Full transcript
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: "Judeopessimism: Antisemitism, History, and Critical Race Theory," April 3, 2023.
CHARLES STANG: Welcome to the Center. My name's Charles Stang. I have the privilege of serving as the director here at the CSWR. We're very happy to be hosting the Center's annual list lecture in Jewish Studies in person again this year. It's the first time we've been able to do so since the pandemic.
Recent list lecturers have included Elliot Wolfson, Guy Stroumsa, Vivian Liska, and Sarah Hammerschlag. And we're honored this evening to add Professor Shaul Magid to that distinguished list of Lists. Shaul, that's a joke. Thank you for laughing. That is the only joke I will tell, and it's a terrible one. Yeah. Yeah, actually, it's amazing, I haven't tried that one before. It just came to me this year. Probably be the last one.
OK, Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. He's a Senior Fellow here at the CSWR and the Kogod-- am I saying that right?
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.
CHARLES STANG: Wow.
SHAUL MAGID: Kogod.
CHARLES STANG: Kogod, thank you-- Senior Research Fellow in the Shalom Hartman Institute in North America. His Dartmouth website describes his areas of interest as Jewish thought, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and American Jewish culture. But to be honest, after reviewing his list of publications, that seems-- it doesn't feel as if that description does justice to his range of interests.
So his most recent books include The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance. That just is 2023. Meir Kahane: --Kahana, right? Am I saying that right? OK-- The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical that's 2021. The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Commentary on the New Testament. That's 2019. And also in 2019, Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidim.
So in addition, Professor Magid is also inducing a lot of self-loathing in me right now due to the frequency of his publications. So thank you for that, very grateful. But the good news for us here at HDS is that Professor Magid next year, 2023-24, will be the Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies. We're delighted to have him here next year. That's an area in which the school sorely needs more courses.
So just a few brief words about Professor Magid lecture this evening, entitled "Judeopessimism: Antisemitism, History, and Critical Race Theory." He writes, "Black Studies and Critical Race Theory constitute some of the most theoretically sophisticated conversations in the humanities today on issues of individual and collective identities. The results have not yet been brought to bear on Jewish Studies in general or research on antisemitism in particular."
This talk makes the case that antisemitism can be better theorized through engagement with theories of anti-Blackness particularly. It focuses on how Jews write about antisemitism, how it's perceived in contemporary America, and how this discussion relates to race and Jewish identity. So Professor Magid thank you so much for accepting the invitation to deliver this year's List lecture. We're honored to host you. This podium is yours.
[APPLAUSE]
SHAUL MAGID: Thank you, Charlie, for that introduction. And thank you also to Dean Hempton for offering me next year to be a Visiting Professor at the List School, and to all of you who came out tonight.
So this is a project that is somewhat new, meaning. it's about three or four years old. And so I really-- not really sure it's ready for prime time, but here goes. This is really kind of the first time that I've really spoken publicly about it in an academic context.
When Jews began-- when did Jews begin to think of antisemitism as a problem? The term antisemitism was coined in the mid-19th century by Moritz Steinschneider, and popularized soon after by Wilhelm Marr in 1881. Since then, however, Jewish discussions about antisemitism tend to presume it extends back to the more distant past, whether as Jew hatred, or anti-Judaism, or already antisemitism. And then in some sense, it was already a problem before the 19th century, and perhaps even as long as there have been Jews.
If we define antisemitism as the hatred of the Jew qua Jew, ancient antecedents may not quite fit. But by the time we get to the Middle Ages certainly in Christendom, Jews are certainly hated distinctly as Jews. Perhaps the term Judenhass is most apt.
But it is not clear that Jews saw that as a problem that could be solved in any social sense. Most seemed to have viewed that hatred either as part of the exilic punishment or as an eternal truth about non-Jews more generally, as suggested by the rabbinic dictum rendering of Esau hates Jacob, which I'll speak about in a moment.
