Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

In this article I seek to apply the notion of anti-Semitism as a cultural code, which I initially developed 25 years ago with relation to the antimodernist trends in late-nineteenth-century Germany, to the phenomena of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism today. From the 1960s anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism formed part of a larger ideological package consisting of anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and a deep suspicion of US policies. In the eyes of members of the developing countries, Jews became a symbol of the West and legitimate targets for hatred. Thus, the position on the Jewish question, even if not in itself of paramount importance, came to indicate a belonging to a larger camp, a political stand and an overall cultural choice. The question is whether the position towards Israel today, which has become a central issue for the European left, can still be considered a cultural code or whether it rather indicates a more direct anti-Jewish attack, above all as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.     

Italian Jews and their ‘political’ reactions to the fascist regime’s anti-Semitic campaign*

ABSTRACT

The article intends to emphasize the political redefinition of Italian Jews in reaction to the fascist aggression and its different answers ‘organized’. Since 1934 there arose strong divisions within Italian Judaism: the real issue of contention, however, did not reside in the attitude towards fascism, but in the judgement on Zionism and postponed a long-standing dynamics. A group of Jews, called ‘bandieristi’ from a magazine called La Nostra Bandiera, on the basis of a ‘fascist’ programme and anti-Zionism, tried to replace the official establishment of the Jewish representatives, the Union Community of Italian Jewish, as a reference to the fascist authorities. The Union was accused by the ‘bandieristi’ of being complicit with international Jewry and Zionism. The confrontation with fascism exasperated the Italian Judaism internal contradictions, putting in long-term dynamic light that preceded fascism and survived the early post-war years.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 33, Number 6. December 2017

Cover caption, volume 33 issue 6 Front Cover Rescuing tradition from the rubbish, a Jewish man in Israel recovers discarded sacred books. This scene serves as a metaphor for the struggle to hold on to tradition in the modern nation state of Israel. The achievement of political sovereignty is thought to be a form of liberation. It is supposed to bring freedom to the subaltern nations who attain it. But can the modern state create the conditions in which a once persecuted minority can finally flourish? Ethnonational states are always exclusionary. Israel inflicts the conditions that European Jews once suffered onto Palestinians, who have been displaced, disinherited, walled off; and even when they are citizens, they are always second class. But what about those at the center of sovereign citizenship: ‘the people’ themselves? Hannah Arendt reminded us that Jews were never quite at home in Europe. They had to be exceptional to be accepted. They had to be Jews, but not be like Jews, relegating their identity to the private sphere: ‘men in the street and Jews in the synagogue’. But these forces of ‘emancipation’ did not make them citizens like all others. The story of modernity and secularism in Europe is also foundational to nationalism and claims of self‐determination elsewhere. The question is whether or not emancipation has been achieved through political self‐determination, and if so, what such emancipation looks like. Do the forces of assimilation end with political self‐determination? Can a once persecuted people finally be liberated? Who feels free to be Jewish in the modern state of Israel? Whose cultures flourish and whose Jewish traditions can be practised freely? Who finally feels at home? And who, among the sovereign citizens of the ethnonational state, still experience a sense of exile, reflected in the need to rescue traditional texts from being tossed out with the rubbish? Back Cover: MALAGASY JUDAISM Through a warren of alleys in densely packed Antananarivo, capital of the island nation of Madagascar, there is a gated compound. Beyond the gate is a metal door to the entrance of the house within the compound. Emblazoned on it are a seven‐branched menorah and the Hebrew letter ? (shin, for Shaddai, God). Down the corridor, to the left, is a door with Hebrew writing affixed to it; behind it is a prayer room. Instead of pews or chairs, there are rugs, as one might expect to see in a mosque. This is Madagascar's synagogue, in the home of Tubiyya, the self‐taught Malagasy hazzan (Hebrew: cantor). Tubiyya stands next to his wife Miriam and their children. As with the man pictured on the front cover of this issue, Tubiyya sports payos – long strands of hair, sidelocks, that ultra‐Orthodox Jewish men grow on the sides of their faces, to obey the Old Testament commandment from the book of Leviticus 19: 7: ‘Ye shall not round off the edge‐growth of your heads, neither shalt thou diminish the corner edge‐growth of thy beard’. Most observant Jewish men do not follow this particular commandment. In this sense, the Malagasy Tubiyya and the Ashkenazi Haredim in Jerusalem (see front cover) represent small but visible minorities within the greater Jewish world. But they are outliers – both globally and locally – in a deeper, theopolitical sense: both are anti‐Zionist Haredim, rejecting the legitimacy of the Jewish State on religious grounds. The Messiah has not yet come to ‘ingather the exiles’. In the meantime, Israeli society is too secular for them. And yet, would the hawker on the front cover accept Tubiyya as a fellow Jew? Race and Jewish genealogy set them apart. This issue of ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY bookends antipodes of Jewry, where inclusion and exclusion are in constant tension.     

