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Religion and the Global History of Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2022

Abigail Green
Abigail Green*
Affiliation:
Brasenose College, University of Oxford abigail.green@bnc.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

European history has been defined as a field by a notion of Europe—its borders, values, civilization, and nationalities—that is structured by Christianity and its secular legacies. Rather than seeking to globalize the history of Europe by considering the impact of European Christianity on other parts of the world, and how it was impacted by them, this article chal- lenges that narrative. It asks how the historiography of Europe can be integrated with the historiographies of Europe’s historic non-Christian populations, namely Jews and Muslims. These are historiographies with their own rhythms, conceptual frameworks, and geographies in which Europe carries quite different connotations. They shift our attention from the north and west to the south and east, enjoining us to think differently about Europe and the diversity that has always existed within it. Separately, these historiographies speak to very different experiences. Taken together, they help us to think differently about the interface between Europe and the world, and to write the history of Europe itself against the grain.

L’histoire européenne en tant que champ a été construite autour d’une idée de l’Europe – de ses frontières, de ses valeurs, de sa civilisation et de ses nationalités – structurée par le christianisme et ses héritages séculiers. Plutôt que de chercher à globaliser l’histoire de l’Europe en considérant l’influence de la chrétienté sur d’autres parties du monde, et vice versa, cet article remet en question ce récit dominant. Il se demande comment l’historiographie de l’Europe peut intégrer les historiographies des populations non chrétiennes de l’Europe, à savoir les juifs et les musulmans. Ces historiographies possèdent leurs rythmes propres, ainsi que des cadres conceptuels et des géographies spécifiques, dans lesquels l’Europe revêt des connotations très différentes ; elles déplacent notre attention du Nord et de l’Ouest vers le Sud et l’Est, nous enjoignant de penser différemment l’Europe et la diversité qui a toujours existé en son sein. Séparément, ces historiographies parlent d’expériences très différentes. Prises ensemble, elles nous aident à penser d’une autre manière l’interface entre l’Europe et le monde, et à écrire l’histoire de l’Europe elle-même à contre-courant.

Information

Type
European History after the Global Turn
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 73 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 473 - 482
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2022

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Footnotes

This article was originally published in French as “L’histoire globale de l’Europe à l’aune de la religion,” Annales HSS 76, no. 4 (2021): 763–74.

*

I would like to thank Martin Conway, David Feldman, Emily Greble, and Ruth Harris for their feedback and support during the writing of this article.

References

1. On the Christianity of secularism, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); and the contributions in Ari Joskowicz and Ethan Katz, eds., Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

2. On Europe and Latin Christendom, see for instance Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (London: Penguin, 1993), especially chapter 11; William Chester Jordan, “‘Europe’ in the Middle Ages,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 72–90. On the shift from Christendom to a more geographical conception of Europe, see John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 3–50. On the emergence of a more secular conception of Europe linked to particular political forms, see the discussion in Anthony Pagden’s introduction to Pagden, The Idea of Europe, 1–32, especially pp. 1–4.

3. Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 160–61.

4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Extrait du projet de paix perpétuelle de monsieur l’abbé de Saint-Pierre” [1761], OEuvres complètes, vol. 4, Mélanges, part 1 (Paris: Lefèvre, 1839), 259, cited in Anthony Pagden, “Europe: Conceptualising a Continent,” in Pagden, The Idea of Europe, 33–54, here p. 43.

5. Indicative of new work on missions and empire are Andrew Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); and J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). On the mobilization of faith communities around secular causes, see Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene, eds., Religious Internationals in the Modern World: Globalization and Faith Communities since 1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 49–94, reflects the direction of travel on humanitarianism, but see the critique offered in Abigail Green, “Humanitarianism in Nineteenth-Century Context: Religious, Gendered, National,” Historical Journal 57, no. 4 (2014): 1157–75.

6. On Jews in national contexts, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Recent work has been more locally focused, see Till van Rahden, Jews and Other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). A not wholly dissimilar literature on Muslims has begun to emerge, for instance Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain, eds., Islam in Inter- War Europe (New York: Hurst and Company, 2008), part 4. Humayun Ansari, “The Infidel Within”: Muslims in Britain since 1800 (London: Hurst, 2004), is a model of how to write such a study. For a more imperial take, see Naomi Davidson, “Muslim Bodies in the Metropole: Social Assistance and ‘Religious’ Practice in Interwar Paris,” in Muslims in Interwar Europe: A Transcultural Historical Perspective, ed. Bekim Agai, Umar Ryad, and Mehdi Sajid (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 105–23.

7. On the relative novelty of this periphery, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).

8. Fernand Braudel, preface to the English edition of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II [1949], trans Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (1972–1973; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995–1996), 1:13–14, here p. 14. On the Mediterranean as a modern unity, see Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Maurizio Isabella and Konstantina Zanou, eds., Mediterranean Diasporas: Politics and Identity in the Long 19th Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and James McDougall, “Modernity in ‘Antique Lands’: Perspectives from the Western Mediterranean,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60, no. 1/2 (2017): 1–17.

9. Ben Gidley and James Renton, eds., Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

10. Tharik Hussain, Minarets in the Mountains: A Journey into Muslim Europe (Chesham: Bradt Travel Guides, 2021).

11. Daniel J. Schroeter, “Orientalism and the Jews of the Mediterranean,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 4, no. 2 (1994): 183–96, here p. 185.

12. Jonathan I. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

13. Notably Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Matthias B. Lehmann, Emissaries from the Holy Land: The Sephardic Diaspora and the Practice of Pan-Judaism in the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Adam Teller, Rescue the Surviving Souls: The Great Jewish Refugee Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

14. Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Abigail Green, “Nationalism and the ‘Jewish International’: Religious Internationalism in Europe and the Middle East c. 1840–c. 1880,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (2008): 535–58.

15. Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005).

16. Eli Bar-Chen, Weder Asiaten Noch Orientalen. Internationale Jüdische Organisationen und die Europäisierung “Rückständiger” Juden (Würzburg: Ergon, 2005); Abigail Green, “The ‘West’ and the Rest: Jewish Philanthropy and Globalization to c. 1880,” in Purchasing Power: The Economics of Modern Jewish History, ed. Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 155–70.

17. Romano Prodi, “A Union of Minorities” [2004], in The Jewish Contribution to European Integration, ed. Sharon Pardo and Hila Zahavi (London: Lexington Books, 2020), 85–92, here p. 85; cited in Matti Bunzl, “Between Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe,” American Ethnologist 32, no. 4 (2005): 499–508, here p. 502.

18. For good case studies, see Jaclyn Granick, International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); and Nathan Kurz, Jewish Internationalism and Human Rights after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

19. Malachi Haim Hacohen, Jacob and Esau: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), xi. Hacohen’s attempt to produce a “Jewish European history” represents a less globally framed alternative to this approach.

20. Ethan B. Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015).

21. As a corrective to the Germanocentric narrative of Jewish modernity, see Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

22. See Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004); and the contributions to Pascal Firges, Tobias Graf, and Gülay Tulasoğlu, eds., Well-Connected Domains: Towards an Entangled Ottoman History (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

23. Thomas More, Utopia [1516], cited in Hale, The Civilization of Europe, 38.

24. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (1997; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12.

25. Edin Hajdarpasic, Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Emily Greble, “Hierarchies of Citizenship: Islam, the Yugoslav State, and Continuities of Empire,” working paper, University of Washington-Seattle, February 9, 2017, https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-ellison-center-at-the-university-of-washington/emily-greble-hierarchies-of-citizenship-islam-and-/; Nathalie Clayer, “Behind the Veil: The Reform of Islam in Inter-War Albania or the Search for a ‘Modern’ and ‘European’ Islam,” in Clayer and Germain, Islam in Inter-War Europe, 128–55.

26. Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular, “Afterlife of Empire: Muslim-Ottoman Relations in Habsburg Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1878–1914” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013), 94. See also Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, “‘À la poursuite de la réforme’: renouveaux et débats historiographiques de l’histoire religieuse et intellectuelle de l’islam, xv e–xxi e siècle,” Annales HSS 73, no. 2 (2018): 317–58.

27. See Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain, “Muslim Networks in Christian Lands,” in Clayer and Germain, Islam in Inter-War Europe, 22–31.

28. Lâle Can, “Connecting People: A Central Asian Sufi Network in Turn-of-the-Century Istanbul,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 2 (2012): 373–401; Can, “The Protection Question: Central Asians and Extraterritoriality in the Late Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 4 (2016): 679–99.

29. Nile Green, Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Modern Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 19.

30. Nile Green, “Spacetime and the Muslim Journey West: Industrial Communications in the Making of the ‘Muslim World’,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (2013): 401–29, here p. 429. See also David Motadel, “The Making of Muslim Communities in Western Europe, 1914–1939,” in Transnational Islam in Interwar Europe: Muslim Activists and Thinkers, ed. Götz Nordbruch and Umar Ryad (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 13–43.

31. For a transnational approach, see Agai, Ryad, and Sajid, Muslims in Interwar Europe.

32. As described in Gerhard Höpp, “Zwischen Moschee und Demonstration. Muslime in Berlin, 1920–1930,” Moslemische Revue 3 (1990): 135–46; 4 (1990): 230–38; and 1 (1991): 13–19. On the social interaction and accommodations between Muslims and non- Muslim Europeans, see for instance David Motadel, “Islamische Bürgerlichkeit. Das soziokulturelle Milieu der muslimischen Minderheit in Berlin 1918–1939,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 37 (2009): 103–21.

33. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 13.

34. Talal Asad, “Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?” in Pagden, The Idea of Europe, 209–27.