Robert Fine - Antisemitism and the Left: On the Return of the Jewish Question

Antisemitism and the left

On the return of the Jewish question

Robert Fine and Philip Spencer

Manchester University Press

Copyright Robert Fine and Philip Spencer 2017

The rights of Robert Fine and Philip Spencer to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

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ISBN978 1 5261 0495 3hardback

ISBN978 1 5261 0497 7paperback

ISBN978 1 5261 0496 0open access

First published 2017

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To the pure, everything is pure

(in Hebrew la tehorim kol tahor).

(Ephraim Moses Lilien, Ex Libris in E.M. Lilien, Sein Werk, mit einer Einleitung von Stefan Zweig, Berlin and Leipzig: Schuster & Lffler, 1903).

Ephraim Moshe Lilien, Ex Libris (Wikimedia Commons)

We have been helped, criticised and inspired by a number of people in the course of writing this book. Among those to whom we should especially like to express our gratitude (sorry for the omissions from this list) are: Christine Achinger, Claudine Attias-Donfut, Glynis Cousin, Shoshana Fine, Lars Fischer, David Hirsh, Gunther Jikeli, Alan Johnson, Lesley Klaff, Karmela Liebkind, Brendon McGeever, Sean Matgamna, Lydia Morris, Istvan Pogany, Lars Rensmann, Dave Rich, David Seymour, Karin Stoegner, Kim Robin Stoller and Howard Wollman. Institutions are vital to research and we should especially like to thank friends and colleagues in the European Sociological Association Network on Racism and Antisemitism. The discussions we have had every year since some of us succeeded in establishing the network ten years ago have been consistently stimulating, sometimes fraught and always educative. We should also like to mention the roles played by Engage the antiracist campaign against antisemitism; Fathom for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region; the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck College University of London; the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide; the Community Security Trust protecting our Jewish community; the British Association for Jewish Studies; the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Conflict and Mass Violence, Kingston University; the Department of Sociology and Social Theory Centre, University of Warwick; Manchester University Press; and our enthusiastic and friendly editor Caroline Wintersgill. As always, we owe a considerable debt to our families for their engagement as well as support to Jane, Rosa and Reuben, and to Shoshana, Tony, Glyn and Lydia. And lastly we cannot let this go without thanking the hospitable staff at Ishtar, Crawford Street, who provided us with a nourishing lunchtime office where many of the ideas in this book were cooked, skewered and hashed out.

Prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness. (George Eliot, Middlemarch)

Universalism is an equivocal principle. It shows two faces to the world: an emancipatory face that looks to the inclusion of the other on the assumption that the other is a human being like ourselves, but also a repressive face that sees in the other a failure to pass some fundamental test of what is required for membership of humanity. Supporters and opponents of universalism both capture something real and important about the phenomenon itself. Supporters remind us of universalism's emancipatory content that it has proven to be a vital principle of civil, political and social inclusion. Opponents focus on universalism's dark side that it has been used as a means of stigmatising, excluding and at times eliminating the other. Universalism thus appears to be a complicated ism. The idea that it is always work in progress toward an unreachable goal is tempting but treats it as an abstract ideal that loses touch with its own social origins; the idea that it is always exclusive and exclusionary threatens to abandon any idea of universal human solidarity.

In its emancipatory aspect, the principle of universalism entails a family of ends: to treat all human beings as human beings regardless of their particular differences; to translate the abstract conception of humanity into practical legal, political and social consequences; to challenge the legitimacy of all forms of exclusion; to understand the particular differences we construct and with which we may identify such as class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, etc. as relative to an inherently diverse humanity; and not least to acknowledge the singularity of every individual human being. Universalism implies recognition that it is true of all human beings that our common humanity, our particularities and our unique forms of singularity enable us to shape who and what we are.

Many different categories of people have been turned into others in analogous ways, including the enslaved, the colonised, the exploited, the orientalised, and those labelled deviant. Power and knowledge are, in this sense, deeply and mutually imbricated.

Jewish experiences of universalism have been correspondingly equivocal. Universalism has acted as a stimulus for Jewish emancipation, that is, for civil, political and social inclusion; it has also been a source (though by no means the only source) of anti-Jewish prejudice up to and beyond the classic antisemitism of the modern period. While the experience of Jews is by no means unique in this respect, one of the peculiarities of the anti-Judaic tradition has been to represent Jews in some important regard as the other of the universal: as the personification either of a particularism opposed to the universal, or of a false universalism concealing Jewish self-interest. The former contrasts the particularism of the Jews to the universality of bourgeois civil society; the latter contrasts the bad universalism of the rootless cosmopolitan Jew to the good universalism of whatever universal is advanced be it the nation, the race or the class. It is this negative face of universalism that has shaped what was once commonly called the Jewish question. The struggle between Jewish emancipation and the Jewish question has been a struggle waged over the spirit of universalism itself and is the topic of this book.

The idea of the Jewish question is the classic term for the representation of Jews as harmful to humanity as a whole. The fundamental questions it asks are about the nature of the harm Jews supposedly inflict on humanity, the reasons why the Jews are so harmful, and what is to be done to remedy this harm. The answers it finds to these questions are diverse within a certain semiotic unity. Among the harms Jews have been supposed to inflict are economic harms like usury and financial manipulation; political harms like betrayal and conspiracy; social harms like exclusivity and indifference toward others; moral harms like greed and cunning; and cultural harms like abstract intellectualism and contempt for nature. Among the reasons given for the harmfulness of Jews, we find reference to the restrictive conditions in which they were once forced to live, the tribal assumptions of Judaism as a religion, the self-promotion of Jews as the chosen people, the virulent character of Jewishness itself, and as Jean-Paul Sartre observed, the self-fulfilling effects of antisemitic labelling. Among the solutions to the Jewish question that have been proffered, we find seemingly benevolent solutions such as improving the social and political conditions in which Jews live, improving the defective moral character of the Jews themselves, and combating the mindset of antisemites, as well as manifestly malign solutions like rolling back the rights of Jews, expelling Jews from their host countries to some foreign territory, and eradicating the Jews from the face of the earth.