A COMMON CAUSE

ABSTRACT

This paper explores connections and disconnections in the study of racism and antisemitism within sociological inquiry. It begins with an exposition of how certain prominent theorists of racism and antisemitism (e.g., Du Bois, Fanon, Arendt) have in the past identified important connections between these fields of exclusion and persecution in the making of European modernity. While their analysis of connections between racism and antisemitism may have been uneven and provisional, the more recent tendency to replace such connectivity with separatist or even oppositional readings has been a step backward. This tendency toward what we call ‘methodological separatism’ impoverishes our sociological imagination for a number of reasons. First, it neglects the extent to which prejudice and persecution in relation to Muslims, Jews and Black people are connected phenomena in the formation of European modernity. Second, it encourages divisive and competitive analytical approaches which lock their protagonists in rival camps and reproduce aspects of the language of racism they oppose. While affirming the distinctive characteristics of anti-Black and anti-Jewish racisms, we argue that the development of a more integrated approach is required to enable our understanding of how modernity continues to operate.

Keywords:

• racism
• antisemitism
• antiracism
• Du Bois
• Fanon
• Badiou
• sociology

Acknowledgements

We should like to thank Claudine Attias-Donfut, Gurminder Bhambra, Daniel Chernilo, Lars Rensmann and Gurnam Singh for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹In a similar vein Paul Berman recalls a time when there was genuine popular enthusiasm among liberal Jews for the Civil Rights Movement. Noting that Jews accounted for almost two-thirds of the white volunteers who went south for Freedom Summer in 1964 and that three-quarters of the money raised by the civil rights organisations at the height of the movement came from Jewish contributors, Berman discerns behind this solidarity a politics of recognition able to associate slavery and Nazism, lynching and pogroms, Jim Crow and Czarist antisemitism, bigotry and bigotry. Berman sees in this solidarity a mix of idealism and self-interest: ‘the higher-ups in the Jewish establishment always knew that people with sheets over their heads were no friends of Jewry either, and blacks were a good ally to have’ (Berman 1994: 66).

²Paul Robeson, wonderful bass singer, political activist, member of the Communist Party, notably sustained a commitment to the connected struggles against racism and antisemitism. Lapierre draws attention to his insistence that ‘ a direct line leads from Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama to the Berlin and the Dachau of Hitler’ (Lapierre 2011: 86).

³A related argument, one that stands up for universalism by particularising the Jews, is to be found in a recent commentary by John Mearsheimer defending the work of Gilad Atzmon: ‘Atzmon is a universalist who does not like the particularism that characterizes Zionism and which has a rich tradition among Jews and any number of other groups. He is the kind of person who intensely dislikes nationalism of any sort. Princeton professor Richard Falk captures this point nicely in his own blurb for the book, where he writes: ‘Atzmon has written an absorbing and moving account of his journey from hard-core Israeli nationalist to a de-Zionized patriot of humanity’. Atzmon's basic point is that Jews often talk in universalistic terms, but many of them (sic) think and act in particularistic terms. One might say they talk like liberals but act like nationalists. Atzmon will have none of this, which is why he labels himself a self-hating Jew. He fervently believes that Jews are not the ‘Chosen People’ and that they should not privilege their ‘Jewishness’ over their other human traits’ (Mearsheimer 2011).