Exile at home: A matter of being out of place

This article employs Hannah Arendt's theorizing about assimilation to consider how sovereign citizens of a nation state might nevertheless experience a sense of exile. It builds on Aziza Khazzoom's notion of a ‘chain of Orientalism’ to suggest that the assimilation of Europe's Jews to Enlightenment ideals has had ongoing repercussions among Jews in the modern state of Israel. The article focuses on what it means to be Jewish in terms of religious observance, and who feels at home in the Jewish state. Employing vignettes from recent ethnographic fieldwork, it raises questions about the modern nation state's capacity to create conditions in which its own ‘people’ can flourish. In this case, Israel has claimed to make it possible for the Jews to flourish, in Arendt's terms, ‘as Jews’, but it is far from clear what ‘as Jews’ would, could or should mean. This leads the author to suggest that Israel has a Jewish problem.     

Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?

From Hellenistic to modern times, in the eyes of Jews and non-Jews alike, circumcision is a sign that marks the boundary between Jews and non-Jews. Jews are circumcised, gentiles are not. What, then, of Jewish women? Why are they not marked with a bodily sign attesting to their place within the covenant? Cohen argues that the Jews of antiquity seem not to have been bothered by this question probably because the fundamental Otherness of women was clear to them. Jewish women were Jewish by birth, but their Jewishness was assumed to be inferior to that of Jewish men. Jews and Christians, however, who opposed circumcision, used the non-circumcision of women as one of their supporting arguments.     

The Jewish Communities of Central Asia in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods

When the Jews first settled in Central Asia is uncertain, but circumstantial evidence clearly indicates that this happened at least two and a half thousand years ago. In the first millennium AD, the Jews lived only in cities no farther than 750?km east of the Caspian sea (in the eighth–eleventh centuries the sea was called Khazarian). Only later did they migrate to the central part of the region, to cities like Samarkand and Bukhara. It is possible that Jews from Khazaria joined them, since they already had tight trade connections with Central Asia and China. There is no trace of evidence regarding the existence of Jews in the entirety of Central Asia in the early sixteenth century. At the very end of the sixteenth century Bukhara became the new ethnoreligious center of the Jews in that region. In the first half of the nineteenth century, thanks to European travelers visiting Central Asia at that time, the term “Bukharan Jews” was assigned to this sub-ethnic Jewish group. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary source materials, this article aims to prove that the presence of Jews in Central Asia was not continuous, and therefore the modern Bukharan Jews are not descendants of the first Jewish settlers there. It also attempts to determine where Central Asia’s first Jewish population disappeared to.     

