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ABSTRACT
Semites, Semitism, the Semitic, the Semite. We all know the terms: we’ve heard them many times. We know of Semitic languages, we know of growing antisemitism, and we are familiar with book titles about Semites and Semitic cultures. And yet, these terms, these words, these adjectives remain for us today somewhat misty, imprecise and ambiguous in a way they did not seem to be for readers of nineteenth-century philology, theology or travel journals. Who are the Semites? What makes a culture Semitic? These today are questions we find hard to answer. But perhaps the terms belong to the past. Indeed, is there any good reason to return to the Semite? To revive and revisit the concept of Semitism? Should we not just let it go, die, fade into oblivion, together with many other nineteenth-century colonial, imperial and racist terms? Hochberg’s essay attends to these questions by engaging with several artistic projects that return to the figure of the Semite and revive it into current political contexts. Hochberg argues that today, perhaps more than ever, we must remember the Semite and, by the same token, re-remember the Semites: the Arabs and the Jews. This, she suggests, is important because it may be very useful to compare nineteenth-century European discussions of the Semitic mentality to today’s discourse on refugees and immigrants (particularly Muslims), but also because ‘the Semite’ enables us to make historical connections between antisemitism and Islamophobia, as well as between Jews and Muslims/Arabs. These connections are particularly worthwhile in the European, Christian and western context in which Jews and Muslims/Arabs have been more recently positioned against each other, and often played against one another. Finally, to revive the figure of the Semite, or the so-called ‘Semitic bond’ between Jews and Muslims, is not to cling to anachronism and nostalgic fantasies about the past or to romanticize the relationships between these people. In fact, it has little, if anything, to do with the past or history altogether. This ‘rememory’, to borrow Toni Morrison’s term, is not a historical project; rather, it is about returning to the present by rejecting its confining myths.
Notes
1 Abdelkebir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun, Le Même livre (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat 1985), 24. Translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.
2 The ads were finally noticed when posted for the third time, on Valentine’s Day 2002. While they were initially viewed positively, in the post-9/11 reality, articles in the New York Post, US News & World Report and Washington Report returned to the ads to suggest they may actually represent real (Palestinian) terrorist plots. See Jenny Gheith, ‘Exhibiting politics: Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir talks about her work’, Electronic Intifada, 4 November 2004, available at https://electronicintifada.net/content/exhibiting-politics-palestinian-american-artist-emily-jacir-talks-about-her-work/5295 (viewed 8 January 2020).
3 Other examples include: ‘Semitic sweetheart seeks enlightened Jewish man with whom to escape NY winter & return to ancestral home for warm Palestinian-Jewish Valentine’s day in Galilee’ (#9795); ‘Virile Palestinian Semite. Exotic looks & curly hair. Seeks Jewish lady (any race) 4 LTR in Israel. I love history, Arabic cuisine & skinny dipping in lake Tiberias’ (#9804); and ‘Exotic Semitic Palestinian wishes to celebrate Eid and Hanukah next year in Israel. Seeking non-smoking Jewish male to fast and light the menorah together!’ (#9616).
4 The Palestinian ‘right of return’ states the right of Palestinians who fled Palestine or were forced to flee in 1948, as well as in 1967 (after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank), along with their descendants, to return to their homeland. The right of return is also backed by international law. The UN General Assembly in December 1948 adopted Resolution 194, which called for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes. In June 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 237 calling on Israel to facilitate the return of refugees. The Palestinian right of return is often presented (including in Jacir’s work) in direct response to the Israeli Law of Return. Passed by the first Israeli Knesset in 1950, the Law of Return declares the right of every Jew, wherever s/he resides, to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. In 1970, this law was expanded to include automatic citizenship not only to Jews, but also to their non-Jewish children, grandchildren and spouses. See General Assembly Resolution 194, ‘Palestine—Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator’, A/RES/194 (III), 11 December 1948, available on the United Nations website at https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/C758572B78D1CD0085256BCF0077E51A; Security Council Resolution 237, S/RES/237 (1967), 14 June 1967, available on the United Nations website at https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/E02B4F9D23B2EFF3852560C3005CB95A; ‘The Law of Return 5710 (1950)’ and ‘The Law of Return (Amendment No. 2) 5730-1970’, available on The Knesset website at www.knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/return.htm (all sites viewed 8 January 2020).
