UNE RACE IMAGINAIRE (AN IMAGINARY RACE)
Courte Histoire de la Judéophobie (A Short History of Judéophobia)
by Shlomo Sand
176 pp. Paris, Seuil. 2020.
The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has ventured into a territory that is nowadays mostly occupied by ardent Zionists intent on proving that Jew hatred is eternal and that the state of Israel is the only place where the Jews can feel safe. Sand hardly belongs to that hasbara taskforce, having authored a book on the invention of the Jewish people and another on the invention of the Land of Israel. Nor does he believe in neutrality and objectivity of an historical narrative, which necessarily reflects concerns and biases of the historian’s own history. He is a child of Holocaust survivors, born in Austria, a country with a much higher number of Nazis per capita than the rest of the Reich. This makes his interest in Jew hatred rather personal. Moreover, he is “not at all certain to have fully understood the whole set of factors that produced this long-term hatred” (p. 166). But his approach deserves attention.
The book is written in a clear and concise style and consists of fifteen short chapters. (It was written in Hebrew and translated to French. No English edition has been published.) Its main argument concerns the historical experience of Jews living under Christian rule. Sand posits that a group believed to have killed the son of God is shaped by the hatred that surrounds it. The Jews distance themselves from their non-Jewish environment, become suspicious and mistrustful of attempts at rapprochement, particularly since these often turn out to be hidden attempts at conversion. The Jews turn inside, engage in Talmudic study and – hope against hope – long for deliverance.
Moreover, Jews are not passive receptors of Christian prejudice, they develop resentment and hatred that may find outlets in their attitudes and rituals (see Reckless Rites by Elliott Horowitz). Sand understands the resultant identity, just as the environment, tend to change. However, the change is never immediate. These negative attitudes, developed in conditions of powerlessness, become truly dangerous when acted out in the Israeli state where Jews wield exclusive power.
The author does not refer to Antisemitism but to Judéophobia, Jew hatred. The former is rather recent (late 19th century) and is predicated on the imaginary concept of Jews as a race, while the latter goes back centuries and is rooted in religious intolerance. Sand draws a parallel between Antisemitism and Zionism, a political movement often presented as a reaction to persecution. Just as Christian hatred of the Jews fashions their identity, racial Antisemitism fashions Zionism and the state that embodies it. In a peculiar form of self-hate, early Zionist authors used explicitly antisemitic images to express their disdain of the meek Jews, longing to transform them into a proud new Hebrew. Sand concludes that the Israeli state is a ethnoreligious and ethnobiological entity rather than a modern democratic state of its citizens.
Sand looks at the longue durée historical perspective, which, he shows, prepares the mass murder of Jews in the 20th century. He explicates the gradual onset of Judéophobia: from prohibition to proselytize to policies of public humiliation instituted in the 6th century, from periodic expulsions to massacres during the Crusades. Sand is particularly good in the realm of European intellectual history, highlighting Judéophobia of the humanists, from Erasmus to Voltaire. He quotes Kant and Michelet, Fourier and Proudhon, Gobineau and Marr to show the continuity of a certain perception of the Jews. The contemporary period recycles the ideas of race developed in Spain in the 16th century not only to discriminate against Jews but also to structure a whole gamut of Latin American products of miscegenation. Moreover, these ideas become scientific.
Sand refers to Arthur Ruppin (1876-1943), one of the main organizers of Zionist colonies in Palestine, who, after defending a doctoral thesis on eugenics in his native Germany, engaged in research in physical anthropology, measuring skulls and noses of Jews of different origins as well as collecting and comparing their fingerprints. Ruppin firmly believed that Jews constitute a distinct white race whose ancestors in Canaan were not Semites, but Indo-Europeans. While settled in Palestine since 1908, he maintained contact with his German peers, including Hans Günther (1891-1968), a major promoter of racial theory, whom he visited for the last time soon after Hitler’s rise to power. By that time, he had been appointed professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (pp. 124-127).
This material, mostly familiar to the educated reader, is presented in a novel manner: it focuses on the persistent image of the Jews as “a wandering people-race”. Zionism, a European ideology par excellence, has naturally inherited this image as well as other denigrating ones (profiteers, troublemakers, degenerates etc.). In today’s Europe, argues Sand, Judéophobia has been largely replaced by Islamophobia, while erstwhile Antisemites have become admirers of Israel, particularly of its way of “dealing with the Muslims”. This concise book naturally has a few lacunae (for example, the treatment of Soviet Jews is rather cursory) but it would definitely interest broad readership in English and other languages.
“The author does not refer to Antisemitism but to Judéophobia, Jew hatred. The former is rather recent (late 19th century) and is predicated on the imaginary concept of Jews as a race, while the latter goes back centuries and is rooted in religious intolerance.”
In support of that idea, here’s a quote from Hajo Meyer’s “An Ethical Tradition Betrayed – The End of Judaism”, page 159: “Until 1879, the word ‘anti-Semitism’ did not exist. It made sense only after hatred of Jews became increasingly grounded in the psuedoscientific theory of races,…
But then he goes on to explain that anti-Israeli sentiment is not the same as anti-Semitism, page 166:
It is a bitter example of historical dialectics that the Jewish state, originally established in order to protect Jews from anti-Semitism, has spawned a new phenomenon often mistaken for anti-Semitism: namely anti-Israeli sentiment. While at times old anti-Semitic attitudes may partially feed this response, it is the current aggressive and shameful policies of the state of Israel that are chiefly responsible for its growth.