On the use of Nazi sources for the study of Fascist Jewish policy in the Italian-occupied territories: The case of south-eastern France,November 1942–July 1943

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the use of Nazi sources for the study of Fascist policy towards Jews in 1940–1943. By exposing the gap between the Nazi perception of and the reality of the Fascist policy towards Jews in Italian-occupied south-eastern France, the article demonstrates that Rome’s refusal to hand over Jews for deportation did not contradict the fundamental anti-Semitic nature of its Jewish policy in that context. Thus, the article highlights the risks for historians to read Fascist Jewish policy through Nazi lenses and thereby fall prey to stereotypical characterizations of the Italians as insubordinate, scheming and driven by what an S.S. official disparagingly labelled a ‘Jewish-friendly attitude’. At the same time, the article shows that, when combined with Fascist sources, Nazi sources can help shed light on the conceptual divide that underpinned the Axis partners’ disagreement over the means by which the ‘Jewish problem’ should be ‘solved’, thereby exposing the analytical limitations of the current prevailing understanding of the Fascist refusal to hand over the Jews as purely the outcome of ‘pragmatic’ opportunistic considerations.     

The challenges facing the First Aliyah Sephardic Ottoman colonists

The case of the tiny Jewish colony of Har-Tuv, which was founded by Ottoman Jews who immigrated to Palestine in 1895 from Bulgaria, sheds light on Ottoman policies vis-à-vis settlement activity by Sephardic Jews in Palestine at a time when there were concerted efforts to limit the Jewish national activity there. The latter was mainly carried out by non-Ottoman Ashkenazi Jews who immigrated to Palestine from eastern Europe. As the only colony established during the First Aliyah by Sephardic Jews, and also due to its geographical isolation, Har-Tuv was detached from the processes taking place within the other Jewish colonies and the New Yishuv. At the same time, Har-Tuv’s founders had a long tradition of living under Ottoman rule and were on good terms with the local Ottoman authorities in Palestine. This was often useful when the colony had problems with its Arab neighbors, and on several occasions Har-Tuv even served as an intermediary between the Arab rural population and the government.     

“马斯基尔”与犹太社会——以启蒙视阈下的德国为个案

欧洲启蒙运动发生之后,德国犹太思想家马斯基尔以自由理性为旗帜,批评传统犹太教、发展世俗教育、提倡现代生活方式,引领犹太人走出隔都,对犹太社会产生了极为深刻的影响,也留下了惨痛的教训,越来越多的犹太人背离了民族传统。从此以后,传统与现代性的关系成为犹太史上的核心命题。本文以启蒙视阈下的德国尤其是柏林为个案,探讨社会转型时期犹太思想家对传统社会的重创,分析犹太文化与现代主义、德国主流文化多重汇集之后,犹太知识阶层无所适从的精神困境,从而为研究现代化背景下少数族群的身份认同以及亚文化的存续与发展提供借鉴。     

Berlin and Florence in the Age of Enlightenment: Jewish Experience in Comparative Perspective

Into the 1930s, the Jewish population in Germany used the termEnlightenment (Aufklärung) emphatically to formulate itsself-image. At the end of the twentieth century scarcely anythingremained of the once emotional semantics. The most recent literatureon relations between Jews and the Enlightenment elaborates thehostility of the German Enlightenment towards Jews with philologicalacuity. The essay examines the relationship between the Enlightenmentand Jewry and Jewish experiences in the eighteenth century froma comparative perspective. The Berlin Enlightenment is comparedwith its Florentine counterpart. This comparison shows thatintellectuals in the Prussian capital were far more open andunbiased towards Jews than their Tuscan counterparts. Whilein Berlin Jews were admitted to the academies and convivialsocieties, this was largely denied them in Tuscany. Despite the altered climate at the end of the Enlightenmentperiod, the article emphasizes that, if there was ever a periodin German-Jewish history that may be deemed balanced, then itwas the age of Enlightenment. The comparison between Prussiaand Tuscany can thus help us to understand how the Enlightenmentcould become such an emphatic and emotional point of orientationfor German Jews in the nineteenth century.     

