After World War II, Israel and Germany adopted curiously similar policies of ethnic immigration, accepting as immigrants only putative co-ethnics. The objective of this article is to account for the main variation between the two cases, the resilience of Jewish immigration in Israel, and the demise of ethnic-German immigration in Germany. The very fact of divergent outcomes casts doubt on conventional accounts of ethnic immigration, which see the latter as deriving from an ethnic (as against civic) definition of nationhood. We point instead to the possibility of ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’ contention surrounding ethnic immigration, and argue that for historical and geopolitical reasons the political space for such contention has been more constricted in Israel than in Germany.

For much of his life Weber favored the rational activity of the ascetic in contrast to the irrational passivity of the mystic. However, Weber developed a growing interest in mysticism both in the East and the West. Johannes Tauler and his teacher Meister Eckhart offered Weber glimpses of the western mystic's beliefs. Perhaps in Weber's last years, religion and mysticism moved from being merely intellectual interests to something more significant and personal.

This article explores the Durkheimian engagement with the sacred as intricately enmeshed in a personal search for meaning in intellectual labor. By situating the intellectual work of Durkheim, Mauss, Hubert and Hertz in their personal quests for the sacred, we uncover two kinds of Durkheimian thought on the sacred and two ‘species’ of Durkheimian intellectual. Weber's categories of religious experience, the mystic and the ascetic, frame this rethinking of the meaning of Durkheimian theory.

Sociologists have shown little interest in friendship. The rather fragmentary empirical work which does exist on friendship in modern society paradoxically tends to confirm the impression that the subject is of marginal importance; for friendship emerges from much research as a relationship which provides emotional support and small services but little else. Admittedly, there is also evidence indicating links with more classical sociological themes—such as access to jobs. But this evidence is often seen as representing ‘exceptional’ circumstances. Thus, among an immigrant group, friendship ties may be seen as particular to the culture from which immigrants come; among an elite group, the importance of friendship ties may be seen as peculiar to that elite circle. We can talk of a genuine ‘paradigm’ of modern society as being based on relatively impersonal relations. The paper maintains that if friendship is approached differently, it emerges as of more central and ‘structural’ interest. What is required is a shift on both theoretical and methodological levels. Sociology needs to shift its theoretical perspective and recognize that people articulate their values, enact their strategies, develop their language in face-to-face groups, not as isolated individuals. In terms of empirical research, what is needed are methods capable of tracing these groupings. This is difficult at present because most sociological methods rely heavily on data collected on individuals and their attributes.

Eve's polemic on the relatively insignificant contribution of sociological studies of friendship to the central concerns of the discipline has some force. However, he weakens his case in three main ways. Firstly, his over-reliance on Giddens to demonstrate the contrast in the importance of personalistic relations between ‘traditional’ and ‘late-modern’ societies. See for example Allan Silver. Secondly, Eve's contention that there is an over-reliance on dyadic relationships in the study of friendship is becoming outdated, as demonstrated in the major ESRC project ‘Rethinking Friendship’. Thirdly, Eve underestimates the importance of analyses of friendship in contemporary sociological studies of stratification and power. For example, the so-called velvet revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe were fuelled by the friend-based organisation of radically dissident intellectuals.