsh enemies, filmmakers become vulnerable to the charge of anti-Semitism.

Despite his relatively small role in the Gospels, Caiaphas is frequently portrayed in film as Jesus' main enemy and the one who bears moral, if not legal responsibility for Jesus condemnation and death on the cross. It is Caiaphas who presides over Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin, pronounces him guilty of blasphemy, and delivers him to Pilate. Like the Pharisees, Caiaphas challenges filmmakers to maintain the tension and conflict so essential to the biopic genre, and yet avoid antagonizing viewers who might be sensitive to the ways in which a Jewish leader, even a long dead one, is brought to life on the silver screen.

This chapter focuses on the economic culture of Jews with particular emphasis on myths and practices. While steering clear of essentialist assumptions about intrinsic ‘racial traits’, it asks whether there was, in fact, anything distinctive about the attitudes and activities of Jewish entrepreneurs. It examines ‘Shylock's shadow’, the scurrilous stereotypes that pictured Jews as greedy, materialistic, and acquisitive; the historical and sociological literature regarding Jewish economic behaviour; and the role of Jews in specific sectors of the American economy, notably in book publishing. It is argued that the Jewish experience in American business underlines the role of social marginality as an important source of innovation.

This chapter focuses on anti-Jewish messages in Passion sermons. It shows that conventions of anti-Semitic utterance in preaching on the Crucifixion did not soften with the coming of the Reformation. Post-Reformation Catholic preachers continued to tap them with full enthusiasm, and Lutheran and Reformed clergy all drew upon them. However, in the basic dimension of the derogation of the Jews, differences are evident among the three leading denominations. Catholic divines treated the Jews rhetorically as the perpetrators of the most ferocious torture upon Jesus. Lutheran pastors retained the conviction that the Jews were indeed the authors of the gravest offenses against Christ. These remain most assuredly physical, even though the tendency within the evangelical movement is to damp down not just the length of Passion preaching—which itself would curtail elaboration—but also the sensual horror of the Crucifixion. John Calvin and his Reformed followers rendered the Jews' culpability yet more abstract. They adhered to it faithfully, but they turned the figure of the treacherous Jewish mob into a metaphor for their verminously sinful human charges, including themselves.

This chapter focuses on the so-called ‘race enemies’. Anti-Semitism was pushed from the beginning of Hitler's dictatorship, but in the first two and a half years, more cautiously than often supposed. From May 1935, however, actions aimed at Jews accelerated, and by mid-July vandals were hitting stores on the best streets in downtown Berlin. Anti-Semitism of one kind or another was reported from all over the country. The Party insisted that its members boycott the Jews, with the obvious implication that all citizens should do so as well.

This chapter presents two religious events by the Christian Zionist group Eagles’ Wings and explores the theology behind the various speakers’ pro-Israel sentiments. It defines the term “Christian Zionism,” tracing its origins and considering its possible meanings. The chapter discusses premillennial dispensationalism. That 19th-century doctrine divides divine history into epochs and applies biblical prophecy to foresee the events that will happen in the end-times, including the coming of the Antichrist and the battle of Armageddon. This chapter then surveys the history of “restorationism” in Britain and America, the movement to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland. The chapter concludes with a discussion or Replacement Theology, the traditional Christian belief that God is done with the Jews and that His promises to them now apply to the Church. Evangelicals consider this to be theological error, responsible for centuries of anti-Semitism.

Chapter Two introduces Oberammergau’s increasingly complex political culture by describing the Corpus Christi procession in which youths carry banners, costumed girls display a Marian statue, and priests surround the Host under a baldachin. Political Catholics dominated elections before 1914, although a Liberal challenger paved the way for Catholics to join non-denominational parties. Defeat in World War I brought Oberammergau both a Soviet-style council that competed briefly with traditional political structures and armed revolutionaries in Bavaria’s capital whom local paramilitary forces helped to defeat. Villagers became passionately anti-Communist, often laced with anti-Semitism because of the Munich uprising’s Jewish leaders. In the 1920s, political Catholicism (BVP) declined as the electorate fragmented, although voters participated extensively in local politics, including Passion Play management. The Nazis performed surprisingly well in the 1930 election, which took place during the Passion season; newcomers, including temporary workers, helped them succeed in Oberammergau.

Chapter Four discusses identifying the core Nazi membership and building biographies of the leading figures. The narrative continues with partial coordination of Oberammergau’s community council. As party members introduced a specifically Nazi culture and Catholics maintained their public presence, new joiners flocked to the Nazi party. The chapter turns to the motives for joining revealed through the biographies of top Nazis, both Catholics and Protestants, beginning with the Nazi mayor and including his nemesis within the party, the Motorstorm commander. Two Nazi generations, war-scarred veterans and unemployed youth, made up the core members for whom both anti-Communism and anti-Semitism emerge in the biographies as driving factors. The Nazi leaders introduced in Chapter Four become the characters carrying the narrative of Oberammergau’s Nazi regime in the following chapters. That story resumes with the first Nazi May Day celebrations in Oberammergau and a confrontation over the Corpus Christi procession.

This chapter reviews critical coverage of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and finds little attempt to understand or portray the movie on its own terms—that it was not any effort at a literal portrayal of the gospels but was structured around a very specifically Catholic piety centered on the Stations of the Cross and the Eucharistic sensibility of Christ’s body and blood. Because they did not grasp these liturgical dimensions, the media instead focused on controversies about the movie’s purported anti-Semitism, its bloodiness, and supposed literalism. This led to many wrong predictions, including that the movie would bomb at the box office, that Gibson would lose his fortune, and that it would ignite a wave of anti-Semitism, and missing a major story—that millions of evangelicals warmly embraced a picture of very Roman Catholic sensibility.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to trace the events that occurred in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. It shows how and why a social consensus emerged in favour of Hitler and Nazism within months of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. This consensus took many forms, and was fluid rather than firm, active rather than passive, differently constituted according to context and theme, and constantly in the process of being formed. The book also details how anti-Semitism changed and slowly spread after 1933, and how media reports and press stories were an essential dimension of life and death in Hitler's dictatorship.

This chapter examines questions about bodies and origins, homelands and fatherlands in À la recherche du temps perdu. In Marcel Proust's novel, the important parental body is the maternal body—at once sacred and profane, place of both sanctuary and exile. We are also taken back periodically to the Recherche's original religious home, by, for example, the views of Charlus in pious mood on the subject of the Christian Church and the sacrament of the Word made flesh. Charlus spews out a set of stock themes from the history of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe. The chapter also considers the presence of churches and cathedrals in the Recherche; the cathedrals are an expression of nation and ancestry, and as national patrimony they belong to “the body-France.” The chapter concludes by suggesting that in Proust the body is where we live but not where we are at home.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the so-called “Mendelssohn Jewish Question”. Many commentators have assumed that since Felix Mendelssohn was born Jewish and set many Old Testament subjects to music, he retained a strong attachment to Judaism throughout his lifetime. Some of the anti-Semitic criticism Mendelssohn experienced is explored. Mendelssohn's numerous Psalm settings are discussed, showing that the composer's setting of these Biblical passages does not prove that he retained an affinity for Judaism. The chapter concludes by distinguishing between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism.