This book is about universalism and its limits. Or, in the words of Shmuel Eisenstadt, it is about the many universalisms available to modern subjects, and the way in which these universalisms impinge on the lives of minorities. And because the volume is primarily concerned with the lives of Jews and Muslims in Germany, the overall theme is one of skepticism toward the claims of one universalism in particular: liberalism.

Shmuel Eisenstadt's contribution sets the tone. Rejecting essentialized conceptions of majorities and minorities, he prefers to speak of “intercivilizational relations” (p. 23). This notion allows for a more nuanced approach, Eisenstadt avers, in that scholars can more easily trace the continual process of reconstitution that comprises society everywhere. In the case of Muslims and Jews, it means that we can examine how different universalisms (Christianity, nationalism, liberalism, socialism) produced disputes as to who belonged and who didn't—and why inclusion or exclusion was called for. While Eisenstadt's introductory essay suggests that these disputes involved contestations, most of the remaining pieces in Juden und Muslime in Deutschland tend to accentuate the dichotomy between majority and minority as well as the impositions of the former on the latter.

Shulamit Volkov, for example, repeats the familiar argument that even the most vocal liberal supporters of Jewish emancipation such as Theodor Mommsen asked Jews to renounce not only their corporate institutions but their separate identity as well. Volkov goes further, however. The liberal search for internal cohesion, already manifest in early opposition to mediating corporations, became stronger still when liberals embraced the idea of a unified Volk before and after 1870/71. Indeed, Volkov proffers a teleological reading of German developments, one that culminates in National Socialism's promise of “national unity through complete uniformity and joyful togetherness” (p. 43). In a similar vein, Aisha Achmed's contribution on “Arab presences” in German Völkerschauen during the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods relates the hegemonic power of the majority gaze. Though her express aim is to discern exceptions—instances where the gaze was returned or transgressed, much of the material she musters speaks in favor of a one-sided affair. As she herself admits, without an extant narrative by those who were on display, it is difficult to posit possible cracks in the staging of the Arab “other.”

In his examination of the German discourse on ritual slaughter, Shai Lavi compares the lot of the Jews before 1933 with that of the Muslims after 1945. Lavi recounts the means by which successive local governments tried to curb Jewish ritual slaughter, often for economic reasons rather than out of any concern for animal welfare. Yet to assert as he does that “Muslim slaughter was perceived as a new political threat coming from the outside, whereas Jewish slaughter was viewed as an old economic threat coming from the inside” (p. 180), is to contradict his own findings for the sake of argument. After all, anti-Semites old and new have associated shehitah with Jewish violence, barbarism, and ritual murder. Shai is on firmer ground where he examines more recent attempts on the part of West German officials to distinguish between Jewish and Muslim rituals. He is able to demonstrate that Muslim practice, unlike its Jewish equivalent, has often been dismissed as a mere custom with no binding force. Far from establishing clear-cut and valid distinctions, this line of reasoning bespeaks unfamiliarity with both the Jewish past and the Jewish present, and privileges the Jewish tradition in an overt act of Wiedergutmachung.

Shirin Amir-Moazami's analysis of the Deutsche Islam Konferenz (DIK) is equally damning of Germany's most recent policies toward its Muslim community. Amir-Moazami is a Foucauldian critic of liberalism, specifically of its purported strategy to transform Muslims from unfree to free citizens. The objective of the DIK, she maintains, is to produce Muslims of a liberal democratic stripe, pitting the category of the “problematic Muslim” against the category of the German Muslim. In her critique, Amir-Moazami emphasizes the question of gender—and rejects the liberal feminist position according to which traditional Muslim women, in their acceptance of certain laws, are trapped in false consciousness. More controversially, she lambastes the role of secular Muslim women in the DIK for permitting the majority to “penetrate” the inner being of the female “other,” thereby repeating older colonial scenes in which colonial masters unveiled colonized women in an effort to control them. Amir-Moazami's critique of a liberalism that feigns neutrality but promotes values of its own is not new, and hardly needs Foucault to strike a chord. Furthermore, she herself resorts to the “false consciousness” argument in holding that secular Muslim women are playing into the hands of the liberal enemy. Indeed, she not only fails to give voice to those women whom she wishes to defend, but also sidelines the liberalism present in the Muslim community itself. Even so, Amir-Moazami's piece is a stark reminder of how the idea of bürgerliche Verbesserung, outlined earlier in Volkov's essay, remains influential in current German debates on minority cultures.

This influence is also at the heart of Nikola Tietze's excellent essay on lawmaking and practice with regard to Muslim customs in the Federal Republic. Her story is one of paradox. On the one hand, recent legislation has had an inclusionary impact: schools, firms, and the army have all introduced measures to accommodate Muslim concerns. On the other, state and local administrations are increasingly adopting the language of culture as opposed to law in their response to minority religious practice. This culturalist turn, she writes, has led officials and politicians to emphasize the “Christian” nature of German institutions, which are then defined against the Muslim “other.” This trend has had two immediate effects: first, legislative acts originally introduced to integrate minority cultures are offset by the language of occidental German culture; and second, equality as both idea and practice is replaced with the idea of tolerance.

This collection of essays is a very strong one indeed. Its general critique of liberalism may be overstated (Jews feared the Right more than liberalism, for example, and Muslims today have more to fear from the CDU/CSU than from the FDP), but Juden und Muslime in Deutschland is an important addition to the growing literature on (German) universalism and its limits.