New Books in Western European Studies

In German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic (Princeton University Press, 2016), John M. Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, examines the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry. Efron provides us with an account of how German Jews saw Sephardim as worldly, morally and intellectually superior, and beautiful, products of the tolerant Muslim environment in which they lived. This book is a highly original contribution which will be referred to for many years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Michael Goebel‘s Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015) thinks globally while focusing on the local, everyday histories of non-Europeans in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Examining the myriad ways that Paris functioned as a hatchery or clearinghouse for the development of anti-imperial ideas and movements, the book argues that the social history of migration is central to any understanding of the political and intellectual histories of nationalism, from the interwar years through the period of decolonizations that followed the Second World War. Anti-Imperial Metropolis traces the experiences and statuses of different categories of non-Europeans in the city, groups identified variously as French citizens, colonial subjects, and foreigners. Interested in how non-European students, workers, and activists from various parts of the globe met and interacted in Paris, the book details how politicization happened when it did, and how differences between communities revealed crucial inconsistencies and contradictions in the ideological underpinnings and workings of imperialism itself. Moving from the private worlds of non-Europeans as they lived day-to-day in the city, to the work of mutual aid associations, to the impact these communities and their exchanges could have on international diplomacy, the book reveals much about the imbrication of culture and politics. Drawing on a wealth of archival material from several countries, Anti-Imperial Metropolis offers readers new perspective on Paris’ interwar past while making a significant contribution to the transnational history of empires and their undoings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his path clearing new book, Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Seth Kimmel, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, presents a fascinating account of how conversion from Islam to Christianity was imagined, debated, and contested in early modern Spain. Shifting focus from the experiences of converts to intellectual discussions and disputes on matters such as coercion and assimilation, Kimmel demonstrates that such discussions were intimately tied to not only questions of religious reform but also to the demarcation of varied scholarly disciplines within Christianity. It is this nexus of knowledge, religious reform, and conversion that this book brilliantly explores and uncovers. Questioning binaries such as tolerance/intolerance and religious/secular, Kimmel highlights the complex material, intellectual, and political conditions and considerations that informed scholarly engagements with the questions and puzzles of religious conversion in early Modern Spain. In our conversation, we talked about the major themes and arguments of the book and its striking relevance to discourses on religious tolerance in the present. Parables of Coercion is at once beautifully written and unusually multilayered for a first book. It will also make an excellent choice for courses on Muslim-Christian relations, early modern religion, religious conversion, secularism, and Islamic Spain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellent new book Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). What Brown-Fleming makes clear in her work is that the archive is far richer and more interesting than that. The book is partly an extended discussion of the contents of the archive. But Brown-Fleming’s goals are broader than this. She hopes to help people recognize the new kinds of research questions the archive makes it possible to ask and answer. She tries to help researchers imagine how they might employ Big Data approaches to open new vistas on old questions. And she hopes to give people personal examples of the stakes of these questions by offering specific examples of stories, tragedies and conflicts drawn from the archive itself. Anyone who is interested in research about the Holocaust should read this book. And if you don’t do primary research, you should still read it–to get a better sense of how research is done, to get a better sense of places where our understanding of the Holocaust is still patchy, and to get a better understanding of one of the most important postwar institutions that dealt with refugees and displaced people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar France: Rebuilding Family and Nation (Indiana UP, 2015), Daniella Doron, Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University, looks at the post-WWII effort to rehabilitate Jewish children and to reconstruct Jewish families in France.  She argues that ideas about the family were tied to national identity, citizenship, and ethnicity. Her works adds to the growing scholarship on the history of childhood and the history of the Jewish family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Robert Priest‘s The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a fascinating book about another fascinating book: Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus, published in 1863. Renan’s was a nineteenth-century non-fiction bestseller, but is far from widely read today. In a series of chapters that explore issues of authorship, content, and reception, Priest offers readers a contextual analysis of this “secular” life of Jesus within Renan’s own biography and oeuvre. He also examines the controversy surrounding the book in France, and traces its continuing impact and legacies into the early twentieth century. One of the major contributions of this work is its analysis of the popular reception of Vie de Jesus by French citizens across the political and religious spectrum. In addition to contemporary press and pamphlet discussion of the text, Priest also consulted hundreds of letters addressed to its author from men and women throughout France. This previously unexamined archival material gives us a glimpse of how “everyday” readers responded to Renan’s work, its spiritual and political meanings. The Gospel According to Renan illuminates the history of reading and writing under the Second Empire. Its in-depth analysis of La Vie de Jesus also reveals a great deal about the intersections of religion and politics in the years leading up to the Third Republic.