global anti-semitism in world-historical perspective: an ... · inﬂuential books, including, ......

H

UMAN

A

RCHITECTURE

: J

OURNAL

OF

THE

S

OCIOLOGY

OF

S

ELF

-K

NOWLEDGE

, VII, 2, S

PRING

2009, 1-15 1

H

UMAN

A

RCHITECTURE

: J

OURNAL

OF

THE

S

OCIOLOGY

OF

S

ELF

-K

NOWLEDGE

ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

The articles collected in this Spring2009 issue of

Human Architecture: Journal ofthe Sociology of Self-Knowledge

were part ofan international conference entitled, “ThePost-September 11 New Ethnic/RacialConfigurations in Europe and the United

States: The Case of Anti-Semitism,” orga-nized by Lewis Gordon and Ramón Gros-foguel at the Maison des Sciences del’Homme (MSH) in Paris on June 29–30,2007. Part of a series inaugurated by a dis-cussion on Islamophobia, the conference

Lewis Gordon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Jewish Studies and Director of theCenter for Afro-Jewish Studies at Temple University and Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Govern-ment at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several award-winning andinfluential books, including, more recently, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge UP) and, with JaneAnna Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster (Paradigm Publishers). Ramón Grosfoguel is Associate Pro-fessor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Research Associate of the Maisondes Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. He has published on the political economy of the world-system and on Carib-bean migrations to Western Europe and the United States. His most recent book is Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricansin a Global Perspective (University of California Press, 2003). Most recently he was co-editor, with Eric Mielants, ofa special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (Vol. 47, Aug. 2006) on Minorities, Racism andCultures of Scholarship. Eric Mielants is Associate Professor in Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences atFairfield University and Research Associate of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris. He is the author ofThe Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West (Temple University Press, 2007). Most recently he co-edited Car-ibbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States (Temple University Press, 2009) and Mass Migration in theWorld System (Paradigm Press, forthcoming).

Global Anti-Semitism in World-Historical Perspective: An Introduction

Issue Co-Editors:

Lewis R. Gordon, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Eric Mielants

Temple University • U.C. Berkeley • Fairfield University––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected] • [email protected] • [email protected]

Abstract: This introduction to the Spring 2009 issue of Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge begins with a discussion of “The Articulation and Re-Articulation of Anti-Semitism” in a world-historical perspective, focusing on such topics as “Anti-Semitism in the Longue-Durée,” “ChristianEurope’s Final Solutions,” and “Israel and Global Anti-Semitism.” It then follows with a survey of thevolume’s articles which were part of an international conference entitled, “The Post-September 11 NewEthnic/Racial Configurations in Europe and the United States: The Case of Anti-Semitism,” organized byLewis Gordon and Ramón Grosfoguel at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in Paris on June 29–30, 2007. The two scholars along with Eric Mielants also served as co-editors of this issue. Part of a seriesinaugurated by a discussion on Islamophobia, the conference brought a majority Jewish group of scholarstogether in the hope of bringing to the forum a critical exchange and conversation among the participants.The discussion presented in the introduction is not necessarily representative of the views of the scholarsincluded in the collection.

2 L

EWIS

R. G

ORDON

, R

AMÓN

G

ROSFOGUEL

,

AND

E

RIC

M

IELANTS

H

UMAN

A

RCHITECTURE

: J

OURNAL

OF

THE

S

OCIOLOGY

OF

S

ELF

-K

NOWLEDGE

, VII, 2, S

PRING

2009

brought a majority Jewish group of schol-ars together in the hope of bringing to theforum a critical exchange and conversationamong the participants. This introductionis not necessarily representative of theviews of the scholars included in this col-lection.

PART I: T

HE

A

RTICULATIONS

AND

R

E

-

ARTICULATIONS

OF

A

NTI

-S

EMITISM

Anti-Semitism in the Longue-Durée

A contemporary discussion of anti-Semitism requires reflecting on the emer-gence of Christian Europe; Zionism; andthe state of Israel. After the fall of the an-cient Roman Empire in late antiquity, it wasChristianity, at first under the rubric of theHoly Roman Empire, that organized underChristendom during the Middle Ages theterritories that subsequently became Eu-rope. Since Christianity rose out of ongoingstruggles among the colonized people ofJudea, many of whom spread across the Ro-man world during a period of ancient Jew-ish proselytizing, the consequence was aconstant presence of Jews among Chris-tians who were by the Middle Ages a hege-monic group. Moreover, although therewere many Jews living outside of Judea, thedestruction of the Second Temple in 70ACE, the centerpiece of Jewish life, createdan entirely Diasporic Jewish world inwhich Jews became quintessential minori-ties among Christians and, in other places,other “Gentiles.”

The situation for Jews in Christianlands was tenuous, marked by restrictionson movement, domicile, and ownership,and, on many occasions, violent persecu-tion. The Christian conversion of the Em-peror Constantine in 312 ACE led toChristianity as the state religion of Romeand edicts making Jewish proselytizing acapital offense. This historic situation of

Jews was further affected by the emergenceof Islam in the seventh century ACE and itsspread from West Asia to create IslamicEmpires with a reach extending into the In-dian and Pacific Oceans to the East and theMediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean tothe West. As Christendom was heavily in-fluenced by the cultures that becameknown as “European,” Islamic Civilizationwas based on Arab culture and broughtprominence to Arabic, a linguistic frame-work with many manifestations amongvarious peoples in the Arab Peninsula andsubsequently across the areas of Muslimconquest. Even though Islamic civilizationcovered many cultures and linguistic tradi-tions, Arabic became the lingua franca ofthe Islamic World.

