David Nirenberg

David Nirenberg
Awards	Laing Prize; Ralph Waldo Emerson Award; Historikerpreis der Stadt Münster; Premio del Rey
Academic background
Alma mater	Princeton University
Academic work
Main interests	History of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim relations; history of Spain and the Mediterranean; history of ideas
Notable works	Communities of Violence, Anti-Judaism, Neighboring Faiths

David Nirenberg is an American historian, Dean of the Divinity School, and Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, as well as the former Executive Vice Provost of the University, Dean of the Social Sciences Division, and the founding Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Family Collegium for Culture and Society. He has a particular interest in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought in Medieval Europe. In addition to the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of History, he is also appointed in the Divinity School and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, and the College of the University of Chicago.

Career

David Nirenberg earned his BA from Yale, where John Boswell introduced him to the study of minorities in Medieval Aragon. He holds a PhD from Princeton, where he studied under Peter Brown, Natalie Davis, and William Chester Jordan. He has held visiting professorships at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas in Madrid, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and is an Associate of Germany’s Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2006 he joined the History Department at the University of Chicago and the Committee on Social Thought. Between 2014 and 2017 he served as dean of the Social Sciences Division of the University of Chicago. In 2017 he became Executive Vice Provost, and in 2018 he additionally took on the role of Interim Dean of the Divinity School, stepping down from the Provost's office a year later.

Major works

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition

Nirenberg's 2013 book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is not a history of anti-Semitism, rather, it focuses "on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Christian and post-Christian thought—though it starts with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian polemics." Pulling on an array of sources from across the centuries, Nirenberg demonstrates the potency of "imaginary Jews" in "works of the imagination, profound treatises, and acts of political radicalism." Described as "an extraordinary scholarly achievement", Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition argues "that a certain view of Judaism lies deep in the structure of Western civilization and has helped its intellectuals and polemicists explain Christian heresies, political tyrannies, medieval plagues, capitalist crises, and revolutionary movements." Christopher Smith of King's College London argues that Anti-Judaism represents, "the culmination of a career volte-face in respects to his methodological approach. His 1996 work Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages rejected a longue durée history of anti-Semitism." Whereas, "in Anti-Judaism, Nirenberg allows for a continuation of trends in the development of a shared concept of anti-Judaism built on and progressed over" a period of three thousand years.. Some historians, while praising Nirenberg's oeuvre, have expressed dissatisfaction with the parts concerning contemporary history (for instance, Maurice Kriegel).

Communities of Violence; Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages

Nirenberg's "important" 1996 book Communities of Violence; Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, challenged interpretations that set inter-communal medieval violence (specifically, attacks on lepers, Jews, and Muslims) into larger teleological frameworks. It argued that each event must be understood in its own terms, in the context of economic and social tensions available for exploitation in a specific time and place. He argues that primacy should be given to understanding the local meaning of inter-communal violent events, and that violent events can be better understood as one of the mechanisms that in fact contributed to social stability and kept the overall amount of violence low. The book makes these broader arguments by focusing on Aragon in the 1300s.

Nirenberg questions the longue duree approach that sets individual riots, attacks and pogroms into a series that he characterizes as a "march of intolerance" culminating in modern events, most notably the Holocaust. The book has been understood as a challenge to the entire concept of minority history, reinterpreting groups often cast as "other" or "marginal" as integral parts of the societies in which they dwelt. It has also been criticized for facile use of functionalist Anthropology and of the essayist René Girard's model.

Publications

List of books

• Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies: Judaism in Christian Painting, Poetry, and Politics, Brandeis University Press (2015).
• Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today, University of Chicago Press (October 2014).
• Judaismus als Politischer Begriff, Historische Geisteswissenschaften Frankfurter Vorträge, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen (October 2013).
• Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, W.W. Norton (2013).
• Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism (with Herbert Kessler), University of Pennsylvania Press (2011).
• Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages, Princeton University Press (1996). Paperback edition, February, 1998. Spanish translation: Comunidades de Violencia: Persecución de minorías en la edad media, Peninsula Editorial (2001); French translation: Violence et minorités au Moyen Age, Presses Universitaires de France (2001).

Selected Articles

• "What Is Islam? (What Is Christianity? What Is Judaism?)." Raritan 35 (Fall 2016): 1–14.
• "Love." In What Reason Promises: Essays on Reason, Nature, and History, edited by Wendy Doniger, Peter Galison, and Susan Neiman, 46–54. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
• (With Leonardo Capezzone) "Religions of Love: Judaism, Christianity, Islam." In The Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, edited by Adam Silverstein and Guy G. Stroumsa, 518–535. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199697762.013.20. ISBN 9780199697762.
• "Power and Piety: Is the Promotion of Violence Inherent to Any Religion?" Nation (April 29, 2015).
• "Posthumous Love in Judaism." In Love After Death: Concepts of Posthumous Love in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, edited by Bernhard Jussen and Ramie Targoff, 55–70. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.
• "'Judaism' as Political Concept: Toward a Critique of Political Theology". Representations. 128 (1). Regents of the University of California: 1–29. Fall 2014. doi:10.1525/rep.2014.128.1.1..
• (Coauthored with Ricardo Nirenberg) "Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematical Ontology." Critical Inquiry 37 (4) (2011): 583–614. doi:10.1086/660983. JSTOR 660983.
• "Shakespeare's Jewish Questions." Renaissance Drama (2010): 77–113. JSTOR 41917471.
• "Love and Capitalism." New Republic 240, no. 17 (September 2009): 39-42.
• "The Politics of Love and its Enemies." Critical Inquiry 33, no. 3 (2007): 573-605. doi:10.1086/513528. JSTOR 513528.
• Sarah Stroumsa, "Double Game: Maimonides in his World". London Review of Books 32 (18) (September 23, 2010): 31–32. ISBN 978 0 691 13763 6.