In the fantastical Three Oaths Pericope and Talmud Sanhedrin of 111a, God says to Israel, and I quote, "I promise not to enable the nations to persecute you too much." [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Persecution seems to be taken as a covenantal inevitability, maybe even necessity to purify the collective Jewish soul in preparation for the future redemption. By this logic, non-Jewish hatred is simply an inevitable part of Jewish history. What celebrated Jewish historian Salo Baron called its lachrymosity.
A different approach emerges among Jews during the modern era of emancipation, as many Jews wanted to be part of European societies in which they lived. Antisemitism emerges as a concept precisely when Jews begin to see the hatred of the Jew qua Jew as a problem that needed to be solved and could be solved. That is, something that requires social and political intervention for emancipation to be successful.
And yet, the older theological approach remains, largely within traditional Jewish communities, but not only. My suggestion here, in fact, is that the rabbinic idea that hatred of the Jew defines the Gentile always and everywhere still informs much of the Jewish discussion of antisemitism to this day, even in discussions that seem to be historical on how best to resolve or eradicate it.
My question here, though, is not about the origins of antisemitism. There are plenty of books that are written about that. Rather, I'm more interested in how Jews, especially today, write about antisemitism in places-- its place in the Jewish popular imagination, and its uses by Jews in our contemporary world. Part of what I want to investigate is the tension in how antisemitism is simultaneously viewed as a historical phenomenon, best understood contextually, and as an ahistorical, if not ontological, principle, which is even on some theological readings, as we will see, not only inevitable, but even necessary.
I first began to think through-- I first began to think through these questions when I was doing research for my recent book on Meir Kahane. Kahane was a radical militant rabbi, founder of the Jewish Defense League in 1968, and founder of the Israeli political party Kach in 1971. And he was deemed to be a racist by the Israeli parliament and removed from office in 1976-- 1986, I'm sorry.
But in his 1971 breakout book, Never Again, Kahane stresses that the most startling thing about the Holocaust was that Jews were surprised by it. For him, the Holocaust was distinctive only in its expanse, not in its program and not in its goal. Antisemitism, as he saw it, is simply a part of what he called the DNA of the Gentile. Their hatred of the Jews needs no explanation and can find no solution. It is more like a natural law.
He writes as follows. "I only know that those who say that the Holocaust cannot happen again are blind-- are fools, or blind, or both. I only know that the haters look upon the Jew as the enemy. I only know that the Jew is first to go into any Holocaust, and that the economic envy, and religious hatred, and irrationality of Jew baiting are here. And above all, let us understand that people in the best of times do not like Jews.
And that people in America today"-- this is written in 1970-- "do not like Jews. It is not a thing that is logical. And one who cannot understand it had better search his own psychological condition. For ages, we have sought to diagnose the condition in the hope of finding a cure, and we have failed. In the end, we are left with the resigned word of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai-- 'It is natural law that Esau-- that Esau hates Jacob.'"
By this logic, the historians who attempt to understand the Holocaust have failed because antisemitism for Kahane is not historical or structural. It is woven into the very fabric of human civilization. It is definitive of the Gentile, and thus will always be part of any non-Jewish world in which Jews choose to live. For Kahane, antisemitism can never be eradicated, only managed. And thus, he offers a way to counter its violence through the deterrent of Jewish militancy.
It was when trying to understand Kahane that I first coined the term Judeopessimism, an analogy to the position of Afropessimism, current in Black Studies and Critical Race Theory. Here I want to develop this a little bit further, suggesting that the conversation with Black Studies can offer a productive way toward a more critical approach to antisemitism and the Jewish discourse about it.
Why Black Studies? Or, as some prefer, Black Study? My aim here is not to juxtapose two constructs of navigating different simply because it hasn't been done before or to suggest that all forms of hatred are the same. Rather, I have found in Black Studies some of the most sophisticated theoretical thinking about difference and marginality, history and ontology, inclusion and exclusion, servitude and freedom.