As with Christianity, Islam was at firstindexed in terms of the revealed religion ofa common people in the region of West Asiaknown today as the Middle East. But unlikeChristianity, which became more associ-ated with peoples outside of the MiddleEast, the Arab cultural dimensions of Islampresented cultural mores that requiredfewer radical adjustments for the Jewishpeoples spread across the by then Muslim-governed territories, and the added cate-gory of “people of the book” in Islam en-abled a status for Jews and Christians thatwas absent in Christian-governed territo-ries with regard to non-Christians. Whenthe North African Muslims, the Moors, ex-panded the reach of the Islamic world intoIberia in the eighth century and formed An-dalusian civilization, whose impact wasfelt as far north as southern France, the sit-uation of Jews was transformed to an in-be-tween condition: For the Christian peoples,the Jews were outsiders within and weremore associated with the North Africanand West Asian civilizations, althoughmany in those regions were descendants ofpeople who came to Judaism during the pe-riod of Jews actively seeking proselytesprior to the period of Constantine; for theMuslims, they were accepted as of similar if

G

LOBAL

A

NTI

-S

EMITISM

IN

W

ORLD

-H

ISTORICAL

P

ERSPECTIVE

: A

N

I

NTRODUCTION

3

H

UMAN

A

RCHITECTURE

: J

OURNAL

OF

THE

S

OCIOLOGY

OF

S

ELF

-K

NOWLEDGE

, VII, 2, S

PRING

2009

not the same origins, because Islam was aproselytizing religion from the same areasof the world, but they faced limits becauseJews were not Muslims. Crucial during thisperiod, however, as David Sasha (2008) haspointed out, the Arab allowance for Arabicto facilitate hybridization allowed the pos-sibility of Arabic and Arab Jews, which en-abled the existence, for a time, of bothMuslim and Jew to be regarded at times asa unity in the face of Christendom.

The focus on anti-Semitism in this col-lection raises the question, then, of how an-cient and Medieval versions of anti-Jewishpractices should be interpreted, especiallysince even the term “Semite” came about asan effort in eighteenth-century French andGerman scholarship to organize Arabic,Aramaic, and Hebrew under a single lin-guistic nomenclature, which was crystal-lized in the nineteenth century in the workof the French scholar Ernest Renan. Con-temporary discussion of anti-Semitismprior to this period is, in effect, a retroactiveorganizing of the past in the language ofthe present. It may be better to say “proto-anti-Semitism” when referring to this formof hatred prior to modern times, but giventhe impact of the term, we will simply referto “anti-Semitism” to refer to the circum-stances that link the discussion from theMiddle Ages to modern times.

A consequence of Islamic control of theMediterranean was a limitation of tradethat locked in Christendom from its south-ern and Eastern borders. The economies ofChristian territories suffered greatly duringthis period, which led to the Crusades,whose expansion was stopped by the Otto-mans of Turkey in the East. In the West, the“Reconquest,” as this effort was called un-der the leadership of King Ferdinand andQueen Isabella, culminated in the fall ofGrenada in 1492.

Many Jews were, during this eighthundred years period of Moorish rule inIberia, linked to the Arab world, whichmeant, also, that anti-Judaism fused with

Islamophobia. Thus, anti-Semitism hasthree components from its inception: “anti-Jewish anti-Semitism,” “anti-Arab/Mus-lim anti-Semitism,” and, often overlookedbecause rarely formulated, “Anti-Afro-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism.” The year1492 was marked by events that broughtthese components together in familiarways: Jews and Muslims were ordered toconvert to Christianity, and those who re-fused were subsequently expelled from theIberian Peninsula through pogroms andmassacres (Baer 1993; Gerber 1992; Bresc2001). Recall that the people who becameknown as Semitic people were character-ized as coming from what we currently re-fer to as the Middle East or Western Asiaand Northeastern Africa, and this group in-cluded Arabs as well as Hebrews, the tribaldesignation from which Jewish peopleemerged. Recall as well that the term itselfhas origins in philological research in eigh-teenth-century France and Germany, whereit referred to linguistic types. By the nine-teenth-century, it was transformed from alinguistic ascription to a full-fledged racialcategory for the mixed-race group of peo-ples of East Africa, West Asia, and thesouthern parts of Europe that were meetingpoints of those geographical zones.

The people who became known as“Semites” were, and to a large extent stillare, what in recent racial language—as ob-served by Charles Finch III (1991)—is re-ferred to as “mulattoes.” It was an ascrip-tion pushed by Arthur de Gobineau, thefather of modern racism, in his discussionof Jewish people in explicitly racial terms inhis

Essai sur l'Inegalite de Races Humaine

(1853–1855). The concept itself workedwithin an economy of fixed points or cen-ters, through which a theology of meaning

as meaning

—of organized centers fromwhich contaminants and degraded matri-ces, as Gil Anidjar (2008) argued, echoingthe poststructural observations of JacquesDerrida—flowed, produced, and orga-nized a new race retroactively placed into

4 L

EWIS

R. G

ORDON

, R

AMÓN

G

ROSFOGUEL

,

AND

E

RIC

M

IELANTS

H

UMAN

A

RCHITECTURE

: J

OURNAL

OF

THE

S

OCIOLOGY

OF

S

ELF

-K

NOWLEDGE

, VII, 2, S

PRING

2009

the past, including the distant past, of hu-man difference.

Mixture was a source of much anxietyand fear during the processes of expulsionof Jews and Moors from Iberia, since a con-sequence of eight hundred years of Islamicrule brought together a mixture of peoplewith the usual logic of identity and identifi-cation, especially with regard to problemsof passing and hidden, supposedly essen-tial, substantial modes of being. The Span-ish Inquisition, inaugurated in 1478 in theChristian territories, expanded with that ofChristendom in 1492 and continued intothe nineteenth century. From the outset,many Andalusian Jews and Moors fled toNorth Africa and the Ottoman-controlledterritories. The period that followed is onein which Jews among Arabs and Arab Jewslived in a Muslim world to the South andEast while a Christian world dominated thenorth and eventually most of the globe.

As with Andalusia, most of the Muslimregimes in North Africa and West Asia rec-ognized Jewish minority rights (Kramer2006) and served as refuges for Jews. AsDavid Sasha (2008) explains:

Traditionally in the Arab world,culture was a unifying factor andreligion a divisive one. Havingused the term divisive, I do notmean to imply that the divisionwas in any way seen as illegitimateor intrusive. Each faith communityin the Arab world was providedwith communal autonomy whilethe maintenance of Islam as thedominant and dominating religionwas clearly affirmed. But underthis system Jews were able to con-duct their intra-communal affairsin relative ease having establishedinternal institutions and entities toadminister the affairs of the com-munity without the interference ofthe Islamic authorities.

