Antisemitism Studies and the War Against the Imagination

Safa Khatib considers theories of Judaism, antisemitism, Zionism, and anti-Zionism in her review of “Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism” by Jonathan Judaken.

By Safa KhatibAugust 4, 2024

• Politics

• Philosophy & Religion

• Nonfiction

WHEN THE POET Diane di Prima wrote that “the war that matters is the war against the imagination,” she meant, at least in part, that when furnishing the record of any oppression, the stories one tells about the actors involved make all the difference in the kinds of responses we deem possible. Since 1948, scholars of antisemitism, with few exceptions, have certainly waged a war against how we might imagine the relationship between antisemitism and the state of Israel. At its root, this war concerns the relevant histories that one might draw upon in order to understand the oppression of Jews and Arabs within and beyond Europe. Too often, progressive American and European writers who critique antisemitism remain committed to the exclusion of non-European historical frameworks. This exclusion takes various forms, most commonly a refusal to engage with leftist cultural and political historians of the Middle East and Southwest Asia. The effects of this exclusion are immense. When the relevant critiques of antisemitism rely upon European cultural and intellectual histories, scores of imaginative responses to oppression are pushed beyond the realm of possibility, despite their very real existence.

At the heart of Jonathan Judaken’s new book Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism is a commitment to understanding anti-Jewish oppression in the longue durée of European history. Rejecting eternalist views of antisemitic oppression, Judaken calls attention to the histories of premodern Europe in which it originated. “The concept of the Jew shapeshifts,” Judaken writes in his introduction, and it is therefore crucial to understand “how myths about Jews have had different meanings at different moments or have signified differently to different people in the same era.” He notes, for instance, Edward Said’s claim in Orientalism (1978) that the Arab has been the “secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism,” as well as the work of Gil Anidjar and Ivan Kalmar on how both Jews, on one hand, and Arabs and Muslims, on the other, living intertwined lives for most of human history, suffered a doubled demonization in the cultural history of the West. Over the course of the book, he seeks to open up the critique of antisemitism to approaches that have proven incredibly rich in the study of colonialism, race, nation, gender, and class. He illuminates how an array of theorists, from Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt to Theodor Adorno and Jean-François Lyotard, as well as historians such as Léon Poliakov and George Mosse, sought to understand Judeophobia.

When it comes to the theorization of antisemitism in the cultural, political, and intellectual traditions of Europe, the book offers important insights into the foundations of anti-Jewish sentiment. For Judaken, an investigation into the entangled history of antisemitism is crucial. “[T]he oft-claimed uniqueness of anti-Semitism,” he writes, “must cede to comparative frames, and ultimately to a history of interlaced pasts.” Just as scholars in Black studies and Middle Eastern studies have critiqued the reduction of anti-Blackness and anti-Arab racism to economic factors, so Judaken argues against simple scapegoat theories of antisemitism that treat anti-Jewish animus as a cover for deeper hatreds. In addition to a sustained argument against scapegoat theories, Judaken also devotes attention to a critique of “supercessionist” theory, a largely forgotten but once incredibly influential tradition in US-based antisemitism studies that was first popularized by Maurice Samuel in his 1940 book The Great Hatred. Finding one of its origins in Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), this conservative tradition of thought viewed Nazi antisemitism and the hatred of Jews as the manifestation of a barbaric, mechanistic, and polytheistic rebuke of Christianity. For Samuel, opposition to antisemitism required a mission to uphold the moral and civic virtues of a so-called “Judeo-Christian” civilization. Yet as Judaken carefully demonstrates, it is precisely the incoherence of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the violence it has justified against Jewish peoples throughout European history, that must be understood to make sense of antisemitism in the modern and contemporary eras.

The structure of the book reveals a commitment to the inseparability of class, race, nation, economy, and sexuality as lenses for a critical theory of antisemitism—which, as Judaken repeatedly insists, is intertwined with nearly all aspects of Europe’s formation. Judaken’s intervention into antisemitism studies begins with a conceptual reflection on the term itself. The concept of antisemitism should be delimited in its use, he argues, “to the era of modern racism when it was coined, reaching its climax with the Holocaust.” Today, the phenomenon that requires deeper understanding is better termed “post-Holocaust Judeophobia”—practices and discourses that target Jews due to cultural and political conflicts after the Holocaust, not the kind of institutionalized and programmatic racism that led to the rise of the Nazis. Building upon this premise, each chapter presents a paradigm for understanding Judeophobia after the Holocaust.