The Jewish presence in Granada

In contrast to almost all other Spanish cities and townships, nothing tangible survives in Granada that might be reminiscent of Judaism. There is no trace of an ancient synagogue on either side of the River Darro, neither on the hills nor on the plain. On the right bank, region of the oldest settlement, rises the hill of widest dimension, the ‘Albaicín’. On the left bank ascends the steeper hill ending in several summits: a pointed one atop the ‘Mauror’ slope is crowned by the ‘Torres Bermejas’ (Red Towers); the other, the majestic plateau ‘Sabika’, carries the Alhambra. to the west of the hills, the city on the plain spreads outwards into the valley, the ‘Vega’. No buildings in any of these areas reveal a Jewish past; Granada's urban nomenclature offers not the slightest hint of a former Jewish presence, and all current - and former - studies of Granada lack satisfactory information about the location of the historic Judaic quarter. There is no mention even of the last chief temple that must have existed until 1492, the year of the great exodus (decreed by Isabella and Ferdinand in this very city) of all the Jews from Spain. And yet, Granada, the town that has forgotten all about its Jews, is said to have once been known as ‘Garnāta-al-Yahūd’: Granada, city of the Jews, and later tradition has accepted this as a fact.I attempt in this study to show that, although some Jews lived there from Roman times, all of Granada never was a ‘city of Jews’. Second, taking as point of departure a remark in the new Encyclopedia Judaica (1971:852) that the Jewish quarter was “not located in a single place throughout the centuries of Muslim rule”. I shall show that the earlier Jewish quarters (preceding the Muslim conquest and lasting throughout the Zirid regime) were located on the Albaicín; third, it will be demonstrated that a Jewish quarter was established on the Mauror only in Nasrid times: and fourth, I shall explain why I think that the church of San Matías was built on the foundation of the last synagogue of Granada, a ‘Gima Abrahén’, which, erroneously, is believed to have been a mosque.     

The Jewish presence in Granada

In contrast to almost all other Spanish cities and townships, nothing tangible survives in Granada that might be reminiscent of Judaism. There is no trace of an ancient synagogue on either side of the River Darro, neither on the hills nor on the plain. On the right bank, region of the oldest settlement, rises the hill of widest dimension, the ‘Albaicín’. On the left bank ascends the steeper hill ending in several summits: a pointed one atop the ‘Mauror’ slope is crowned by the ‘Torres Bermejas’ (Red Towers); the other, the majestic plateau ‘Sabika’, carries the Alhambra. to the west of the hills, the city on the plain spreads outwards into the valley, the ‘Vega’. No buildings in any of these areas reveal a Jewish past; Granada's urban nomenclature offers not the slightest hint of a former Jewish presence, and all current - and former - studies of Granada lack satisfactory information about the location of the historic Judaic quarter. There is no mention even of the last chief temple that must have existed until 1492, the year of the great exodus (decreed by Isabella and Ferdinand in this very city) of all the Jews from Spain. And yet, Granada, the town that has forgotten all about its Jews, is said to have once been known as ‘Garnāta-al-Yahūd’: Granada, city of the Jews, and later tradition has accepted this as a fact.I attempt in this study to show that, although some Jews lived there from Roman times, all of Granada never was a ‘city of Jews’. Second, taking as point of departure a remark in the new Encyclopedia Judaica (1971:852) that the Jewish quarter was “not located in a single place throughout the centuries of Muslim rule”. I shall show that the earlier Jewish quarters (preceding the Muslim conquest and lasting throughout the Zirid regime) were located on the Albaicín; third, it will be demonstrated that a Jewish quarter was established on the Mauror only in Nasrid times: and fourth, I shall explain why I think that the church of San Matías was built on the foundation of the last synagogue of Granada, a ‘Gima Abrahén’, which, erroneously, is believed to have been a mosque.     

DOES ANYBODY STILL NEED JUDAISM?