This is not to say that there was no dis-crimination or persecution of Jews in theearlier periods and early modern periods ofMuslim rule. On December 30, 1066, for in-stance, 1,500 Jewish families were massa-cred in Grenada by Muslim mobs (Perez2005:36–37). Crucial during this period,however, was that the political regimes var-ied across the Muslim world. AndalusianJews of that period fled, for instance, tomore tolerant Arab communities to theeast, as was the case of Rabbi Maimonides,the most famous Jewish philosopher of thatperiod. Similarly, the Christian territorieswere not uniformly inhospitable, so therewere also Jews who also fled to more north-ern Christian areas. In the Muslim world,there were some periods of pronounced ef-forts to force Jews to convert to Islam, suchas those that led the Persian Shah to orderthe expulsion of Jews from Esfahan or OldPersia in 1656, although the order wasnever fully implemented; by 1661 (only fiveyears later) the Persian government re-stored the rights of Jews to practice their re-ligion without repression from theauthorities (Littman 1979). In Muslimcountries, “

dhimmi

” peoples (“protectedpeoples”) had minority rights because theywere considered to be custodians of scrip-tural revelations (Perez 2005). In Iran andMuslim-ruled countries in the Mediterra-nean region, these minorities included Zo-roastrians, Christians, and Jews. Thus, thehistory of discrimination against Jews byArab Muslims, which we shall call “SemiticAnti-Semitism,” during this period (1492–1948), was not on a par with the anti-Semitic pogroms, extermination, torture,and wide-spread recurring massacresagainst Jews in Europe. These were funda-mentally a Christian European problemthat considered both Muslims and Jewsoutside the natural theological order be-cause they were non-Christian and thus an-tithetical to the emerging Europeansocieties (see, e.g., Kamali 2009). The Chris-tian version was linked to the expansion of

G

LOBAL

A

NTI

-S

EMITISM

IN

W

ORLD

-H

ISTORICAL

P

ERSPECTIVE

: A

N

I

NTRODUCTION

5

H

UMAN

A

RCHITECTURE

: J

OURNAL

OF

THE

S

OCIOLOGY

OF

S

ELF

-K

NOWLEDGE

, VII, 2, S

PRING

2009

other practices and concepts that trans-formed the prototypical anti-Semitism intosomething more grand, to which we nowturn.

Recall that the Spanish Christian Mon-archy began the European colonial expan-sion in 1492, the same year theycommenced the process of expelling Mus-lims and Jews from Andalusia (Dussel1994). The more marked Muslims and Jewswere the darker Andalusians, but for thosewho could “pass,” a program of uprootingtheir “hidden” Muslimness or Jewishnessfollowed, and for those who were Christianbut of darker complexion, presuppositionsof their origins made them bearers of a non-Christian past through which illegitimatetraits could surface. The colonization of in-digenous peoples in the Americas and thesucceeding enslavement of Africans in theNew World’s colonial plantation economythen inaugurated what is known as theModern World System. This new systemgrew out of the theological anthropologythat came upon its limits in encounterswith people who were not Christians, Jews,or Muslims. More, the reordering of eco-nomic relations from medieval kingdomsto global flows of materials led to demandsfor labor beyond the population resourcesof the growing centers. A colonial/racistconfiguration of anti-black and anti-indige-nous racism followed with a new interna-tional racial division of labor and globaltemporal organization of Europe into mo-dernity (Quijano 2000). Indigenous Ameri-can and African peoples were placed belowthe line that defines the Human (Taylor2001; Maldonado-Torres 2005, 2006, 2008).They were treated and characterized assub-humans or simply non-humans(Quijano 1991, 2000; Dussel 1994; Gordon2008).

With the emergence of a new global ra-cialized capitalist world-economy in thepost-Andalusian age (Majid 2003), anti-Semitism acquired new connotations asparticular forms of discrimination against

people who exemplified mixtures withWest Asian and North African populations.If before 1492, “anti-Jewish anti-Semitism,”“anti-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism,” and“Anti-Afro-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism”were defined primarily on the basis of reli-gious discrimination (“praying to thewrong God”) or on theological interpreta-tions of Christian natural theology, the anti-Indigenous and anti-black racism thatemerged in the Americas provided theseold forms of discrimination with newmeanings (Maldonado-Torres 2005; 2006;2008). Anti-black racism became part of thefoundation of modernity and affected thesituation of all non-European subjects atthe time (Gordon 1995; 2008). With the colo-nial “boomerang effect” (Césaire 2001), co-lonial racism in the Americas came back toEurope and redefined old forms of discrim-inations against Jews and Muslims, includ-ing Afro-Muslims or Moors, with theadditions of Gypsies, turning them, likeblacks and Indigenous peoples, into sub-human or simply non-human (Grosfogueland Mielants 2006). For centuries Jews inEurope lived the nightmare of anti-Semit-ism. They faced persecution, torture, andattempted genocide at the hands of domi-nant Western elites in the new post-An-dalusian world, the modern worldgoverned by a slashed and hyphenated se-ries that could be formulated as “Capital-ist/Patriarchal Western-centric/Christian-centric Modern/Colonial World-System”(Grosfoguel 2005).

Christian Europe’s Final Solutions

The Holocaust,

Shoa

, represents one ofthe extreme forms of European F

INAL

S

O-LUTIONS

, but it was not the only effort tohandle Europe’s “Jewish question” in thefirst half of the twentieth century. Anotheranti-Semitic “F

INAL

S

OLUTION

” contem-plated early on by the Germans under na-tional socialism but developed by theBritish was to transfer European Jews out

6 L

EWIS

R. G

ORDON

, R

AMÓN

G

ROSFOGUEL

,

AND

E

RIC

M

IELANTS

H

UMAN

A

RCHITECTURE

: J

OURNAL

OF

THE

SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009

of Europe (Segev 2001). Given the British Empire’s colonial

control of the sacred land of Jews, Chris-tians, and Muslims in the former Ottoman-governed territory of Palestine, they beganwith the support of the European Zioniststo export large numbers of European Jewsto what is defined by these monotheistic re-ligions as the Holy Land (Segev 2001; Ger-ber 2006; Pappe 2006). This began a processof settler colonialism, where Zionism as aform of Jewish nationalism in Europe ac-quired colonial aspirations (Piterberg2008). Although there were other Jewishpeople living in Palestine before the emer-gence of Zionism, World War II led to a ma-jority European Jewish population seekingrefuge in the Holy Land, and many of thoseEuropean Jews reproduced there, under theaegis of the British Empire, the classicalforms of European settler colonialism. Pal-estinian and other Arab Jews, who once en-joyed certain rights when the Ottomanscontrolled Palestine (Greber 2006), were of-ten opposed to the British Imperial occupa-tion of Palestine and to many EuropeanJews’ Zionist aims of forming a Jewish-onlynation-state in Palestine (Hart 2007a).