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In his new book Going to the Palais: A Social and Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 (Oxford University Press, 2016), cultural historian James Nott charts the untold history of dancing and dance halls in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. This exploration reveals the transformations of working-class communities, and of the changing notions of femininity, masculinity and leisure that occur in this period. To do so, Nott navigates us skillfully between the perspectives of the dance hall owners, dance teachers and innovators. He them leads us to consider the point of view of enthusiastic jiving individuals. Finally, we take our place on the sidelines with the onlookers and killjoys alarmed by this ‘craze.’ This kaleidoscope of voices and images illuminates the role of the dance hall as a social space. It is argued that the dance hall brought together men and women in search of fun, but also provided them with a safe space to try out identities and behaviors. Nott claims that the spread and success of the dance hall reached the whole country. He situates it within the democratization process of British culture that was led by commercialism in the 1920s and 1930s, and even more so after the Second World war. Nott points to the American origins of the music and dances that dominated the dance hall. But also suggest that a national style was forged on the dance-floor and via the business models and publicity methods of the institution. Consequently, he maintains, a uniquely British space was born. The story of the rise and fall of the dance hall is constructed through its economic history. Its financial success and decline are analyzed with sources from the day’s trade press, the archives of individual companies and the regulation and licensing records of towns and cities. The cultural role of the dance hall is revealed through its representation in local and national press. Oral interviews, contemporaneous social surveys and Mass Observation reports are woven together to construct the experience of going to the palais. The result is a superb analysis of gender and race relations, as well as a fascinating look at an industry that had once rivaled cinema as an ultimate pastime. Dr James Nott is a social and cultural historian at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Music for the People: Popular Music and dance in Interwar Britain (OUP, 2002) and co-editor of Classes, Politics and Cultures: Essays in British History in Honour of Ross McKibbin (OUP, 2011). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, hundreds of thousands of people from the British Commonwealth migrated the United Kingdom with plans to settle and find work. Kennetta Hammond Perry‘s new book, London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship, and the Politics of Race (Oxford University Press, 2015), is a political history of postwar Caribbean migration. Perry shifts our attention away from the response of white Britons and focuses it instead on the politics of black Caribbean migrants. As Perry notes, migration itself was a practice of citizenship, and Afro-Caribbeans saw moving to the UK not as immigration but as their right as British citizens. Furthermore, Perry demonstrates that as black political activists organized against racial discrimination, racist violence, and legislation designed to limit migration, their shared belief that living in Britain was one of their citizenship rights was the foundation of their activism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Justin E. H. Smith‘s new book is a fascinating historical ontology of notions of racial difference in the work of early modern European writers. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015) argues that “in order to understand the forces that shaped thinking about racial difference in early modern philosophy, we must look to the philosophers’ own interest in a scientific classification and physical anthropology, with an eye to the way these projects were influenced by early modern globalization and by the associated projects of global commerce, collection, and systematization of the order of nature.” The resulting book is a thoughtful contribution to both the history of philosophy and science in early modernity, and to the modern history of concepts of race and identity, and is highly recommended to readers and teachers in both fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In Ataturk in the Nazi Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2014), historian Stefan Ihrig examines the history of Mustafa Kemal and Republican Turkey through the interpretive lens of Nazi political discourse. Ihrig shows how Ataturk’s Turkey became a symbol of resistance and national rebirth in the interwar period. Challenging semi-colonial or orientalist visions of Turkey held by British and French, German nationalists saw many of their own aspirations play out in Anatolia after World War I. Ataturk’s struggle against the Entente and the Greek Army became an inspiration for the right-wing press, initially overshadowing early fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini Ataturk’s Turkey became model of governance not only to be praised by the Nazi elite, but to be emulated German state. Nazi leaders borrowed liberally from Ataturk’s example, citing “Turkish lessons for Germany” in the right-wing press. Hitler described Ataturk as his own “star in the darkness” during his years of imprisonment and political isolation during the 1920s. Ataturk’s dictatorship paved the way for the Nazis twisted visions of national progress, authority, and modernity. The ethnic cleansing of Armenians and Greeks mirrored the Nazi party’s own view of Jews as a dangerous enemy within. Ihrig shows how the Nazi vision of Ataturk (albeit not the reality) inspired Hitler’s foreign and domestic policy in the years leading up to the World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies