Citizen Stranger: Contemporary German Muslim Intellectuals, Twentieth-Century German Jewish Intellectuals, and a Politics of Relationality

Abstract Jews and Muslims in Europe have faced a similar othering in modernity. As insider-outsiders, they are both what we term citizen strangers: even with legal inclusions, they remain culturally set apart. German Jewish intellectuals since the end of the nineteenth century and German Muslim intellectuals today have recognized their marginal positionalities, but also drew/draw on these positionalities as a critical resource for addressing social inequalities. In this article, we move away from hierarchical minority-majority relations to the horizontal relations between two minoritized groups. Through interview-based research, we find that contemporary German Muslim intellectuals position themselves vis-à-vis a politics of relationality—through acts of fabrication (imagining and making)—with German Jewish intellectuals past. Drawing on their entwined intellectual histories, inspiration from the works of twentieth-century German Jewish intellectuals, and interreligious/intercultural work today, they strive to carve out both a space for themselves in German society and to re-enliven German Jewish intellectual life.