On cultural survival

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Notes

Gil Anidjar

Department of Middle East and Asian

Languages and Cultures

612 Kent Hall, MC 3928

Columbia University

New York, NY 10027

USA

E‐mail: [email protected]

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier, 1961) 82.

For an excellent survey of historical and contemporary attitudes toward Islam in the West, see Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells (eds.), The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy (New York: Columbia UP, 2003). Although I fully endorse the importance of the approach embodied in this collection, I am offering “the Jew” as a necessary addition that suggests once again that the distinction between Jew and Arab, Jew and Muslim is constitutive of Europe in ways that remain invisible. This distinction serves to manage tensions and conflicts that are “internal” to Europe, a Europe that was, from this perspective, always beyond East and West. In doing so I am pursuing a path opened by scholars such as Ella Shohat, Amnon Raz‐Krakotzkin and Susannah Heschel who, with and after Edward Said, have explored Europe and its history as that which articulates itself as the history of Orientalism and the history of anti‐Semitism.

Esther Benbassa, La République face à ses minorités: les Juifs d'hier, les Musulmans d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2004) 147.

Peter the Venerable, quoted in Jeremy Cohen, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999) 247.

As Eric Savarèse explains (while attending exclusively to Algeria rather than to the larger, franco‐maghrebian phenomenon it engages), the distinction participates of a separation between Muslims and non‐Muslims: “on the one side, Jews and Europeans, who become French nationals and subsequently French citizens; on the other, indigènes, that is to say the category of non‐citizen French, excluded from the right to vote” (L'Invention des Pieds‐Noirs (Paris: Séguier, 2002) 16).

Amnon Raz‐Krakotzkin has long pointed out the way in which separation is the operative term for the Israeli right as well as for the left. Separation between “Jews and Arabs,” whether by way of expulsion (a practice that began in 1948 and continues to this day), or by way of proposed border drawings and other territorial, discriminatory devices, from “security fences” to “surrounding roads” and apartheid walls (see Amnon Raz‐Krakotzkin, “A Peace Without Arabs: The Discourse of Peace and the Limits of Israeli Consciousness” in After Oslo: New Realities, Old Problems, eds. George Giacaman and Dag Jorund Lonning (London: Pluto, 1998) 59–76).

Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton in Early Writings (London: Penguin/New Left Review, 1992) 219.

Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 230.

Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 230.

Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 232.

The distinction between “nationalité” and “citoyenneté,” deployed in numerous contexts, was of course instrumental to the management of colonial Algeria, participating, among other effects, in the distinction between two indigenous collectives, namely, Jews and Muslims (see Kamel Kateb, Européens, “Indigènes” et Juifs en Algérie (1830–1962): représentations et réalités des populations (Paris: INED, 2001) 194). One awaits a comparable study on demography and the management of minorities in postcolonial France. In the meantime, one could also read the tangential but relevant study by Eric Savarèse mentioned above.

Marx, “On the Jewish Question” 234; for reasons that are linked to my argument, as well as for the sake of what seems to me historical accuracy, I have substituted the term “cultural” for Marx's “social.”

Nadia Abu El‐Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self‐Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2001). On the Arab‐Jew, see the seminal work of Ella Shohat, most notably her “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (Fall 1988): 1–35, and“The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29.1 (1999): 5–20; and see also Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), and Sami Shalom Chetrit, The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel: Between Oppression and Liberation, Identification and Alternative, 1948–2003 (Tel‐Aviv: Am Oved, 2004).

Derrida's perhaps most poignant articulation of such an impossibility can be found in his Monolingualism of the Other, or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). See also my The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), esp. 40–60.

This section is an abbreviated version of a longer paper entitled “The Semitic Hypothesis (Religion's Last Word)” to be published elsewhere.

• On the one hand, Jewish social scientists were members of the general social scientific community. Educated in European universities, they spoke the language of European science; this was, by definition, the only language they could speak. On the other hand, they were Jews, engaged with their own community or people at both the intellectual and the practical level. This tension helped define Jewish social science to a significant degree. (Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000) 10)

• To the extent that, as Hart shows, social science “involved a reformulation of Jewish identity,” to the extent that it involved “a refutation of the idea that Jewry (Judentum) could be ‘reduced’ or limited to religious identity and community,” to the extent, finally, that Jews were being redefined by this new scientific discourse as “a Volk and a nation” (16), the dialectics of “resistance and rejection” as well as “acceptance and appropriation” that characterized the relation of Jews to anti‐Semitism (12) are of extensive significance. Hence, Hart's argument goes well beyond the scientific discourse to which he attends in rigorous detail.

“Several historians, perhaps most notably Hannah Arendt, have distinguished sharply between the older hatred of Jews as religious and the modern hatred as secular (or racial)” (Langmuir, History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 10). I am not as certain as Langmuir appears to be regarding the popularity of Arendt's argument. Consider, for example, that Steven Aschheim, writing about the same period, describes it in precisely inverse terms. “Germany,” Aschheim writes, “spearheaded the movement to dismiss the ethnic component of Jewish faith and to radically ‘spiritualize’ it” (S.E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness 1800–1923 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1982) 16). Nor am I certain that Arendt's argument is altogether reducible to what Langmuir attributes to her.

