HUMAN EMANCIPATION AND PARTICULAR BELONGING

On what terms do religious communities have a place in modern secular societies? Could their demand for world interpretation and to the formation of the political order in a secular state be legitimate at all? Are religious law and civil law compatible? These questions – which are discussed nowadays mainly but not exclusively with re-gard to Political Islam – have a long history. The debates on the emancipation of European Jewry in the 19th cen-tury were already accompanied by a discussion about the specific terms on which full civic participation should be granted. At first, the conference investigates the contem-porary debate about Bruno Bauer’s notorious text “The Jewish Question” (1843), focusing on the reactions of Jewish participants in the debate (Samuel Hirsch, Gab-riel Riesser, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Jellinek). Those developed specific ways of Jewish encounters with the modern nation-state. Contrary to Bauer’s accusation of loyalty to Jewish law and his refusal to political emancipa-tion, Bauer’s Jewish critics sought to develop concepts of religious pluralism in which human emancipation and col-lective belonging remained interconnected. Against this background, the experiences of the crisis of World War I and of the revocation of emancipation in the 1930s will be analysed and the intellectual reflections of these his-torical processes examined. The conference seeks to in-vestigate the significance of the emancipation debates in the 19th century for the present and to discuss the gene-ral question of the relationship between history, religious affiliation, and liberal politics considering these findings.