Dmitri Levitin, PhD

Arbeitsvorhaben

The Western Mind: The Origins of a Myth

At the end of the 18th century, German thinkers started offering genealogies of modernity running from Classical Athens (especially its philosophers), through early Christianity (considered a Greek rather than a Jewish phenomenon, at least in spirit), to modern “enlightened” Protestantism. A century earlier, this genealogy would have been unthinkable. For in 1700, every European intellectual would have agreed that Greek philosophy was not qualitatively different from its “oriental” counterpart, and that Christianity had emerged directly from Judaism.
Combining intellectual and social history, my project will provide a new account of how this peculiar Eurocentrism emerged, and why it proved so successful, coming to be deployed in political debates about Jewish emancipation and the abolition of Atlantic slavery. It will suggest that explanations that simply explain the phenomenon as a product of European imperialism are not convincing, and that a more complex account is required. In the process, the project will identify the origins of some long-lasting concepts and ideas: (1) the distinction between “Pauline” and “Jewish” Christianity; (2) the distinction between “pre-” and “post-Socratic” philosophy; (3) a “Greek miracle” in intellectual history; (4) the earliest full conspiracy theory about a Jewish politico-economic plot to take over the world; (5) the first fears of a “Great Replacement” of native Europeans by immigrants. It will suggest that the parallel appearance of these concepts was not unconnected.

Recommended Reading

Levitin, Dmitri. Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Hardy, Nicholas, and Dmitri Levitin, eds. Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Levitin, Dmitri. The Kingdom of Darkness. Cambridge University Press, 2022.