“The theory that the Jews are always the scapegoat implies that the scapegoat might have been anyone as well. It upholds the perfect innocence of the victim, an innocence which insinuates not only that no evil was done but that nothing at all was done which might possibly have a connection with the issue at stake” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian, 1958) 5). Arendt's words are increasingly pertinent in the current, reigning victimology.

I have learned much from Maurice Olender's study, which documents this invention in numerous and nuanced ways. However, unlike Said, Olender alludes only marginally to the discursive collusion that links the scholars he discusses to the history of imperialism, indeed, to the specificity of Orientalism in the colonial history of the West. In this context, it is perhaps interesting to consider the translation of Olender's title, particularly since the book has recently been published again. The French original title is: Les Langues du paradis: Aryens et Sémites: un couple providentiel (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1989). The 1992 translation by Arthur Goldhammer bears the following title: The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992), whereas the recent version – by the same translator – has a more accurate (although one wonders where the plural of Aryans and Semites has gone), if more concealing, rendering: The Languages of Paradise: Aryan and Semite: A Match Made in Heaven (New York: The Other Press, 2003). The argument remains the same, obviously, and it engages, crucially, both race and religion.

On the Hamitic hypothesis, see Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001).

See Joseph Massad, “The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5.3 (2003): 440–51.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1962) 150; and further: “The Jew has always been a people with definite racial characteristics and never a religion” (306). Later on, Hitler will claim that the Jews use religion in order to occlude their racial identity. The Jews' “whole existence is based on one single great lie, to wit, that they are a religious community while actually they are a race” (232). Significantly, Hitler credits the Zionists for publicly acknowledging, at least, the Jews' racial‐national identity (56). Hitler also fails the Zionists for their attempt at making the world believe they would be satisfied with the creation of a state (325). It is a puzzling fact of scholarship that the research done on Nazi science and doctrine has refrained from engaging the specific heritage of philological and racial studies done in Germany and elsewhere over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (although clearly the philological and theological heritage is being recognized, as has been argued recently by Richard Steigmann‐Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), and see esp. 108 for a discussion of Renan). Most striking, in this context, is the overwhelming absence of interest in the Muslim, the “Muselmann” of concentration camps (as well as that of the first non‐Aryan division of the Waffen‐SS), and more generally in the Nazi attitudes and theorizations regarding Arabs and Muslims. In my own discussion of the “Muslims,” I have remarked that the meager scholarship on the Nazis and the Arabs has remained focused on foreign policy rather than on racial doctrine and policies. Following Primo Levi, if for different reasons from those he elaborated, it seems to me crucial to recognize the epochal significance of the figure of the “Muslims,” and quite precisely so for an understanding of the relation between race and religion, the Jew, the Arab (Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, esp. 229 n. 113). I should also mention that the work of Gerhard Höpp, of which I learned all too recently, is devoted to the question of the Muslim presence in Germany and German writing and scholarship. In a series of articles published just before his death, Höpp engaged the question of Arabs and Muslims in concentration camps in the context of Nazi racial policy. What he shows, aside from the dearth of scholarship, is the strange vanishing of racial thought on the part of the Nazis when it came to Arabs and Muslims. The Arabs did belong to the Semitic race, but were distinguished from the Jews in numerous ways (see Gerhard Höpp, “‘Gefährdungen der Errinerung’: Arabische Häftlinge in Nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern,” asien afrika lateinamerika 30 (2002): 373–86, and “Im Schatten des Mondes: Arabische Opfer des Nationalsozialismus,” Sozial Geschichte Zeitschrift für historische Analyse des 20. Jahrhunderts 2 (2002)).

Consider Hitler's recognition of (and implicit admiration for) Islam's efficiency in spreading its doctrine when comparing it with the Christian missionary movement (Hitler, Mein Kampf 267). Aside from this reference, I could find no other references to Islam or to Arabs in Mein Kampf. The dearth of scholarship on Nazism and Islam and the Arabs is perhaps comparable to the lack of attention given to blacks. In a recent study, Clarence Lusane points out that “Afro‐Germans, and Blacks in general” have been massively under‐studied. It is important to note that, over against Muslims and Arabs, blacks were repeatedly “vilified by the Nazi leadership as exemplified throughout Hitler's Mein Kampf.” Lusane demonstrates the importance of micro‐analysis of race policies when he shows, for example, that blacks in Nazi Germany were stigmatized and victimized, brutalized, sterilized and imprisoned, even killed, but “were never named as a group to be gathered up and dealt with by physical elimination” (C. Lusane, Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experience of Afro‐Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era (New York: Routledge, 2003) 98, 181).

