| David Nirenberg | |
| Main Interests: |
|
| Notable Works: |
|
| Awards: |
|
| Education: | Yale University (AB) Princeton University (MA, PhD) |
David Nirenberg is a medievalist and intellectual historian. He is the Director and Leon Levy Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He previously taught at the University of Chicago, where he was Dean of the Divinity School, and Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and the Committee on Social Thought, 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 is also appointed to the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies.
He is notable for his landmark analysis in 2013 of antijudaism as a constitutive principle of the Western tradition, and his argument for a longue durée approach to historical understanding, a career about-face from the methodological approach taken in his 1996 work, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. He has a particular interest in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought in medieval Europe.
In 2024, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[1]
Nirenberg is Jewish.[2] The son of immigrants from Argentina who settled in upstate New York, his father Ricardo Nirenberg taught him Euclidean Geometry and had him memorize book I of the Odyssey in ancient Greek.[3]
David Nirenberg earned his AB from Yale,[4] where John Boswell introduced him to the study of minorities in Medieval Aragon. He holds a PhD from Princeton,[5] where he studied under Peter Brown, Natalie Zemon Davis, and William Chester Jordan.[6] He has held visiting professorships at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid, and the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, 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,[7] and a former fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.[8]
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.[9] He became Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2022.[10]
Nirenberg's 2013 book Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition is not a history of racist 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."[11] 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."[12]
“Anti-Judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought,” Nirenberg observes in his introduction, as quoted and affirmed by Paula Frederiksen in her review. “It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.” And as he ominously concludes, hundreds of pages later, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel’.”
Described by reviewers "an extraordinary scholarly achievement," and as a "magisterial work of intellectual history,"[13] Anti-Judaism 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."
David A. Bell of Princeton University calls it "quite simply one of the most important pieces of humanities scholarship to appear in many years. Supremely learned, beautifully written, and powerfully argued, it takes on nothing less than the Western tradition itself. And it makes a case we cannot afford to ignore."[14] Christopher Smith of King's College London notices 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 duree 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.[15] Some historians, while praising Nirenberg's oeuvre, have expressed dissatisfaction with the parts concerning contemporary history.[16]
Nirenberg's 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.
The preface to the French translation was given by Claude Gauvard, one of France's leading historians.
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.[17] 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.[18] It has also been criticized for facile use of structural functionalism and of the essayist René Girard's model.[19]