This collection of essays focuses on the concepts of tolerance and intolerance as it commemorates the life of James Parkes - the man who pioneered the study of antisemitism and Jewish-non-Jewish relations throughout the ages. The essays cover a broad and comprehensive chronology including antiquity, the middle ages, the early modern period and the modern period right through to the present day. Their geographical scope is global and the essays analyse many different examples of antisemitism, ambivalence and philosemitism as well as Jewish experiences of these phenomena.
Introduction - interdiciplinary approaches to James Parkes, Sian Jones,
Tony Kushner and Sarah Pearce. Christian-Jewish relations: James Parkes - a
centenary lecture, Nicholas de Lange; attitudes of contempt - Christain
anti-Judaism and the Bible, Sarah Pearce; silence or speaking out, Elisabeth
Maxwell; the silent retreat of the fathers - episodes in the process of
re-appraisal of Jewish history and culture in 18th-century England, Paolo
Bernardini. Jewishness and the construction of "racial" and national
identities: Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro; radical identities? -
native Americans, Jews and the English Commonwealth, Claire Jowitt; in
England's green and pleasant land - James Parkes and Jerusalem, Tony Kushner.
Jews and antisemitism: Parkes, prejudice and the Middle Ages, Colin Richmond;
reporting antisemitism - the "Jewish Chronicle", 1879-1979, David Cesarani;
the necessity of antisemitism, Frederic Raphael; afterword - liberalism and
toleration, Raymond Plant.