I recall that one of the earlier Shlomo Sand “invention of” books was out in French and Hebrew long before available in English. Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s, 200 Years Together is still withheld from English, but available in Russian, French and German – a comprehensive history of the Jews in Russia.
I recall that one of the earlier Shlomo Sand “invention of” books was out in French and Hebrew long before available in English. Alexandre Solzhenitsyn’s, 200 Years Together is still withheld from English, but available in Russian, French and German – a comprehensive history of the Jews in Russia.
I’ll await the English translation of UNE RACE IMAGINAIRE. But there is an academic history available about Jews in early medieval times: Early Medieval Jewish Policy in Western Europe, by Bernard S. Bachrach, 1977, University of Minnesota Press. History of peoples has ups and downs. Narratives can be written either way.
The conclusion here (page 139)
“To conclude: early medieval rulers were fundamentally pro-Jewish in their policies as understood within the framework of contemporary values. Judaism was the only religion other than orthodox Christianity that was legally permitted. In light of the treatment by Christians of heretics, pagans, and Muslims the position accorded to Judaism is astounding. Throughout the early Middle Ages a general pattern of Jewish policy evolved that included the elimination of the restrictive Jewry provisions of the Roman law, the rejection of the anti-Jewish restrictions of the canon law, and the cooperative development by secular rulers and their Jewish subjects of a Jewry law that gave Jews the same basic rights enjoyed by other national groups. Just as people in early medieval society lived according to their national laws, so too the Jews were permitted also to live according to their own law. ……….”
I recall that one of the earlier
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“Until World War II, the vast majority of Eastern and Western Jews – traditionalist, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Communists and Bundists – were avowed anti-Zionists. They did not wish for sovereignty over themselves within a nation-state framework in the Middle East. The Bundists did in fact see themselves, and quite rightly, as a Yiddish people in need of cultural-linguistic autonomy, but they rejected outright the proposal to immigrate to Palestine as part of a project of a trans-world Jewish nation.
“And here we come to the last desperate attempt to justify the Zionist enterprise retroactively: Zionism as a response to an emergency situation. History, unfortunately, was more tragic. Zionism failed utterly to rescue Europe’s Jews, nor could it have done so. From 1882 until 1924, the Jews streamed in their masses – about 2.5 million – to the North American continent of promise. And yes, had it not been for the racist Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that prevented continued immigration, another million or perhaps two million of these souls might have been saved.”
“What remains for me, then, is to go on being a-Zionist or post-Zionist while doing what I can to help rescue the place I live in from an ever-intensifying racism, due, among other reasons, to the teaching of a false historical past, fear of assimilation with the Other, revulsion of the indigenous culture and so on. For, as the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet wrote, ‘If I don’t burn / if you don’t burn / … if we don’t burn / how will the light / … vanquish the darkness?’”
In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got
(a) a moral argument for the creation of Israel
(b) an argument to show that the European Zionist Jews were not invaders
(c) a simple acknowledgement that the Arab offer of a single secular state was a reasonable compromise
?
No, we ain’t got them.
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“Opinion The Twisted Logic of the Jewish ‘Historic Right’ to Israel” by Shlomo Sand, Haaretz, Nov. 14/18
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-twisted-logic-of-the-jewish-historic-right-to-israel-1.6654428
“Our political culture insists on seeing the Jews as the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews. But the Jews never existed as a ‘people’ – still less as a nation.”
EXCERPTS:
“The founding myth of Zionism – which proceeds in an unbroken line from Max Nordau and Arthur Ruppin, to worrisome geneticists in several Israeli universities and at Yeshiva University in New York – acts as the principal ideological glue for the nation’s everlasting unity, and today more than ever. The justification for Zionist settlement/colonization (choose your preferred term – they mean the same thing) is the meta-paradigm that is expressed in the declaration of the establishment of the state, namely: ‘We were here, we were uprooted, we came back.’
“Full disclosure: Even when I believed, mistakenly, that the ‘Jewish people’ was exiled by the Romans in 70 C.E. or 132 C.E., I didn’t think that this conferred on the Jews some sort of imagined ‘historic right’ to the Holy Land. If we seek to organize the world as it was 2,000 years ago, we will turn it into one big madhouse. Why not bring Native Americans back to Manhattan, for example, or restore the Arabs to Spain and the Serbs to Kosovo? Of course, such twisted logic of ‘historic right’ will also commit us to supporting the continued settlement/colonization of Hebron, Jericho and Bethlehem.
“As I pursued my research, my realization that the Exodus from Egypt never happened and that the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah were not exiled by the Romans, left me nonplussed. There is not one study by a historian who specializes in antiquity that recounts that ‘exile’ or any serious historiographic study that reconstructs a mass migration from the place. The ‘exile’ is a formative event that never took place, otherwise it would be the subject of dozens of research studies. Judahite farmers, who constituted an absolute majority of the population at the first century C.E., were not seafarers like the Greeks or the Phoenicians, and did not spread across the world. It was Jahwist monotheism, which since the Hasmonean era had become a dynamic religion engaged in conversion, which laid the foundations for the Jews’ age-old existence around the globe.” (cont’d)