Even the most celebrated treatments of antisemitism have tended to be sorely under-theorized. By contrast, recent work in Black Studies has been marked by serious considerations of the consequences of the failure to theorize anti-Blackness, and thus, to misunderstand the nature of whiteness that is committed to keep Blacks on the margins of society as otherly human or not human at all. Not because of racism in the sense we conventionally understand it, or because of bias, or prejudice, but because anti-Blackness in particular is constitutive of human civilization as such. That's the argument.
Showing the failure of liberal ideas of tolerance and representation to diffuse anti-Blackness, such thinking thus moves beyond the conventional solutions found in civil rights or even in Black nationalism. Decoupling theory from the search for solutions, some scholars in Black Studies, and Critical Race Theory more generally, have embarked on a theoretical project of discovering anti-Blackness as a key to understanding difference as categorical-- in some cases, even ontological, rather than simply historical or circumstantial. And perhaps most importantly, they have done so in ways that resist the hegemonic white gaze.
At first sight, Jewish reflection on antisemitism might seem quite different. Both scholarly and popular works on the topic, for instance, tend to be framed as historical surveys, oriented toward present-day solutions, or at least the possibility of such solutions. Part of what I learned from writing my book about Kahane is that his views are more widespread than they might seem.
Today, Kahane's position is summarily rejected in the polite company of Jews, who live in the post-emancipation belief that Jews can successfully integrate into non-Jewish societies. In general, American Jews reject Kahane's militancy as illiberal, if not immoral. If antisemitism can only be managed and can never be resolved, the project of modernity will fail the Jews.
Kahane said precisely this, "But most Jews today in America would not agree." But the current discussion of antisemitism, both claims to say that-- both claims to say this and also not to say this. Antisemitism is treated as historical, but also implied to be inevitable or even eternal-- the term Hannah Arendt evokes, and then rejects in her Origins of Totalitarianism, all without explaining how both can be true at the same time.
And this fissure is most ubiquitous in popular books written on the topic, largely by Jews for Jews. To cite a few recent examples, Dara Horn's People Like Dead Jews, Deborah Lipstadt's Antisemitism: Here and Now, Bari Weiss' How to Fight Antisemitism, and David Baddiel's Jews Don't Count. Each in different ways seems to address historical context, while implying, or certainly gesturing, toward the eternal argument that remains unsaid.
This is even more the case with more scholarly works, such as Robert Wistrich's A Lethal Obsession: Antisemitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad. On the need for the eternalist claim, Hannah Arendt provocatively said as follows.
"Jewish concern with the survival of their people would in a curious, desperate misinterpretation hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism after all might be an excellent means for keeping people together. So that the assumption of eternal antisemitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence." She says this in the beginning of The Origins of Totalitarianism.
My claim is that through the lens of Afropessimism, in particular, we can expose an unauthorized fissure in the contemporary Jewish discussion of antisemitism. Again, my concern is not to understand antisemitism itself, but first to understand the nature of the Jewish discourse about it and the cultural work that it does for Jews today. My claim is not that antisemitism and anti-Blackness are parallel. Rather, I suggest that the critical study of anti-Blackness enables us to grapple with the unspoken tension in contemporary Jewish discussions of antisemitism that treat it as simultaneously historically contingent and an ahistorical inevitable phenomenon. Or in other words, what makes them more like Kahane than they would like to admit.
Reading Kahane as a Jewish theorist of antisemitism, and I would suggest-- I would suggest a quintessential Judeopessimist, we are first taken back to those rabbinic teachings that most shaped the views in the Middle Ages. As I have noted, this is a Jewish view of the non-Jewish hatred of the Jews. That does not view it as a problem in search of this worldly solution, certainly not the way moderns do, but as a matter of covenantal consequence.
