Reference no: EM13520509

Many of our theorists were, at least on the surface, writing about “primitive” cultures. Additionally, most of them saw themselves as scientific and therefore creating scholarship that was untouched by the circumstances of their own positionality. Yet we can see now that they were very much positioned in their times and places, and their commentary on the past can be seen as a veiled commentary on their present. In what ways was the attempt to “explain” religion that we have been charting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a response to their own present, especially the fundamental issue across Europe of religious identity and the Christian majority’s treatment of the Jewish minority? What was the situation in Europe regarding Christian-Jewish relations by the nineteenth century? How did the work of our scholars constitute a commentary on this issue, or on the related issue of the generally held belief that Christianity was superior to other religions? Explain how the work of at least 3 of these scholars was a commentary on religious identity in their own time period.