The Zionist project of forming a Jewishstate was formulated by European Jewswho had considered even Uganda at theSixth Zionist Congress (1903), led in Basel,Switzerland, as a site for the Jewish NationState. These ideas were formed during a pe-riod of high colonialism in the Europeannations, especially with regard to Africaand Asia, since conditions were no longerfavorable for expansion into the Americas(North and South) because of the postcolo-nies and difficulties of maintaining the re-maining colonies there. This view of stateformation through colonization carriedthrough to the process that unfolded at theend of World War II, which amounted tothe effort to form a European settlement forJews in the Middle East (Masalha 2005;Hart 2007a; Piterberg 2008).

Exacerbating the colonial dimension ofthe situation was that many of the Euro-pean Jews involved in this process were,prior to the Holocaust, groups of Jews whoregarded themselves as cosmopolitan andassimilating Europeans to the West versusthe Oriental and less modern groups ofJews to the East. The Holocaust had fusedthese conflicting populations of Jews into asingular identity suffering from commonpersecution. Although seeing themselvesas returning to the Holy Land, they did notsee themselves as commonly linked to thepeople, including other Jews, who were al-ready there.

The term that was created after 1948 toidentify Jews of the Middle East was “Jewsfrom Arab lands.” There seemed to be avery careful elision of Jews from the Arabiccultural system that was marked by astrong political bias. Arabs had now be-come the enemy par excellence of the Jew-ish State, which was now seen as the solelegitimate representative body of the Jew-ish people. With the traditional antipathyof the Ashkenazi Jews—and it should be re-membered that Ashkenazi Jews dominatedthe Zionist movement and had once evenconsidered making Yiddish the nationallanguage of Israel—toward the classicalSephardic culture in place, the adoption ofa new anti-Gentile animus toward the Ar-abs similar to that sense of exclusion thathad animated Ashkenazi culture for manycenturies, caused the Arab nature of Jewishidentification to find itself singled out forextinction. Practices of separation fol-lowed, and for non-Jews already living inthe territory, what followed was what anew generation of Israeli historians de-scribes as “ethnic cleansing” (Pappe 2007).Paraphrasing Aimé Césaire’s Discourse onColonialism (2001), Hitlerism as a continua-tion of colonial racist ideology came back tohaunt Palestinians this time at the hands ofgroups of European Jews who ironicallywere escaping from the Nazi Holocaust.The settler project was ironically also

GLOBAL ANTI-SEMITISM IN WORLD-HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: AN INTRODUCTION 7

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE: JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE, VII, 2, SPRING 2009

“Semitic anti-Semitic” ideology. The Jewishstate formed in 1948 justified and continuesto justify its existence on the basis of beinga refuge for Jews (Hart 2007a; Kovel2007)—inaugurating many Jews to makealiyah, migrating to Israel, and in somecases escaping from horrific conditions un-der “anti-Jewish anti-Semitism” not only inEurope but also in some countries of EastAfrica and Western Asia—while Arab-Jews, in addition to Sephardic Jews fromAsia, and East African (mostly Ethiopian)Jews suffered and continue to suffer fromracist discrimination by European Jewswho controlled and continue to controlmost of the apparatuses of the new state.Thus, although the formation of the Jewishstate in 1948 led to the forced expulsion anddisplacement of most Palestinians fromtheir land (Marsalha 2005; Pappe 2007),Palestinian Jews and many other Arab Jewsfaced a peculiar development in this pro-cess. As David Sasha (2008) explains:

It is for this reason that the onlyJewry that has been forced toremove its adjectival prefix is thatof Arab Jewry. There is no otherJewry that is called “Jews fromsuch-and-such lands.”

This move for extinction from withinreflected a policy toward many of thoseoutside. Similar to the North American set-tler colonialism against Native Americansin the formation of the United States, Israelielites, who were mostly comprised of Euro-pean Jews, violated nearly every treaty andkept over the last 60 years a policy of sys-tematic, forced displacement of Palestin-ians from the land—which they argued didnot belong to them but to the British to giveas a territorial possession gained from thecollapse of the Ottomans—and settlementof Jewish colonies in these territories(Masalha 1992; Hart 2007b; Pappe 2007).

The “remarkable explicit Jewish-Chris-tian [combination] in political terms”

(Wallerstein 2008:31) in the last couple ofdecades can only be understood in the con-text of a gradual incorporation of EuropeanJews as “whites” in most Western metro-politan centers after the Second World War(Brodkin 2000). In addition, the concurrentuse of Israel as a Western pro-imperialistmilitary bastion in the Middle East (Chom-sky 1999)—especially because of its prox-imity to strategic sites of oil reserves in aworld needing fuel for further develop-ment of competing markets—led to astraight-jacketing of Israel’s identity asmore Western than part of the North Afri-can and West Asian worlds. The colonialproject in Israel can therefore not be sepa-rated from US hegemony and global whitesupremacy. Over time a triple global alli-ance was built between white Europeanand white Euro-American elites with Euro-American and European Jewish pro-Zion-ist elites in the West and European andEuro-American Jewish settlers in Palestine.Western blessings to Israel legitimated, fi-nanced, and made possible Israeli settlercolonialism in Palestine (cf. Petras 2006).

