From time to time on DailyKos, we are visited by a few users who post some fairly patently antisemitic diaries. The users here see through it, and the person either gets banned or slinks away. Other times, there are pro-Palestinian diaries that contain criticisms of Israel based on disputed ideas that sometimes result in comments that I believe are genuinely motivated by anger at Israeli policies but are so laden with antisemitic baggage that if the target were another race, that person would be chased away. Finally, there are criticisms of the state of Israel that stick to the policies and are devoid of this content.
This diary will put antisemitism in historical context and attempt to explain why certain facially neutral criticisms aren't what they seem, how it is different than American racism and how it is the same, and why it matters.
Hopefully this will provide some clarity to folks who are looking to criticize nutbags like Avigdor Liebermann without making it a racial thing.
Full disclosure
I have never been to Israel. If I lived there, I would oppose Netanyahu's government vigorously and would be beside myself at the current coalition government. I have my concerns with the two-state solution, but not because of what I think it means for Israelis—nuts and bolts things like water and economics—but I'm generally in favor of getting a peace deal done yesterday-like, and I think there are a lot of people who know more about it than me. I'm Jewish. I've studied Jewish history at the graduate level.
OK, so now that you know where I'm coming from, I hope you will evaluate the following on the merits. If you would like more information on how my background my affect this analysis, feel free to ask in the comments.
Threshold Question: Who is a Jew and What are "the Jews"?
Volumes have been filled trying to answer the question of who may rightly call himself a Jew. Opinions vary wildly. The religious definition seems simple: someone whose mother was Jewish or who converted. That definition derives from Rabbinic authority, and, as such is normative as Jewish law. The problem even with that seemingly simple definition is that it appears to be contradicted by events in the Bible unless we fill them in. For example, Moses's own wife was Midianite, not Hebrew, and so was Moses's son Gershom a Hebrew? Presumably yes, but we have to guess that Zipporah "converted" at some point, which seems hard to understand because even the earliest laws relating to "strangers" in the midst of the Israelites weren't given yet. On the basis of arguments like this, the american Reform and worldwide progressive Jewish movements recognize someone as being Jewish if they have a Jewish father. I say that just to give an example of the complexity of this question, not to overly digress.
Even if we assume that the Rabbinic rule is correct it leaves open an even more complicated question: who is a convert. Here we again are given a simple definition that has generated reams of controversy and is a hot-button issue in the state of Israel to this day. The controversy has to do with Jewish denominational politics and does not reveal much about the question I'm discussing here.
However, both of these questions are definitions promulgated largely by Jews and largely in the context of religious, not civil, questions. For historical purposes, who Jews consider to be Jews is almost entirely irrelevant, and is probably fully irrelevant before the establishment of the State of Israel. What is important is what the government or majority culture considers to be a Jew.
For a discussion of some of the different defintions of who is a Jew, here is a Responsum by the Reform movement:http://data.ccarnet.org/cgi-bin/respdisp.pl?file=38&year=carr
On an individual level, for civil purposes, the state of Israel recognizes this reality. In order to emigrate to Israel on the basis of your Jewish status, you have to have at least a Jewish grandparent, even if you're a Catholic priest. This was modeled on the Nazi Nuremburg laws, which considered you to be a Jew if you had three Jewish grandparents, or if you had one or two and were practicing Judaism or married to a Jew. Both of these laws firmly rely on Jewishness as a racial status, something passed by blood and ancestry, and not something that simply depends on the religion that one practices. (Originally, the Law of Return was limited to practicing Jews, but that was changed in 1970.)
Antisemitism and Anti-Judaism
That was not a new phenomenon in Israel or in Nazi Germany. Modern antisemitism, like modern racism, began in Medieval Spain. This isn't to say there isn't racism other places or in other manners, but the racism that we still struggle with in America, as well as the antisemitism that pervades the world, grew from there. James Carroll's The Sword of Constantine (the book not the not so hot movie) is a great source on this.
