Munich's Ludwig-Maximilian University had good news at the welcoming event for its new fellow for Jewish studies, Richard Cohen, on November 29, 2007: the new "elite" university has approved several new positions for Jewish and Islamic culture. The university's Vice President, Hans van Ess, underlined the high priority of this academic field for the university and added that the Allianz fellowship particularly helped the Institute for Oriental Studies to make it through a "long dry spell" in the last five years.
New Allianz fellow in Munich
"A stroke of luck"
Richard I. Cohen, the program's ninth fellow, was born in Montreal and holds the Kelman Chair in French Jewry Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Former Allianz board member Ihno Schneevoigt pronounced his presence in Munich a "stroke of luck for our fellowship." Cohen's advanced seminar "When West meets East – West European Jews and Jews in Islamic countries in the modern period" covers both Judaism and Islamic life, "exactly as we intended when we established the Allianz fellowship", as Schneevoigt put it.
Schneevoigt explained: "Allianz endowed the fellowship after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 in the USA to foster mutual understanding between the Islamic, Jewish and of course Christian worlds and thus create something tangible to counter terror and the polarizing forces at work." Since 2003, Ludwig-Maximilian University has been inviting lecturers from the Islamic and Jewish domains alternately to Munich for one or two semesters.
Richard I. Cohen
Clash between Western and oriental Jews
Richard Cohen's welcoming speech focused on the "clash of civilizations" theory as postulated by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in the 1990s. Huntington sees a clash between "the West and the rest". While things are much more complicated than this, Cohen decided to look into the clash between European and Oriental Jews "as if such categories exist."
French Jews, the first in Europe to be emancipated, are a good example of "regenerated" Jews who soon tried to take their oriental brethren "under their wings." The Jewish Consistory in France, initiated by Napoleon, soon became strongly committed to the colonial idea. French Jews tried to educate the "weak, unfortunate, degenerate" Jews and expected them to become France's most faithful supporters in Algeria, once they were separated from their Arab past.
This conflict continued in the Israeli society after 1948 between European and Arab Jews "with all attributes of a clash of civilization", according to Cohen. "This shows us how difficult coexistence can be, even for people of the same faith and background, when there is a constant desire to transform the other."