Israel and Global Anti-Semitism

It is irresponsible to discuss anti-Semit-ism today without taking into account thetransformation of European Jews from ra-cialized subjects of color into “whites” inboth Western Europe and North Americaand without the transformation of Pales-tine into a Jewish settler state (Christison &Christison 2006:116). With the incorpora-tion of European Jews as white there is animportant reduction of anti-Semitism onlyinto “anti-Jewish anti-Semitism” in theWest. By contrast, other forms of anti-Semitism such as “anti-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism” and “anti-Afro-Arab/Muslimanti-Semitism” are part of ordinary com-mon sense and are strong in the West (cf. El-Tayeb 2008). The recent incorporation ofEuropean Jews and Euro-American Jewsinto whiteness has important consequences

8 LEWIS R. GORDON, RAMÓN GROSFOGUEL, AND ERIC MIELANTS


captured in the following statement by Re-ligious Studies scholar Carl W. Ernst:

Europe and America have done adramatic about-face with respect toJudaism over the course of the pastcentury. Although anti-Semitismwas common and even fashionableearly in the twentieth century, thehorrors of the Holocaust and theestablishment of the state of Israelchanged that. While anti-Semitismstill lingers among certain hategroups, there are plenty of defend-ers of Judaism on the alert againstthem. Christianity, of course, re-mains the majority religious cate-gory in most of Europe andAmerica, and it is not in any realdanger. Among major religiousgroups, there remains Islam, with acomplex of media images that is al-most uniformly negative. How didthis negative representation cometo be, and what is its relationshipwith the actuality of Muslims pastand future?

The question of anti-Muslim ste-reotypes looms especially large to-day in terms of sheer numbers. Norespectable authorities defendanti-Semitism anymore, and thereis a widespread consensus that in-sulting statements and stereotypesabout Jews are both factually incor-rect and morally reprehensible,whether in reference to physicalappearance or behavior. Yet, at thesame time, it is commonly accept-ed among educated people that Is-lam is a religion that by definitionoppresses women and encouragesviolence. (Ernst 2003:11–12)

Neo-conservative elites in the US andWestern Europe (Taguieff 2002; Iganski2003), take “Judeophobia” and “anti-Jew-

ish anti-Semitism” as the hegemonic formsof racism in the West today, often in orderto blame, in a perverse way, Arabs andMuslims and to hide the hegemonic formsof white racism, which are mostly “anti-black racism” (globally) and “anti-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism.” (We point to theglobal aspects of anti-black racism because,unfortunately, anti-black racism is also a re-ality in Arab Muslim governed societies, in-cluding those in North Africa.) GivenArabs’/Muslims’ critical views of Israeland the Israeli state, associating critiques ofthe Zionist state with anti-Semitism, whiteracist elites in Europe and North Americadeveloped a strategy of “bad faith” (Gor-don 1995) where the main victims of racismtoday are accused of being the major perpe-trators of racism. Two recent exampleswere the readiness of the American right tocall Justice Sonia Sotomayor “racist” be-cause of her claims of bringing her life ex-perience as a Puerto Rican woman to theAmerican judicial system and their com-parison of President Barack Obama withHitler in their objections to publicly sup-ported national health care.

The misrepresentation of Jewish peo-ple as a white people, albeit with protestfrom many Jews, including some EuropeanJews who insist that they are not white, hasled to a perverse form of accusation of anti-Semitism premised upon global denuncia-tion of the role of Israel in Middle Easternpolitics and its impact on the rest of theworld. A pariah status has emerged for Pal-estinians living in the Holy Land, whichhas garnered protest across the globe. Al-though similar protest is made by Jewishpeople in Israel, their efforts are pushed tothe wayside by elites in charge of the Israelistate and their supporters in the UnitedStates who accuse all criticisms of Zionismor policies of the Israeli government asequivalent to anti-Semitism (Balibar, Brau-man, Butler, and Hazan 2003; Finkelstien2008). This instrumentalist argument dis-torts real situations of anti-Semitism and



reduces the credibility of anti-Semitic dis-course worldwide (ibid.). The charge con-fuses criticisms of a state’s policies withthose against its population. The matter iscomplicated by Israel being a nation-state,but that could apply as well to the many na-tion-states in the Arab world. Leaders havetried in those countries to make criticismsof their states equivalent to anti-Arab criti-cism or anti-Arab anti-Semitism, but thecurrent political climate enables the fallacyof this view to be seen more clearly than inthe case of the state of Israel. What makesthese cases vulnerable to this tactic, how-ever, is that there are instances of anti-Israelcriticism also being made by “anti-Jewishanti-Semitic” people and there are in-stances of anti-Saudi Arabia, anti-Iranian,and anti-Pakistan criticism taking the formof anti-Arab anti-Semitism, although thelast two are not primarily Arab peoples.

If we understand anti-Arab racism as aform of anti-Semitism, the main contempo-rary ideologues of this “Semitic anti-Semit-ism” are many pro-Zionist intellectuals,both Israeli and non-Israeli (Masalha 2007;Spector 2008; Finkelstein 2008). It shouldtherefore not come as a surprise that anti-Muslim rhetoric focuses not only on “Arabsin the Arab world” but also on Muslims inthe “West” under the stereotype of “terror-ist-prone people” (Said 1981; Gottschalkand Greenberg 2008). Some Islamophobicscholars, such as Raphael Israeli (2008),evoking the third Muslim invasion of Eu-rope, depict Muslim minorities, as opposedto other immigrants, as inherently danger-ous and intent on turning non-Muslimpopulations into second- and third-classcitizens in their own countries. This hyper-bolic rhetoric and preempting of criticaldiscussions of a state versus a people havecreated a situation where real expressionsof “anti-Jewish anti-Semitism” have be-come banal and where old forms of “anti-Jewish anti-Semitism” are being recycled todescribe atrocities of the Israeli state. Forexample, slogans such as “Hamas, Hamas:

Jewish to the gas” in recent anti-Zionistdemonstrations in Europe should be ofconcern to anti-colonial, anti-imperialist,and anti-racist movements.