In the Ancient Mediterranean, Jews were seen as a people from Judaea who had a peculiar set of folk habits. Like many other peoples, they were integrated into the Mediterranean world. (Martin Goodman's Rome and Jerusalem is my main authority on this.) The Maccabean war which forms the basis for the festival of Chanukah was more about religion than race. Hellenized Jews opposed the war, and Jews outside of Judaea were not involved. (See Alexander to Actium by Peter Green) Later, with the Jewish war ending in 70, and the later conflict in c. 133, Jews stood out among the people subject to Roman rule as less willing to engage in syncretism, probably because their monotheism was incompatible with the merging of polytheistic pantheons that facilitated it between other peoples, leading to, for example, the temple and cult of the Egyptian Isis in Rome. Prior to these conflicts, it has been said that as much as 10% of the population of the Roman Empire was either Jewish or in some meaningful way Judaized, and that the practice of the sabbath spread widely. These numbers may be exaggerated, and may include only dilettantes, but it was clear that there were a lot of people not of Judaean origin practicing Jewish religion in the early Roman imperial period. In the New Testament, Jesus accuses the Pharisees (the forerunners of the rabbis) of being overly convert hungry. It is likely that these Judaizers without ancestral ties to Judaea were the most fertile ground for converts to Christianity, since Pauline Christianity eliminated some of the—erm—more painful entry barriers, like circumcision.
There is not much doubt that there was a kind of antisemitism in the Roman world. Many famous writers derided the Jews' refusal to eat pork and accused them of laziness for not working on the sabbath. Certainly, the practice of circumcision was a cause for much ridicule and shock as well. It's not clear that this antisemitism was limited to ancestral Judaeans, however. This means it's probably different than what came later.
In Late Antiquity, however, with Christianity ascendant, the focus began to change from focusing on the Jews as a people to Judaism as a religion. The prevailing rule was that of St. Augustine, who reasoned that the Jews were the "witness people" but were in error religiously. According to this rule, the Jews must be tolerated, not eliminated, but they may be humiliated and given second class status. Important in this rule is to note that Judaism was not racial. A convert to Christianity, once approved, gained all of the rights and privileges of a Christian.
This was largely the same in the muslim world, where Jews, as people of the book, were second class citizens, but citizens nonetheless and were largely tolerated, and, in some times and places, ascended to high rank. By comparison, the practitioners of non-Abrahamic faiths were not treated as well by the Caliphates. The Byzantine Empire largely considered Jews to be second class, but not third or fourth class. Remaining pagans and various other heretical sects were given an even lower status through much of Byzantine's thousand year empire. Among the lower classes of people were adherents to religions that were something like Judaism, but weren't: this included the Samaritans, who fought a war with the Byzantines, and other Judaizing tribes and other groups that were nominally Jewish but outside the Rabbinic mainstream.
I'm not well versed in the history of the Persian diaspora that existed for over 1000 years before the Islamic conquest. Jews there lived a separate existence under their own laws, and were in many ways second class citizens, but apparently had a degree of political power. I'm unaware of any dehumanizing racial acts by the Persians, Parthians, and later Persian empire.
This began to change as Christian kings made substantial progress in conquering Spain. As new towns were captured, Jews were seen as collaborators of the muslim enemy (wouldn't you be?) and were deprived of status. In order to avoid this, many Jews converted, at least outwardly. This angered many of the fortune-seeking knights who wanted rank, title, and land in the newly conquered land. Racial lineage was thus very important in Spain. The small remnants of Christian controlled territory along Spain's northern coast slowly conquered the rest of the peninsula and formed mini kingdoms. The racial confrontations here were more common than anywhere else in Western Christendom, and probably only second in all of Christendom to the flagging remains of Byzantium. Thus, racial identity was heightened, and, given the background of zero-sum conflict, it did not generate a cosmopolitan multicultural society such as existed in the east or in the ancient world. In my view, the modern world, good and bad, was born in Spain. Spain and Portugal are the result of the only successful crusade. Spain and Portugal catalyzed the expansion of European empires. On the more positive side, it was in Spain where ancient wisdom lost to Christendom was transmitted back into it, and back to Italy, where it would produce a flowering of arts we call the Renaiassance, and to France where it would change western philosophy.
Thus, the first blood purity laws were enacted by Alfonso VII in Toldeo in the Twelfth Century. Recently converted Jews could not hold office. One can literally trace the evolution of this policy in early medieval Spain directly to the Nazi Nuremburg laws.
In other words, regardless of what Jews though about themselves, or of their relatives who may have converted to Christianity, the hegemonic culture set their own standards. Imagine being locked in the ghetto with your cousin Peter (born Chaim) tonsored and in a monk's habit after he found Jesus. Oy vey.
Jewishness may be a unique phenomenon. It is not really a race, because you can be excluded from the group by making a choice about your beliefs, and you can be adopted into that group based on your beliefs. It's not just a religion, because you are given Jewish status by birth. It also consists of more than one ethnicity, linked by religion and distant ancestry. Puzzling all of this out is a complicated question.
