| Unit name | Dis/Engaging with the Other: Germany, Judaism and Islam |
|---|---|
| Unit code | GERM29007 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Dr. Anne Simon |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of German |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Since the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre on 11th September 2001 the world has turned on a different axis, one determined by an increasingly fraught, mutually distrustful relationship with Islam. At the same time anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe, fuelled in part by the continuing troubles in Palestine. Germanys own recent troubled history of anti-Semitism has been exhaustively explored and documented. However, considerably less well-known are the historic roots of both anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic prejudice, which date back to at least the Middle Ages. After an introduction to both religions, especially to those aspects potentially alien to the Christian West, we shall use a wide variety of sources (travel literature; crusading epic; ballads; Church laws; drama; medical texts; historical chronicles; poetry; satire; sermons; urban geography; manuscript and book illustration; sculpture; altarpieces; stained glass) to trace the origins and development of German attitudes to Jews and Muslims from the Middle Ages to Luther and the sixteenth century.
Aims:
To study the mediaeval and Early-Modern roots of current assumptions about and attitudes to Judaism and Islam; to trace the development of such attitudes and their effect on the treatment of the religious Other; to identify their recent and current impact on German society; to accustom students to thinking across and making links between disciplinary boundaries; to train students in the use of original source materials and independent analysis.
Students will understand the complex nature of Germanys relationship to Judaism and Islam and be able to judge it within the equally complex context of Europes relationship to these religions in the mediaeval and Early-Modern periods; they will be able to identify the persistence of long-entrenched attitudes in contemporary German society and their impact on present Jewish and Muslim minorities; they will be able to define their own research questions and further develop the analytical tools with which to answer them; will be used to working with a wide range and variety of original sources materials and synthesizing the information gleaned into a coherent whole.
One two-hour seminar a week over one teaching block.
One essay of 2,000 words; one two-hour exam.