Both of the books under review focus on the tradition of Jewish scholarship and debate. The Genius of Judaism is written from a religious perspective, whereas the authors of Jews and Words envision a future in which Jews live without Judaism; they see Jewishness as a culture that can be divorced from religion. For Lévy, a sense of the divine—including the concept of being a chosen people—is the source of Jewish identity and historical continuity. Lévy also argues that the Jews are chosen to serve non‐Jews. Inspired by the prophet Jonah, Lévy undertook diplomatic missions in the Ukraine and in Libya, and I consider the lessons he draws from these missions. I also discuss the relationship of Judaism to various concepts in the philosophy of history: revolution, progress, messianism, and utopianism, as well as the affinity between Judaism and skepticism.     

Into the Spiral of Problematic Perceptions: Modern Anti-Semitism and gebildetes Burgertum in Nineteenth-Century Germany

This article attempts to relate modern anti-Semitism to theincreasingly close interactions of Jews and non-Jews in an ageof political emancipation and social integration. It arguesthat the changing mutual perceptions of Jews and Protestantsin the German educated bourgeoisie are of central importancein this regard. In nineteenth-century Germany, literature movementssuch as realism, and various human sciences such as anthropology,Protestant theology or philology provided ample material fordiscussing the Jewish character. These fields suggest four waysof perceiving Jews: the Jew as parvenu, as Talmudist, as materialistand as nomad. Indeed, bourgeois Jews themselves contributedto these literary and scholarly debates. Their discussions werefrequently shaped by the attempt to confront anti-Jewish misconceptions.Moreover, they propagated their own interpretation of the Jewishcharacter: the figure of the humanistic Jew. This Jewish interpretation,which identifies a universal mission, proves to have a twofoldnature: it is not only a counter-attack against anti-Semiticpolemics, but also a particular result of the peculiar Jewishadaptation of bourgeois culture. As the article argues, however,this humanistic perception of Jewish identity caused concernon the Protestant side, which led to further polemics and thusfurther Jewish defence. The resulting spiral of problematicperceptions was the consequence of the growing social intimacyof bourgeois Jews and Protestants in nineteenth-century Germany.Modern anti-Semitism, it is thus argued, can be interpretedas a specific form of rejection of ambivalence and the establishmentof neat binary codes in the confusing closeness of Jews andnon-Jews.     

Adgar's Gracial and Christian images of Jews in twelfth-century vernacular literature

This article concerns the adaptation and translation into the Anglo-Norman vernacular of an existing tradition of Latin miracles of the Virgin by the twelfth-century poet William Adgar. Adgar included many older ideas about Jews in his version of the stories, but also borrowed themes and language from contemporary courtly romance literature in order to suit his intended audience of lay nobles. In doing so, he portrayed Christian characters as the embodiment of loyalty and other courtly values. At the same time, he began to portray Jews according to courtly types of treachery. New implications emerged in his work about the general moral character of Jews, in contrast to previous works that commented mainly upon the nature of Jewish belief. Recent scholarship on Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century has begun to pay increasing attention to the movement of new Christian ideas about Jews outside of scholarly and ecclesiastical circles. The study of vernacular literature has an important place in this scholarly debate, since the move to the vernacular broadened the audience among which the new ideas about Jews could be spread.     

Adgar's Gracial and Christian images of Jews in twelfth-century vernacular literature

This article concerns the adaptation and translation into the Anglo-Norman vernacular of an existing tradition of Latin miracles of the Virgin by the twelfth-century poet William Adgar. Adgar included many older ideas about Jews in his version of the stories, but also borrowed themes and language from contemporary courtly romance literature in order to suit his intended audience of lay nobles. In doing so, he portrayed Christian characters as the embodiment of loyalty and other courtly values. At the same time, he began to portray Jews according to courtly types of treachery. New implications emerged in his work about the general moral character of Jews, in contrast to previous works that commented mainly upon the nature of Jewish belief. Recent scholarship on Christian-Jewish relations in the twelfth century has begun to pay increasing attention to the movement of new Christian ideas about Jews outside of scholarly and ecclesiastical circles. The study of vernacular literature has an important place in this scholarly debate, since the move to the vernacular broadened the audience among which the new ideas about Jews could be spread.     