Even the religion-based anti-Judaism of Late Antiquity, would, of course, be unacceptable in modern society, but it at least reflected, for the most part, a judgment on the beliefs and practices of others—something they actually did—as opposed to the racial antisemitism which would be stamped upon even a newborn child, or, ironically, the most devout Christian. If this was not something new, it was something different.
The Development of Racism At The End of the Middle Ages
In my opinion, it is no accident that racial antisemitism really started to catch its wings around the same time that European society developed what we now call racism. That is, not simply the distrust in others, or ethnocentrism, but the identification of another group on the basis of their race as inferior, and, therefore not entitled to the same considerations as the dominant group (which at this time was still no picnic even for the white christian male if he was not noble, all the worse for the out group). This instance of racism justified slavery and genocide and we live with its consequences and residue today.
The invasion of America and Sub-Saharan Africa by Iberians in the fifteenth century, with much of the rest of Europe soon to follow, is racism's cradle. Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the shutting off of trade are the ostensible reasons given for the pressure to explore by the Portuguese and Spanish, but this makes no sense. Control of Constantinople wouldn't have shut off trade through the Red Sea, and Byzantium had been on the decline for centuries. Regardless of why, the invasion of America destroyed the Mediterranean as the focus of the polity of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Long standing relationships that existed between these places, the Silk Road and other trade routes, suddenly weren't the only important thing. The Italian city states that dominated so much of Mediterranean trade got left behind. Nation states with the resources to exploit overseas conquests raced to take the lead.
But conquering the Americas and depopulating Africa had no historical precedent in Europe. Certainly, this wasn't a restoration of the Roman empire, a feat that had and would continue to justify European wars up until the 20th century. Was it jihad like the Isalmic conquests, done in the name of religion? Yeah. That was the closest rationale. By the time Columbus was asking for a second voyage, he was using the justification of spreading Christianity to do it. By the time he got back to Haiti, however, the caste alignments had nothing to do with Christian or not; it was Spaniard or Arawak.
Depending on who you read, anti-African racism either developed to keep lower class whites from teaming up with the Africans (presaging a sort of Marxist class consciousness hundreds of years before Marx) or as a kind of way for the slavers to deal with what they were doing. Probably a lot of both. Either way, the invasion of the Americas was excused because "savage" Indians could not really own land (they definitely did so, even if they didn't have a county title office) or settle (they built cities and villages everywhere) and were uncivilized by comparison (sure, comparing London to a small village might have looked that way, but what about the typical medieval European town versus Tenochtitlan?) and whatever other excuse they wanted to make. Regardless of the acts of the Indians, those acts were not seen as equivalent because of their skin color, because of their race.
Similarly, Africans were forcibly thrown into this mix because of their skin color. Likewise, justifications abounded, but no matter how advanced African culture may have been (people from Mali may have beat Columbus west) there was that special something that made it inferior: skin color by race.
In this way, all three of these racisms were fabrications created by telling stories—lies—about the other group to justify the horrific acts that would be done to them. In the case of the Jews, earlier contact allowed antisemitism to be built up with old legends.
LIBELS
Indians were uncivilized savages. Africans were animals. Jews were deicides. These and other libels about these people were used for many purposes. To historians like Howard Zinn, the primary use of racial myths was to keep the oppressed races from teaming up with underclass whites and throwing out the rulers. I agree with that, but think there was a lot more to it. Preserving the existing order was definitely part of it, but there's always seemed to me to be something in the spreader of these libels that needs them to be true to justify acts that they would do anyway, and that they did do to others, a sort of release valve, like The Two Minutes Hate. They justify the difference in existence of the libel teller. Even to this day, we tell ourselves things like, "yeah, but the Aztecs performed human sacrifice!" What the fuck do you call Iraq? I strongly doubt that life is more sacred in our world.
Aside from the Christ-killer motif, Jews were also accused of ripping off the poor because they were the money lenders. Of course, in many places, this was one of the few legal professions they could engage in, and this trade was not only tolerated by the rulers, but required by them to finance their own agenda.
Internationalism was another libel that continued to build about Jews. A people with no home that maintained contacts over most of the western world, including trade networks, provided the fertile ground for this libel, which has produced the myths of Jewish bankers controlling the world and at the expense of the purer races. Internationalism in its later phases was used to justify Hitler's rise to power, but in its earlier instances it was used to accuse Jews of spreading plague and other "oriental" diseases.