Of course, rabbinic teaching itself is not univocal on this, or on this or any matter, but two examples were especially influential. first is a perennialist understanding of antisemitism as coterminous with divine election. In some rabbinic traditions, the fact that the Gentile world holds animus toward the Jew is taken as a sign of divine favor, even as a condition of divine election. We find this most overtly and startlingly in an early Medieval midrash called Pesikta Zutarta on Exodus Chapter 3, playing on the etymological similitude between three words-- seneh-- Hebrew for bush, as in the burning bush, Sinai, as in Mount Sinai, and the word sin'a, the Hebrew term for hatred.
The midrash comments on God appearing to Moses in the burning bush. "Why in the bush," the midrash asks. "Because Israel will be ensnared in the thorns of servitude in the future." "But why seneh?" "Because in the future, Israel will receive the Torah at Sinai." The connection between seneh and Sinai. This is also the language of hatred-- sin'a, that the hatred of the Gentile-- the midrash uses the term idolater, but it really is referring to the Gentile-- will descend upon Israel because of Sinai.
Significantly, the Medieval commentator Rashi, in a gloss on a related passage in Talmud Shabbat 89a suggests that the hatred towards the Jews is the result of the Gentiles not receiving the Torah. Other Medieval thinkers suggest that this gestures towards Gentile hatred of the Jews as a result of Jews sinning in the future. In any event, the midrash suggests that hatred of the Jews qua Jew, what we now call antisemitism, emerged with the moment of divine election at Sinai.
In fact, by this logic, antisemitism confirms Israel's election-- hatred of the non-elect being the inevitable consequence of election, a point that Spinoza made in a slightly different, more psychological register. Spinoza posited that claims of election will naturally evoke enmity. The midrash in Pesikta Zutarta offers a more theological reading, claiming that such enmity is produced by the very fact of Sinai.
A second example is the maxim Esau hates Jacob, cited by Kahane, which I suggest is especially important for understanding the covert ontology of antisemitism that survived the advent of modernity. In traditional Jewish circles, the phrase, "Esau hates Jacob" is often deployed as a theological maxim to define antisemitism. The phrase itself is not biblical, but comes from an early midrashic text, Sifri to the Book of Numbers. The context is a comment on Genesis 33:4.
Reading from the text, "Esau ran to meet Jacob. He embraced him, falling on his neck. He kissed him and they wept." That's the verse. The midrash comments as follows. "The verse has an unusual series of dots above the word-- 'and he kissed him.'" And this puncta extraordinaria prompts questioning of whether Esau's kiss was sincere. Rabbinic sage Shimon bar Yochai is credited with the response that "It is a well-known halacha-- halacha [HEBREW]." And there are various manuscript variants on that language, which are actually quite important. Anyway, "It is a well-known halacha that Esau hates Jacob. Nevertheless, at that instance Esau became merciful and kissed him sincerely."
In subsequent Jewish thinking, Esau hates Jacob was treated as a theological maxim, including into modernity. For example, one of the leading halachic authorities, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, in the 20th century, notes in a responsum, and I quote, "Why is the word halacha-- law-- relevant here in this midrash? It is because just as halacha never changes, so also Esau's hatred of Jacob never changes."
More recently, a contemporary Orthodox Rabbi Emmanuel Feldman pushes the point even further. And this is his language. "It is a universal law Esau hates Jacob. This is one halacha that Esau maintains religiously." Quote. Especially in Feldman's interpretation of halacha's universal law, this dictum comes close to an ontological claim about antisemitism as constituent of the Gentile. But was this always the case?
In a 1967 essay, "Esau on Symbol in Early Medieval Thought," Gershon Cohen shows how Esau-- or Edom-- while it may have simply meant Rome in the rabbinic iteration, eventually comes to represent Medieval Christendom, which is still an imperial, rather than theological claim, but one now tied to Christianity as Israel's main adversary.
But when did Esau become a symbol for all Gentiles, such that the claim of hatred could be taken beyond any specific religious historical political or territorial context as a universal law about the non-Jew? In Malachi Hacohen's sweeping 2019 study, "Esau and Jacob: Jewish European History between Nation and Empire," he argues that it is not until the late 19th century, in Yiddish and nationalist Jewish literature, when Esau solidifies as the Goy, the non-Jew, the undifferentiated non-Jew.