Although it is true that many support-ers of Israel reproduce racist and imperial-ist ideologies, we should like to stress herethat it is not our position that all supportersof Israel’s claim to be a refuge for Jews ad-here to racist and imperialist policies. They,and all of us concerned with anti-Semitismin all of its varieties (such as “anti-Jewishanti-Semitism,” “anti-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism,” and “anti-Afro-Arab/Muslimanti-Semitism”), should be concerned bythe extent to which some anti-Israel dis-courses fall into “anti-Jewish anti-Semit-ism.”

PART II: CONTEMPORARY ANTI-SEMITISM

We divided the collection of articles in-cluded in this volume in three main topics.The following are summaries of contribu-tions to this volume:

Anti-Semitism: Past and Present

David Ost discusses anti-Semitism inEastern Europe, examining the popularclaim of a “new anti-Semitism” said to bepresently manifesting itself. ContemporaryPolish anti-Semitism is analyzed in order todemonstrate how Jews are often associatedwith capitalist modernity, rendering popu-lar anti-Semitism more a symbol of non-elite disgruntlement than a real expressionof animosity towards individuals orgroups. In addition, he discusses the perva-sive belief in the reality of virulent Polishanti-Semitism, a belief deeply ingrainedamong western Jews with ancestors fromPoland, and criticizes this as an example ofan unfair anti-Polonism that is itself partlyresponsible for perpetuating anti-Semit-ism.



James Cohen dissects anti-Semitismbrandished as a charge against real or al-leged offenders, an approach he considersindispensable to understanding how thenotion of anti-Semitism operates in politi-cal discourse and action. He analyzes in de-tail the accusation of anti-Semitism in caseswhere it can be shown that the targeted be-havior is at least in part imaginary and con-structed. According to Cohen, theeffectiveness of this ascribed anti-Semitismdepends on the ability of those who con-struct it to denounce it and make it appearplausible by connecting it with tangibleanti-Semitic acts or declarations. Providingrecent French examples, Cohen suggestsanti-Semitism is constructed in an essen-tializing and a-historical manner, lumpingtogether disparate groups and individualsinto a supposed milieu or nebulous collec-tive, sometimes portrayed in conspiratorialterms.

Santiago Slabodsky utilizes the Frank-furt School’s analysis of anti-Semitism todemonstrate the need to go beyond the vi-cious circles of the current academic debateby including the interplay between the cen-ter and periphery regarding the imperialrole of the Jew. Tracing the latter over a pe-riod of five hundred years, Slabodsky re-evaluates typologies of anti-Semitism andpoints to the need to read post-1945/48 de-colonial anti-Semitism as a confrontationwith the colonial legacy that universalizesotherness through the Jewish experience.By tracing the renewal of this constructionin the debate between radical Jews and de-colonizers, Slabodsky concludes that thisrole of the Jew is as important for currentJewish identity as its disruption is neces-sary for de-colonizers.

Rabson Wuriga explores Europeanvoices (Linneaus, Blumenbach, Hegel) thatinfluenced attitudes and policies on raceand anti-Semitism during the 18th–20th cen-turies. He highlights some of the major de-velopments such as scientific racism,‘rights of man,’ and others as movements

that either aided or gave expression to Eu-ropean anti-Semitism. In his contribution,Wuriga puts forth the proposition that theidea of new anti-Semitism is another phaseof anti-Semitism—only one that targets theJewish State of Israel. Wuriga suggests,first, that the European intellectual commu-nity played a major role in aiding the anti-Semitic conception of Jews as Jews; sec-ondly, he notes that European Jews wereimbibed into European racial fantasies andended up committing Semitic anti-Semit-ism and/or racism.

Walter Mignolo discusses how racialformations in colonialism and imperialismhave to be understood in the context of thesimultaneous transformation of Christian-ity and the emergence of the capitalistworld economy. In his contribution he fo-cuses on how Christian theology preparedthe terrain for two complementary articula-tions of racism. One was founded on Chris-tian epistemic privilege over the two majorcompeting religions (Jews and Muslims),the other on a secularization of theologicaldetachment culminating in the “purity ofblood” that became the biological and nat-ural marker (Indians, Blacks, Mestizos,Mulatos) of what used to be the marker ofreligious belief (Jews, Moors, Conversos,Moriscos). Mignolo also discusses theemergence of secular “Jewness” in eigh-teenth century Europe and how these de-velopments were concurrent with WesternImperialism in the New World. He con-cludes that secular Jewness joined secularEuro-American economic practices (e.g.,imperial capitalism) and the constructionof the State of Israel by what Marc Ellis de-scribes as “Constantine Jews.”

Ramon Grosfoguel discusses the conse-quences of the latest Israeli massacres inGaza in relation to its global consequencestoward Human Rights and global Anti-Semitism today. He explores HumanRights in the 20th century in relation toRights of People in the 16th century andRights of Man in the 18th century. More-



over, he develops a discussion about Fun-damentalism in the world today, inparticular on the hegemonic, silent and per-vasive form of fundamentalism: Eurocen-tric fundamentalism.

Jewishness, Anti-Semitism, and Identity

For Marc Ellis, anti-Semitism is a con-sequence of the historical collusion be-tween Western (neo)liberalism and secularcapitalism, supported by Christianity andConstantine Jews. In his contribution heraises provocative questions about Jewishidentity, the Holocaust, and the increas-ingly perilous situation in the Middle East.Ellis uses the categories of a ConstantinianJewish establishment, Progressive Jews,and Jews of Conscience and respectivelylinks them with neo-conservative, liberal/left of center and radical perspectives. ForEllis, Constantinian Jewish life revolvesaround the Holocaust and Israel as centralto Jewish life, adopting neo-conservativepolitics of remembrance and empower-ment; Progressive Jews, while affirming theHolocaust and Israel as central to Jewishlife, see the Israeli occupation of Palestineas a blight on Jewish innocence and pur-pose, supporting a two-state solution as away forward for the Jewish people; andJews of Conscience see the twinning of theHolocaust and Israel in power over othersas a deformation of Jewish life and charac-ter that can only be addressed through aradical evaluation of the uses of Jewishpower in the United States and Israel.

