Professor
David Nirenberg
Institute for Advanced Study
Historian; Medievalist; Educator
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
History
Elected
2016
Nirenberg works on relations and interactions, real and imagined, between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. In his first book he showed how medieval adherents of these three communities related to each other in ways that do not fit within modern paradigms of toleration versus persecution. He suggested that medieval violence was not the result of uncontrollable religious or ethnic hatred but a tactic and attitude compatible with knowledge of one's neighbors and constructive involvement in their affairs. In later work he extended this approach, arguing that the three religions should be understood as "neighboring faiths," co-produced in every moment in time by thinking about their relationship to one another, even when they did not live in physical proximity to one another or know any living representatives of the other religions. Another aspect of his research has focused on anti-Judaism. His book of that title presented a history of ideas ranging from the ancient world to the present, in order to show that anti-Judaism was not caused by economic or religious motivations, or by a breakdown in rationality, but rather by the ways in which the concept of Judaism became a category of thought through which Christians, Muslims, and later secular societies could interpret, criticize, and imagine the improvement of themselves and their world. In other recent works he has applied these approaches to understanding the emergence of various aspects of Western thought, including love, art, literature, and philosophy. He is currently collaborating on a book about the various types of sameness that underpin the relative claims of different forms of knowledge, in the hope of discovering new ways of understanding both the powers and the limits of the sciences and the humanities
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