TODAY'S DEBATE
While Americans are generally ignorant of our own history, I find that readers of DKos are well versed in it. If you ever think the comments here are inane and unintelligent, I refer you to just about any other site. The conversation here is intelligent and well-informed for the most part. I think we take that for granted sometimes.
That comes from a willingness to learn. I hope that after having read the above, you can apply those facts to some of the statements about Israel.
First, the general standard is this: are you applying a judgment that involves the identity of the group as one of the factors in making that judgment. We're pretty tuned in on this for racial issues.
Here's one:
*Blacks won't vote for Hillary Clinton because Barack Obama is black.
Not that I need to do it, but here are just a few reasons why that comment is stupid. First, it's factually inaccurate. Hilary had more black support than Obama heading into late 2007. Second, it presumes that blacks (and implicitly only blacks) will vote for someone just because they are the same as them. Third, it presumes that doing so is stupid. Could it be that Obama has policies that are better for the average black voter? Could it be that sharing in the black experience contributes to that in a legitimate way? Of course it could.
This is much like the idea that blacks are Democratic voters on the basis of race because Dem politicians throw them racial patronage. If that's the case, it's a recent phenomenon because the Democratic party embraced openly racist policies in the not too distant past.
The reason this is a residuum of European racism is because it implies blacks stupidly vote against their interest., because they aren't as smart as the "regular" (i.e. white) voter. Bullshit.
So, I don't need to explain that one to anybody here. Now let's try one that will seems to trip people up here.
*Obama won't deal forcefully enough with Israel because he's scared of losing the Jewish vote and too many of his advisers are Jewish.
This goes back to the whole Internationalist thing. Jews secretly control everything. Rahm Emanuel is an elder of Zion. It's also false (most judgments based on racial factors are shitty). Obama's been tougher on Israel than any recent president.
*What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is the same as the Holocaust.
First of all, whether or not you realize it, this is hyperbole. You can compare refugee camps to concentration camps all you want, but not all concentration camps were death camps, where people were sent for the express purpose of extermination. The United States had a concentration camp in California. The British Empire had concentration camps in the Boer War. Hell, the US arguably has one in Guantanamo today. But neither the US, Britain, nor Israel have extermination camps. There is no racial policy in Israel to exterminate Palestinians. Whatever nasty policies they have (and some of them are quite nasty) extermination is not one of them. This isn't to say there haven't been other cases of genocide even worse than the Holocaust. To me, what happened to the Indians was just as racist, just as deliberate, and killed millions more. There was a policy of extermination, especially in English "territories" where there was much less intermarriage than in Spanish controlled territories.
Second, the reference to the Holocaust implies that Jews are a special kind of human being that are different than other beings and should be conscious of these acts to the point that they never engage in anything remotely the same.
Am I saying the Jews should engage in a genocide? No, no. Of course not. I'm just saying, as members of our human family, Jews are neither more nor less likely to be violent. Holding them to a higher standard on the basis of race is a racist judgment even if it's holding them to a higher standard. Saying all Asians are good at math may appear complimentary, but it's still racist.
Holding Israel itself to a standard that we don't hold other countries, including ourselves, I think has its sources in the idea that some special magic was wrought on Jews by the Holocaust that they have to be more humane. I wish that were true. The countervailing theory, that they are simply perpetuating a cycle of violence, I think may have a germ of truth, but it's a racial judgment that probably only applies to European Jews and their descendants. I am not sure about this; I don't know if Ethiopian Jews feel that in their guts the same way Polish Jews do, but I doubt it.
If you can say in good faith that you are critical of Israel's policy's in Palestine the same way and for the same reasons as everywhere else, including this country, then you're per se not being racist, antisemitic, or anything else. I just don't understand the fascination with events there. The Middle East's importance to our security is overstated to our own detriment time and again, while we ignore Latin America, right next door (Honduras anyone) and Africa (oh, Africa, just the word makes me sad).
As I stated above, I want their to be peace now in Israel. I think it's in Israel's best interest, but I find myself wondering why Israel's best interest is so important to non-Jewish Americans, especially with all the crap going on right here.
There are more people here on DKos that do care about places like Honduras and Sudan than other places. I compliment you on that. There are a lot of people here who call any criticism of Israel antisemitic. That's not the case. Israel is allowed to be imperfect just like the rest of the world. It's allowed to be criticized. We're allowed to wonder what madness was running through voters who put Avigdor Liebermann in power, but when these criticisms and judgments are based in part on historical libels, they are racist.
Oh, and P.S.: Fuck you, Bibi. If Rahm and Axelrod are self-hating Jews, then count me in.