Etienne Balibar’s intervention centreson an insightful and critical analysis ofthree recent works on Zionism: JacquelineRose’s “The Question of Zion,” which inter-prets the historical trajectory of Zionismand examines the messianic foundations ofpolitical Zionism; Idith Zertal’s La nation etla mort: La Shoah dans le discours et la politiqued’Israël, and its study of the way in which aset of commemorations and educational in-

stitutions constructed and incorporated thenotion of a “crucial and exclusive link” be-tween the memory of the Shoah and Israelidefense policy; and Amnon Raz-Krakotz-kin’s Exil et souveraineté: Judaïsme, sionismeet pensée bi-nationale, which addresses bi-na-tional thought and the degree to which itconstitutes both an “intellectual and moralreform” and a political methodology in thecurrent pervasive presence of anti-Semitism and the profundity of the de-ferred effects that its internalization con-stantly produces in the self-consciousnessor Selbstthematisierung indissociable fromthe Israeli national construction.

Ivan Davidson Kalmar explores anti-Semitism as one aspect of the long historyof a joint construction of Jewish and Mus-lim identities, and raises fundamentallyimportant and provocative questions abouthow, in more recent times, the commonalitybetween Jew and Arab, which the term“anti-Semitism” displays unambiguously,could have ever become what he calls a “se-cret.” Drawing on Edward Said and refer-ring to Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion ofthe Christ” as well as Hegel, he argues thatfrom the 18th century to September 11,2001, the nature of contemporary Muslimanti-Semitism betrays a clear debt to tradi-tional, western anti-Semitic stereotypesand hate literature.

Anti-Semitism and Literature

Martine Chard-Hutchinson providesan analysis of Philip Roth’s The Plot againstAmerica and focuses on the depiction ofanti-Semitic riots in America on Monday,October 12, 1942, said to provide “counter-historical” context for the novel while pro-viding clues as to its narrative, some of itskey issues like “the eternal Antisemitism,”and even its title “the Jewish conspirationalplot against America.” Chard-Hutchinsonlooks at how Roth references the riots butalso contextualizes Henry Ford, AmericaFirst, southern Democrats, isolationist Re-



publicans, and major figures such as Lind-bergh, to carefully scrutinize the depictionof anti-Semitism in this major literarywork.

Michael Löwy focuses on FranzKafka’s Trial, which conveys Kafka’s rebelJewish consciousness, combining compas-sion for the victim and a critique of its vol-untary servitude. Löwy claims that it is notin an imaginary future but in contemporaryhistorical events that one should look forthe source of inspiration for The Trial.Among these facts were the great anti-Semitic trials of his time, all examples ofstate injustice: the Tisza trial (Hungary1882), the Dreyfus trial (France 1894-1899),the Hilsner trial (Czechoslovakia, 1899-1900) and the Beiliss trial (Russia, 1912-13).In spite of the differences between the vari-ous State regimes—absolutist, constitu-tional monarchy, republic—the judicialsystem condemned, sometimes to death,innocent victims whose only crime was tobe Jewish.

Finally Jean-Paul Rocchi offers a jointexploration of racism and anti-Semitism ina textual dialogue between Baldwin andFreud. Rocchi argues that the imprint leftby nineteenth and early twentieth centuryracial metaphors on the Freudian construc-tion of gender and sexuality has repro-duced the logic of racial differentiationwithin psychoanalysis, which can be seenin the mutual exclusion of identificationand desire and the role played by uncon-scious fantasies. Rocchi asserts that as amodern theory of subjectivity based on sexand sexual difference, psychoanalysis hasbeen strongly influenced by the cultural,scientific and religious constructions ofrace. At the same time, the binary logic ofgender and sexuality in psychoanalysis de-lineates the space where a seemingly self-assertive white consciousness emerges.

In all, the articles gathered here do notrepresent a unified voice but those oftenunheard in discussions of anti-Semitism. Itis our hope that bringing them together will

offer the readers of Human Architecture anuanced understanding of this persistentaberration.

REFERENCES

Baer, Yitzhak. (1993). A History of the Jews inChristian Spain Vol. 2 (Jewish PublicationSociety: Philadelphia and Jerusalem).

Balibar, Etienne, Brauman, Rony, Butler, Judith,and Hazan, Eric. (2003). Anti-sémitisme:l’intolérable chantage (Editions La Decou-verte: Paris).

Bresc, Henri. (2001). Arabes de langue, juifs dereligion (Bouchene: Paris).

Brodkin, Karen. (2000). How Jews Became WhiteFolks and What that Says about Race inAmerica (Rutgers University Press: NewBrunswick, N.J.).

Césaire, Aimé. (2001). Discourse on Colonialism,trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly ReviewPress: New York).

Chomsky, Noam. (1999). Fateful Triangle: TheUnited States, Israel and the Palestinians.(South End Press: Boston).

Christison Kathleen & Christison Bill. (2005).“Zionism as a Racist Ideology” inDonaldo Macedo & Panayota Gounari(eds.) The Globalization of Racism (Para-digm Publishers: Boulder, CO), p. 111-127.

Dussel, Enrique. (1994). 1492: El encubrimientodel Otro: Hacia el origen del “mito de la mod-ernidad” (Plural Editores: Plural Edi-tores).

El-Tayeb Fatima. (2008). “The Birth of a Euro-pean Public: Migration, Postnationality,and Race in the Uniting of Europe,”American Quarterly, vol. 60, nr. 3, pp. 649-670.

Ernst, Carl W. (2003). Following Mohammad:Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World(The University of North Carolina Press:Chapel Hill and London).

Fenster, Tovi. (1998). “Ethnicity, Citizenship,Planning and Gender: the case of Ethio-pian immigrant women in Israel,” Gen-der, Place and Culture , Vol. 5 , No. 2, pp.177-189.

Finch, III. Charles. (1991). Echoes of the Old Dark-land: Themes from the African (Khenti,Incorporated: Decatur, GA).

Finkelstein, Norman G. (2008). Beyond Chutz-pah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and theAbuse of History (University of CaliforniaPress: Berkeley).



Gerber, Jane S. (1992). Jews of Spain: A History ofthe Sephardic Experiment (The Free Press:New York).

Gordon, Lewis. (1995). Bad Faith and Anti-BlackRacism (Humanity Books: New Jersey).