Redescribing the Enlightenment: The German-Jewish adoption of Bildung as a counter-normative ideal

This essay offers a reconsideration of the ethical vocabulary, social possibilities and religious worldview enabled by the German concept of Bildung, or human self-cultivation, a concept which was enthusiastically adopted by German Jews in the late eighteenth century. By examining the creative use of the concept by German Jewish philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and, later, in a very different political context, Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), the article challenges a body of scholarship that interprets the German Jewish enthusiasm for Bildung as an assimilationist capitulation by post-emancipation German Jews to the individualism and rationalism of the German Enlightenment. In contrast, I suggest that both Mendelssohn and Cassirer saw Bildung's emphasis on the vita activa as offering a vehicle for multifarious human engagement with the world that inspired not only a movement beyond reified conceptions of tradition, whether religious or secular, but forms of activism that could combine cosmopolitan sympathies with communal affiliation.     

论19、20世纪之交东欧犹太移民在美国的群体互助

从19世纪80年代持续到一战后初期,东欧犹太人为逃避俄国及其周边国家的反犹迫害浪潮而大批涌向美国。他们在老一辈美国犹太人的慷慨资助下渡过最初的困境后,就着手调动自己有限的资源创立帮助犹太新移民的慈善组织,并且按照乡镇或地区来源建立同乡会共渡生活难关。他们还将欧洲犹太社区中久已存在的无息贷款社移植到美国,无偿为有志创业者提供小额资金。这些互助组织有效地保障了整个东欧犹太移民群体在美国的生存和发展。     

“They Will Take the Country from Us”: Labor Zionism,the Origins and Legacy of the “Other” in Israeli Mass Media,and Hegemonic Narratives

After 1948, Israel's governing elites embarked on a rigorous program of state building and settling hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. In the process, the elites, primarily from the leading Mapai party, developed a process of othering Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, Arab citizens, and Orthodox Jews. They were physically segregated in their own schools and communities, and the elite culture described them as a threat against the European culture of Jewish immigrants from central Europe. The process targeted Mizrahi Jews before moving on to deplore the “demographic threat” of Orthodox Jews and resulted in the current normative hegemonic discourse in Israel that paints numerous groups as threatening the state. This article proposes a four‐part model for understanding “the other” in Israel: contemporary denial and nostalgia for a homogenous past, the view of Zionism as a civilizing mission, the application of separation of ethnic groups in planning, and demographic fear of the other. Altogether, they paint a picture of an Israel that has not come to grips with its past, and therefore continues the process of “othering” in its contemporary ethnocratic framework. Combining the analysis of geographic separation, and planning and media, it presents an innovative understanding of Israeli society.     

Moroccan Jewish first-places: contraction,fabrication, dissipation

Abstract

The idea of first places is inevitably linked with diasporas. At the heart of this idea and since the very start, there has always been the Jewish case. The diaspora of the Jews of Morocco, in the periphery, was presented by some authors, as a good case with which to relativize the theoretical pertinence and conceptual inspiration of the Jewish model. Focusing on Jewish history, heritage, and travelling in Morocco, I will continue to question the paradigm of social studies based on the bi-polar center-diaspora model. I will testify to the emergence and fabrication of new Jewish ‘first-places’, a process attending the aging and departure of the last Jews of Morocco and with the support of the Kingdom, while following current, and disruptive trends of contraction, commutation and dissipation of ‘first-places’ in different Jewish practices and narratives. The individualization of religious practice in post-secular societies allows and includes – and often merges – secular, ethnic and political approaches of what once was purely designated as religious identity. Heritage Moroccan landscape (and landscaping) allows different approaches and thus probably why one can think of it as an emerging ‘first-place’ for some.