5 Quoted in Doris Bittar, ‘Crossing boundaries: Emily Jacir’, Canvas: Art and Culture from the Middle East and Arab World, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009, 138–49.
6 This radical shift in terms has become increasingly visible in the aftermath of 9/11, with Islam gaining a demonic status in the West. As Jews were finally ‘pulled out’ of their historic ‘Semitic status’, becoming for the first time in history an integral part of western history, ‘the figure of the Semite, as always already a negative value’, has become increasingly identified ‘solely with the Arab’, writes Joseph Massad: Joseph A. Massad, ‘Forget Semitism!’, in Elisabeth Weber (ed.), Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace (New York: Fordham University Press 2013), 59–79 (65).
7 Ernest Renan, History of the People of Israel, vol. 1, translated from the French by J. H. Allen and E. W. Latimer (Boston: Roberts Brothers 1896), 7–8.
8 Ibid., 40–1.
9 J. W. Jackson, ‘The Aryan and the Semite’, Anthropological Review, vol. 7, no. 27, 1869, 333–65 (335); F. A. Gast, ‘Origin of the Old Testament religion’, The Old Testament Student, vol. 5, no. 2, 1885, 52–61 (57, 61).
10 Edward Said famously argued in Orientalism that, while modern antisemitism targets Jews, there is a strong connection between European expressions of antisemitism and European hostility towards Islam and the Arab Orient. He has linked both to the history of ‘Semitism’. Thus, in the introduction to Orientalism, he famously writes: ‘… I have found myself writing the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism. That anti-Semitism and, as I have discussed it in its Islamic branch, Orientalism resemble each other very closely is a historical, cultural, and political truth …’ And, in his 1985 revisitation of the thesis, Said faults the critics of Orientalism for not seeing what he himself originally recognized, namely, the great similarities ‘between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism’. The ‘tie’ between these two seemingly separate discourses and practices of discrimination is, as Said recognizes, ‘Semitism’: the formative discourse of the nineteenth century that defined both Jews and Muslims or Arabs as Semites and, moreover, situated them both in explicit opposition to Christians/Indo-Europeans/Aryans. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books 1979), 27–8; and Edward W. Said, ‘Orientalism reconsidered’, Cultural Critique, vol. 1, 1985, 89–107 (99).
11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern studies: deconstructing historiography’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1988), 3–34 (13).
12 Toni Morrison, Beloved [1987] (New York: Vintage 2004), passim.
13 For more information on Semitic Score, see Oreet Ashery’s website at http://oreetashery.net/work/semitic-score (viewed 10 January 2020). An interview with the dancers and more, ‘Semitic Score’, 28 May 2015, is available on the ‘Projects’ page of the Ibraaz website at www.ibraaz.org/projects/109 (viewed 10 January 2020). A short video, ‘A Semitic Score < O/2Fik #999 de 2fik & Oreet Ashery’, 6 February 2010, is also available on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/14556121 (viewed 10 January 2020).
14 ‘Semitic Score’, on the ‘Projects’ page of the Ibraaz website at www.ibraaz.org/projects/109 (viewed 10 January 2020).
15 Charif Benhelima, Semites: The Album (Ghent: MER. Paper Kunsthalle 2011). Screenshots of the album are available on the publisher’s website at www.merpaperkunsthalle.org/projects/view/552 (viewed 10 January 2020).
16 Denis Guénoun, A Semite: A Memoir of Algeria, trans. from the French by Ann Smock and William Smock (New York: Columbia University Press 2014).
17 Ibid., 18–20.
18 Said, Orientalism, 234.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Gil Hochberg
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies, at Columbia University in New York. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality. She has published essays on a wide range of issues including: Francophone North African literature, Palestinian literature, the modern Levant, gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration, memory and gender, Hebrew literature, Israeli and Palestinian cinema, Mediterraneanism, trauma and narrative. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton 2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (Duke 2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian. She is currently writing a book on art, archives and the production of historical knowledge. Email: [email protected]