Beginning with Sartre, Judaken examines the evolution of the French philosopher’s thought from existentialism to anti-racism. After considering, in chapter two, the Frankfurt School’s interactionist analysis of the association between antisemitism and the culture industry, he moves on to Arendt, whose work offers an often ambivalent account of the paradoxes of the Jewish condition in modernity. Chapter four approaches antisemitism through the work of two prominent sociologists, Zygmunt Bauman and Talcott Parsons, who found the roots of antisemitism in a European theory of modernity that treats the Jew as a “postmodern stranger.” Chapter five, focused on the work of Lyotard, furthers Judaken’s examination of how the concept of the Jew began to signify “an incomprehensible, unidentifiable alterity that the European tradition has consistently excluded, repressed, or otherwise forgotten.” Shifting from theory to history, Judaken concludes his synthesis with two chapters on historians, Poliakov and Mosse.

Judaken’s final chapter, “Critical Theory and Post-Holocaust Judeophobia,” is billed as a culminating reflection on how post-Holocaust and postcolonial Judeophobia should be understood in the contemporary moment. It is in this chapter, however, that the shortcomings of the book’s historical imagination come to the fore—shortcomings that have to do with Judaken’s understanding of antisemitism in the Middle East specifically. While Judaken takes great care to offer a rich historicization of the European politics of antisemitism throughout the 20th century, he does not cite a single contemporary historian of the Middle East when making claims about the region’s relationship to Judaism after 1948. In addition to ignoring scholarship on Arab-Jewish relations, Judaken goes so far as to cite a widely criticized survey by Anti-Defamation League—an organization with a history of denouncing calls for Palestinian rights as antisemitic—for the claim that “Judeophobic stereotypes are prevalent among about 25 percent of people on the planet, and among nearly three out of four people in the Middle East.” In an era when the US Congress uses such unsubstantiated myths about Arab peoples to justify the constant shipment of bombs to an Israeli government carrying out genocide against Palestinians, Judaken’s reliance on the ADL as the sole source of information about civilian sentiment in the Middle East is an instance of intellectual dishonesty.

Judaken’s careful historical analysis consistently disappears when the book’s focus shifts beyond Europe’s borders into the Levantine lands where Israel exists. While he cites the Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi’s diagnosis of racism as an allergy—an autoimmune condition—rooted in a fear of difference, he succumbs to that same allergy in historical generalizations about non-European lands. The inaccuracies begin with Judaken’s sketch of the era in which Israel claimed the mantle of the Jewish state. He avoids any mention of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land:

What made the decoupling of Jews and Muslims definitive was that beginning in the 1930s, spurred by the burgeoning Arab-Israeli conflict, and accelerating to the present day, the demonization of Jews became more common in the Islamic world, drawing upon the European anti-Semitic arsenal, at the same time that anti-Arab racism spread among Jews. The two heads of the European enemy now turned on one another, effacing their earlier entangled past.

The period Judaken identifies as the “decoupling” of Jews and Muslims coincides, in fact, with a reorientation in the long lines of Jewish-Arab relations. That a radical change in cultural and political affiliations occurred with the establishment of Israel is undeniable, but Judaken’s sketch makes an immense claim about the cultural fabric of the Levantine world without reference to the work of writers who have examined Jewish-Arab relations in a Levantine context.

Judaken’s casual transition, for instance, to “Jews and Muslims”—from his earlier citations of Said and Anidjar, in which “Jews and Arabs” are the original targets of antisemitic discourse—is telling. The claim implicit in Judaken’s sketch is that Arab and African Jews were naturally included in the Zionist project, while Arab and African Muslims dissented, often in Judeophobic terms. This claim represses the continued lines of cultural, political, and intellectual affiliation between Jews, Muslims, and others that survived after 1948 outside of a nation-state framework, as well as the testimonies of Arab and African Jews who saw their transit to Israel as one of displacement rather than homecoming. It also shields Israel from one of the most fundamental critiques of its legitimacy as a response to European antisemitism: that the state was founded upon a racial discourse that dispossessed native Palestinians while justifying the economic subjugation of Jews with origins in non-European lands.

