VVI Research Talks
Secular Law, Christian Ambivalence, and Jewish Difference
- Mareike Riedel (Speaker); Lisa Harms (Chair/discussant)
- Date
- Monday 24 June 2024
- Time
- Location
-
Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- C0.20
In conflicts involving religious practices, secular law is often perceived as a neutral arbiter protecting religious freedom and religious equality. However, critical studies of secularism and secular law have shown that secular legal reasoning remains steeped in Christian values and normativity. This talk focusses on one aspect of this Christian normativity: the legacy of Christian ambivalence towards Jews, a group that has constituted for a long time one of Christianity’s most paradigmatic Others but is now often seen as an accepted and successful minority group within societies of the West. In this talk, I discuss how Christian ideas about Jews became secularised into a cultural repertoire and consider some of the ways in which it has shaped central ideas and knowledge underpinning secular law. The legacy of Christian ambivalence towards Jews continues to circumscribe the rights and equality of Jews as well as other non-Christians. Moreover, focussing on the significance of Jewish difference for the formation of secular legal knowledge also invites us to critically reflect on the role of law in maintaining and naturalising Christian privilege in our increasingly diverse societies.
About Mareike Riedel
Mareike Riedel is a Lecturer at Macquarie Law School in Sydney and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University. An interdisciplinary scholar of law and society, Mareike’s work bridges sociolegal approaches and cultural studies of law. Her work is particularly concerned with law and religion in multicultural societies, religious and racial discrimination, the cultural foundations of secular law, as well as antisemitism, and Islamophobia. Mareike’s research has been published in the Journal of Law and Society, the International Journal of Law in Context, Studies in Law, Politics and Society, Griffith Law Review, and forthcoming in Identities. Her book 'Law and Jewish Difference: Ambivalent Encounters' (Cambridge University Press, June 2024) examines the relationship between law, secularism, religion, and racialisation through the lens of the legal encounter with Jewish difference. Before joining Macquarie University, she held research fellowships at the Australian National University, at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and completed her PhD in sociolegal studies at the Australian National University.