Gordon, Lewis. (2006). “Through the Zone ofNon-being: A Reading of Black Skin,White Masks in Celebration of Fanon'sEightieth Birthday” in Worlds and Knowl-edge Otherwise Vol. 1, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 1-29.

Gordon, Lewis. (2008). An Introduction to Afri-cana Philosophy (Cambridge UniversityPress: Cambridge).

Gottschalk, Peter and Greenberg, Gabriel.(2008). Islamophobia: Making Muslemsthe Enemy (Rowman and Littlefield Pub-lishers: Lanham, Maryland).

Grosfoguel, Ramon. (2005). “The Implicationsof Subaltern Epistemologies for GlobalCapitalism: Transmodernity, BorderThinking and Global Coloniality” inRichard P. Appelbaum and William I.Robinson (eds) Critical Globalization Stud-ies (New York and London: Routledge),pp. 283-293.

Grosfoguel, Ramon and Mielants, Eric. (2006).“The Long-Durée Entanglement BetweenIslamophobia and Racism in the Mod-ern/Colonial Capitalist/PatriarchalWorld-System,” Human Architecture:Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge,Vol. 5, No. 1: 1-12.

Hart, Alan. (2007a). Zionism: The Real Enemy ofthe Jews, Vol. 1 (World Focus Publishing:Kent, England).

Hart, Alan. (2007b). Zionism: The Real Enemy ofthe Jews, Vol. 2 (World Focus Publishing:Kent, England).

Iganski, Paul. (2003-editor). A New Anti-Semit-ism? Debating Judeophobia in 21st CenturyBritain (Profile Books Ltd.: London).

Israeli, Raphael. (2008). Muslim Minorities inModern States. The Challenge of Assimila-tion (Transaction Publishers, New Brun-swick, NJ).

Kamali, Masoud. (2009). Racial Discrimination.Institutional Patterns and Politics (Rout-ledge: New York).

Kennedy, Hugh. (1997). Muslim Spain and Portu-gal: A Political History of al-Andalus (Long-man: Essex, UK).

Kovel, Joel. (2007). Overcoming Zionism (PlutoPress: Ann Arbor and London)

Kramer, G. (2006). Historia de Palestina (SigloXXI: Madrid).

Lewis, Bernard. (1987). The Jews of Islam (Prin-ceton University Press: Princeton, NJ).

Littman, David. (1979). "Jews Under MuslimRule: The Case Of Persia." The WienerLibrary Bulletin XXXII (New series 49/50).

Lowney, Chris. (2005). A Vanished World: Medi-eval Span’s Golden Age of Enlightenment(Free Press: New York).

Majid, Anouar. (2003). Freedom and Orthodoxy:Islam and Difference in the Post-AndalucianAge (Stanford University Press: Palo Alto,CA).

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. (2005). “Religion,Conquest, and Race in the Foundationsof the Modern/Colonial World” (unpub-lished).

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. (2006). “"Reconcili-ation as a Contested Future: Decoloniza-tion as Project or Beyond the Paradigm ofWar." In Reconciliation: Nations andChurches in Latin America, edited by IainS. Maclean (London: Ashgate), 225-45

Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. (2008). “Religion,Conquete et Race dans la Fondations dumonde Moderne/Colonial” in Islamopho-bie dans le Monde Moderne, edited byMohamed Mestiri, Ramon Grosfogueland El Yamine Soum (IIIT: Paris), 205-238.

Marsalha, Nur. (1992). Expulsion of the Palestin-ians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in ZionistPolitical Thought, 1882-1948 (Institute ofPalestinian Studies: Washington, D.C.).

Marsalha, Nur. (2005). Catastrophe Remembered:Palestine, Israel and the Internal Refugees(Zed Books: London).

Marsalha, Nur. (2007). The Bible and Zionism:Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel (Zed Books:London).

Melocal, Maria Rosa. (2003). The Ornament of theWorld: How Muslims, Jews and ChristiansCreated a Culture of Tolerance in MedievalSpain (Back Bay Books: New York).

Pappe, Ilan. (2006). A History of Modern Pales-tine: One Land, Two Peoples (CambridgeUniversity Press: Cambridge).

Pappe, Ilan. (2007). The Ethnic Cleansing of Pales-tine (Oneworld Publications: London).

Perez, Joseph. (2005 ). Los judíos en España (Mar-cial Pons: Madrid).

Petras, James. (2006). The Power of Israel in theUnited States (Clarity Press: Atlanta, GA).

Piterberg, Gabriel. (2008). The Returns of Zion-ism: Myth, Politics and Scholarship in Israel(Verso: London).

Quijano, Aníbal. (1991). "Colonialidad y Mod-ernidad/Racionalidad," Perú Indígena 29:11-21.

Quijano, Aníbal. (2000). "Coloniality of Power,



Eurocentrism, and Latin America,"NEPANTLA Vol. 1, No. 3: 533-580.

Sasha, David. (2008). “On the Use of the Term‘Arab Jew,’” JVoices.com (8 August):http://jvoices.com/2008/08/08/on-the-use-of-the-term-%E2%80%9Carab-jew%E2%80%9D/

Said, Edward. (1981). Covering Islam: How theMedia and the Experts Determine How WeSee the Rest of the World. New York: Pan-theon Books.

Segev, Tom. (2001). One Palestine, Complete: Jew-ish and Arabs under British Mandate (OwlBooks: New York).

Spector, Stephen. (2008). Evangelicals and Israel:The Story of American Christian Zionism(Oxford University Press: New York).

Stillman, Norman A. (1979). The Jews of ArabLands in Modern Times (Jewish Publica-tion Society: Philadelphia).

Taguieff, Jean-Pierre. (2002). La Nouvelle Judéo-phobie (Fayard-Mille et une Nuit: Paris).

Wallerstein, Immanuel. (2008). “The PoliticalConstruction of Islam in the ModernWorld System” in Khaldoun Sammanand Mazhar Al-Zoby (eds.), Islam and theModern Orientalist World-System (Para-digm Press Publishers: Boulder, CO), pp.25–36.

global anti-semitism in world-historical perspective: an ... · inﬂuential books, including, ......

Documents