David Nirenberg

David Nirenberg’s outstanding contributions are fundamental to Jewish Studies, but they also profoundly chart territories above and beyond the field that address urgent questions of our times, including the roots of modern evils. Because episodes of violence are not part of a primitive European past long left behind, Nirenberg has engaged with the “yearning to discover times and places of peaceful religious interaction”. In an effort to understand “when Europe took a wrong turn”, he scrutinized the creative and destructive potentials produced by the three faiths in relation to one another, identifying determinants that allowed multireligious societies to produce both coexistence and violent intolerance, arguing that positive and negative potentials are inseparable in polarized societies.

His book, Communities of Violence (1996), makes a significant contribution to Jewish Studies by challenging the essentialist and overly continuity-based paradigm of the approach to antisemitism in the medieval period. It proposed instead a perspective that emphasized the neighborhood, the local determi-nants of hostility, its ritual dimension, and its political significance. He subjected his sources to critical scrutiny with methodological rigor, pondering what can be considered as evidence for oppression, or extermination, and what can be considered as pointing toward tolerance, coexistence, or religious freedom. Since history can be evoked from all points of view, “as a source of geopolitical explanation, moral certainty, and even cosmological comfort to communities in the present,” Nirenberg sought to ascertain how the narratives were framed at the time. To that end, he employed a micro-level approach to investi-gate the motives, choices, and selections of those who produced and preserved the sources. Through these records, Nirenberg interrogated the ways in which participants and witnesses of large-scale violence justified their interactions with their neighbors who did not share the same faith. This anti-structuralist work challenged the paradigm of a “persecuting society” and had a significant impact on historians working on these subjects.

Nirenberg’s following major book, Anti-Judaism (2013) – which became a standard reference work –, set forth views that differed significantly from those in Communities. In it, he seeks to understand the persistence of antisemitism today. He argues that hostility towards Jews is not some archaic or irrational relic in the vast edifice of Western thought, but rather an explanatory force, one of the fundamental building blocks upon which that edifice was constructed. In Nirenberg’s view, a certain conception of Judaism is deeply embedded in the fabric of Western civilization. This work demonstrates a rare ability to combine historical precision with conceptual ambition and represents a major mile-stone in the scholarly understanding of this phenomenon. Indeed, it may point to a paradigmatic reorientation in the field – one that has already begun to influ-ence and reshape ongoing debates.

David Nirenberg has proved to be a pathbreaking scholar of Jewish Studies, recognized by numerous prestigious awards, honors, grants, and institutional cooperations based on his body of work. He also has a significant footprint as a public intellectual, as evidenced by his participation in documentaries and regu-lar presence in the media. Moreover, he accomplished all of this while serving the profession in leading administrative functions, such as his current position as Director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Added to this list of distinctions is Nirenberg’s coveted mentorship of students and researchers. Nirenberg’s accomplishments are clearly worthy of the Balzan Prize in Jewish Studies, and he is also uniquely positioned to elaborate on his agenda-setting research. There is alas much discomfiting contemporary relevance to Nirenberg’s work on violence, as he reminds us of “how rare and strange a similarity the nightmares of a distant past bear to our own.” Advancing our understanding of agency in the face of cataclysm, as Nirenberg has done so expertly, is more welcome now than ever.