In their discussion of “the Racial State,” Burleigh and Wippermann make no mention of Arabs or Semites, although they demonstrate how wide ranging was the scientific and political reach of Nazi racism (Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991)). Let me emphasize that I have little patience for the still current and persistent obsession with the Mufti of Jerusalem, or for claims about alliances between Nazis and Arabs. As Lukasz Hirszowicz explains, Arabs were on the lowestrungs of Hitler's racial ladder – consider the example of the Moor as helping beast to be dispensed with as technology develops, in Mein Kampf 294 (L. Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) 315), a fact which, as with the Jews, does not preclude contamination, and therefore holds little critical potential. Clearly, foreign policy (especially against the colonial interests of Britain) was determining the moves of the Nazi state, but it does not suffice by way of explanation for what is, “domestically,” one might say, mostly a lack of investment. Consider further that Hans Günther, holder of the chair of “racial science” at Jena under the Nazis, wrote that “in view of the large variety of human types among the peoples of the Semitic languages, how could one speak of a ‘Semitic race’?” (H.F.K. Günther, “The Nordic Race as ‘Ideal Type’ in George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1973) 61). There still remains, therefore, the puzzle of how to account for the disappearance of the Semite for these “Aryans,” the disappearance, more precisely, of the Arab after the achievements of scientific doctrines establishing the existence of a race of Aryans and doing so by equating, on the opposite side, both Jew and Arab under the figure of the Semite.

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 239ff., 290. And see, of course, her critique of Zionism in The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, ed. and intro. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove, 1978).

On American Jews, see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999). On Israel/Palestine, see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: Texas UP, 1988), and Joseph Massad, “Palestinians and the Limits of Racialized Discourse” Social Text 34 (1993): 94–114, and see also Joseph Massad, “The ‘Post‐Colonial’ Colony: Time, Space, and Bodies in Palestine/Israel” in The Pre‐Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, eds. Fawzia Afzal‐Khan and Kalpana Seshadri‐Crooks (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000) 311–46.

Amnon Raz‐Krakotzkin, “Orientalism, Jewish Studies and Israeli Society: A Few Considerations,” Jama'a 3.1 (1999): 34–59, esp. 48ff. Justifiably lamenting the lack of studies on the history of “Semitics” and indeed of a crucial chapter in German Orientalism, Ludmila Hanisch traces the development and separation of the study of Judaism from that of “Semitics” in Nazi Germany, asserting that during the Third Reich, “the study of Jewish religion, history and culture became a special branch, it is no longer part of Oriental studies” (L. Hanisch, “Akzentver‐ schiebung – Zur Geschichte der Semitistik und Islamwissenschaft während des ‘Dritten Reichs,’” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 18 (1995): 217–26). Today, the Hebrew University distinguishes in its department between the “ancient Middle East,” “Islam and the Middle East,” and “Asia and Africa Studies,” all of which are, of course – and as Raz‐Krakotzkin has shown – distinct from “General History” (the history of the West) and from “Jewish History” and “Jewish Studies.” Such separations are now typical in the USA as well, although their persistent interrogation may have brought about some limited changes.

One could point to a recent example of scholarship that, however rigorous and innovative, nonetheless maintains the same division between Jews and Arabs, between anti‐Semitism and colonialism, between religion and race, precisely when articulating the shifts between one and the other. In his Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity, Jonathan Hess acknowledges the importance of Orientalism (as theorized by Edward Said). Clearly, Hess is quite right when he asserts that, in the eighteenth century, Johann David Michaelis was “more Eurocentric than his nineteenth‐century successors in Semitic studies, concerned more with ancient Israelites and modern Jews than with Arabs, whom he reduces to sources of potential data for the historical study of the Hebrew Bible. Islam is of little concern to him” (J.M. Hess, Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2002) 57). But what accounts for this discrepancy in emotional investment (if not quite in scholarly interest)? Why is it that, if Jews and Arabs are one and the same object of study (“The nomadic Arabs, conveniently enough, have apparently remained trapped in the state of childhood Michaelis saw as characteristic of the ancient Israelites” 63), one of them is considered less (or, in other cases, more) important? Beyond individual preferences and even programmatic politics, what are the mechanisms thatinsist on the distinction at the very same moment that distinction is otherwise abolished? To be sure, one wonders whether the distinct focus Hess argues for is Michaelis's own or the continued effect of a history that remains invisible. After all, Hess himself points out that “for Michaelis, modern Arabs are the only legitimate descendants of the ancient Israelites” (67). For Michaelis, then, the (modern) Jews are not Arab enough, yet they should be. The collapse of a distinction between them is a desideratum, if not a given. Hess, and he is not alone, appears quite invested in resisting this collapse. Hess does contribute to a better understanding of “the Specter of Racial Antisemitism” (as the subtitle of his chapter has it), but he does so at the price of maintaining some strange chosenness for the Jews as exclusive targets of this racism rather than recognizing the complexity of investments and denegations at work at the very moment “modernity,” and with it the Semites (Jews and Arabs), are emerging from Europe's consciousness.

E. Renan, Etudes d'histoire religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) 65.

See Richard King's compelling discussion of these issues in Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). On Marx and the “history of religions,” see Rosalind C. Morris, “Theses on the Question of War: History, Media, Terror,” Social Text 20.3 (2002): 149–75.

I quote here from William Hart, Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 83.

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gil anidjar

Gil Anidjar Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures 612 Kent Hall, MC 3928 Columbia University New York, NY 10027 USA E‐mail: [email protected]