The Souls of Jewish Folk

"The Souls of Jewish Folk argues that late nineteenth century Germany's struggle with its 'Jewish question' - what to do with Germany's Jews, served as an important and to date underexamined influence on W.E.B. Du Bois's considerations of America's anti-Black racism at the turn of the twentieth century. Du Bois's well-known characterization of the twentieth century's greatest challenge, "the problem of the color line", is actually haunted by the specter of the German Jew. What The Souls of Jews? asks readers to take seriously, then, is how our ideas, and indeed intellectual work itself, is shaped by and embedded within the networks of people, places, and prevailing contexts of its time. The major social, political, and economic events of Du Bois's own life - including his time spent living and learning in a late nineteenth century Germany defined in no small part by its violent antisemitism - comprises the soil from which his most serious ideas about race, racism, and the global color line spring forth"--