Judaken’s distortion of Levantine history is the groundwork upon which he builds his concept of “post-Holocaust Judeophobia,” a concept that recasts Arab Muslims from sharers of European oppression to new perpetrators of anti-Jewish discourse. As a result, his shift in terminology is insufficient to understand the entangled history of anti-Jewish and anti-Arab oppression in the Levant after 1948. This is because problems of historical imagination cannot be solved by an exchange of terms. When Judaken argues, for instance, that the formula “Zionism is racism” is simply a mirror of the equally false formula that “anti-Zionism [equals] anti-Semitism,” and when he concurs with European philosophers that the question of Israel and Palestine should be understood as a “Judeo-Arab differend” of two legitimate and competing claims with no universal resolution, he relies upon the assumption that Zionism, as a nationalist solution to a problem with a European origin, need only justify itself as a response to European antisemitism, not as a movement to occupy lands with historical, cultural, and political fabrics of their own. When Judaken acknowledges the principled anti-Zionism of Arendt and Judith Butler but casts anti-Zionism in the Arab world as the result of passive internalization of Stalinist tropes, he commits to the Eurocentrism at the heart of anti-Jewish and anti-Arab rhetoric, refusing to acknowledge the lived realities and intellectual traditions of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq.

Understanding the relationship between antisemitism, Zionism, and Middle East history requires turning to scholars who place the Zionist movement within the context of Israel’s Levantine geography. One such scholar is Ella Shohat, author of the 1988 essay “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims.” For Shohat, the fate of Jewish peoples in the post-Holocaust world must be understood in terms of a new international political economy that tied the fate of the majority of Arab Jews to the fate of Palestinians. Shohat’s analysis of Zionism demonstrates that the plight of the Palestinians, who continue to face occupation, mass death, and violent displacement at the hands of the Israeli government and armed settlers, is inextricable from that of Sephardic Jews, who have been systematically conscripted as an underclass of laborers to sustain a settler colony that had no popular support in the region. Another relevant scholar is Sherene Seikaly, whose 2015 book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine demonstrates how economic activities in early 20th-century Palestine constituted a complex and particular form of nation-making prior to the violent disruption of Zionist settlement. When Said lamented Sartre’s refusal to condemn Zionism after 1967, he was lamenting the philosopher’s inability to face this global history of displacement and settler colonialism, anti-racist political ideals aside.

Other scholars have pursued the inquiry into antisemitism along similar lines, putting the history of Israel in the context of a long-standing Levantine tradition of Jewish-Arab relations. Ammiel Alcalay argues in his massive 1992 study After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture that, “in the years between 1948 and the late 1950s, roughly half a million Jews from Asia and Africa immigrated to the new state of Israel, only to undergo a proletarianization process directly opposite to that of the urbanization and upward mobility of the ninth century.” Alcalay draws on the work of Israeli writer Elie Eliachar, who examines the racial politics of the Zionist leadership from a Sephardic perspective, demonstrating the process through which the state’s early political parties, overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, dismantled the Sephardi educational system that existed prior to the state’s establishment—which meant that more than half of Sephardi children in the 1950s transit camps did not attend school. These Levantine historical frameworks provide the basis for principled condemnations of Zionism among both activists and scholars—condemnations that do not, as Judaken claims, “tra[p] Jews for their adherence to Jewish nationalism.” Rather, they bring in non-European histories as evidence of the incoherence of the very notion that Zionism is “Jewish nationalism,” since it subsists in the erasure of other legitimate narratives of Jewish belonging.

What lines might be drawn between the testimonies of Palestinians in tents in Gaza hoping not to perish under American-made bombs, the suffering of Jewish and Muslim civilians at the hands of emboldened conservative elites of all religions across the contemporary Middle East, and the despairing testimonies of Sephardic Jews in the Israeli transit camps of the 1950s, recorded by G. N. Giladi in his 1990 book Discord in Zion: Conflict Between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Israel? Such questions are central to a critique of antisemitism after the Holocaust, but they cannot be fully answered without the continued excavation of the international histories of Judeo-Arab cultural and political life in the Levantine world over the 20th century. Looking beyond Europe, especially to forms of cultural belonging in the Levant that are not reliant on a militarized nation-state system, reminds us that the liberation of the enemies of Europe—Arabs and Jews and others—might require attention to political, cultural, and intellectual affiliations that do not take the decoupling of Jews and Muslims for granted.