So Hacohen writes as follows. "Esau returned as a major literary topos in Jewish national literature. He cast the virgin figures. In their Yiddish works, the Russian and Polish acculturated Jewish writers adopted popular conceptions of Esau from the rabbinic idiom and turned them into ethnic ones. Esau emerged as the Goy, the non-Jew, the quintessential other. A Zionist writer, Haim Nahman Bialik proved the equivalent in Hebrew, as did other authors."
At first sight, the modern Jewish discussion of antisemitism might seem to mark a departure from these views. It tends, for instance, to discuss its history in context rather than outlining ahistorical theological truths. To focus on history is to assume that non-Jews are different from one another and mostly tolerant in modern liberal societies in particular, such that any sort of bias or hatred is an aberration or exception in need of explanation and contextualization. But I suggest here that we find these same ahistorical ideas underlying much contemporary Jewish writing about antisemitism.
Such an admission is rarely voiced, as it does not adhere to modern sensibilities of Jewish identity and difference. Yet much of the Medieval view still remains surreptitiously operative, even as modern Jews begin to articulate antisemitism as a problem that can be and should be solved.
So it seems to me, from my perch, that Jews today are mostly confused about antisemitism. In fact, it's arguably this confusion that generates endless writing about it. The confusion is founded on the following assumption. Historically, antisemitism-- historically, antisemitism seems to be everywhere and always, in places where Jews live and in places where they don't live. In places where they're excluded from society and in places where they are integrated into society.
Many Jewish thinkers explore this in painful detail, the instances, trends, and disastrous impact of antisemitism throughout history. But the problem of the transhistorical, the everywhere and always, veiled in the historical is rarely analyzed or theorized. On the one hand, this is understandable. Such claims don't cohere with the modern Jewish goals of integration. And historians in general are mostly uncomfortable with transhistorical decontextualized claims.
On the other hand, what many of these studies show is that antisemitism seems to resist any single explanation. Historians have shown how Jews exercising difference sometimes produce antisemitism, but so do Jews engage in assimilation. Jews being nationalists and Jews being universalists, Jews being capitalists, and Jews being communists. All of these seem to have sparked in some cases antisemitism. Are these all the same? And if so, from a historical perspective, what does that mean for determining the why of antisemitism?
I reconsider this historical study of antisemitism in conversation with transhistorical understandings of anti-Blackness and Critical Race Theory, looking in particular to Afropessimist theorists, who see whiteness and Blackness in political ontological terms. On this, Jarod Sexton notes that antisemitism, and I quote-- notes that Afropessimism, and I quote-- "Moves from the empirical to the structural, or more precisely from the experiential to the political ontological, especially insofar as the question of differential racialization or complexity of racial hierarchy makes recourse to a comparative history and social science."
Now I'm not advocating or rejecting these claims with respect to race. What I'm suggesting is that these theories offer a useful point of conversation to potentially productive juxtaposition with Jewish approaches to antisemitism. Afropessimism in particular takes on the problem of the transhistorical head on, offering one model of how to theorize outside of history and theology about hatred which transcends specific times and places and which can even structure entire identities and cultures.
As I stated at the outset, my concern here is not with what antisemitism is, but rather how it's perceived and presented by Jews today. And part of my suggestion is that the discussion, both by Jews and within Jewish Studies, is distinct, for instance, from the parallel Christian discussion, which is guided by other concerns.
For the Jewish discussion I suggest that one can distinguish three approaches-- the historical, the structural, and the ontological. The first understands instances of antisemitism as products of historical circumstances that produce attitudes of animus or hatred towards Jews or cultivate notions of Jewish otherness. The second claims that these antagonisms run deeper than historical circumstances, are embedded in the very structure of how a society is constructed. Thus, accounting for their recurrent character. Historical instantiation, thus, reflect a structural flaw in society, sometimes driven by religion, sometimes by culture, and sometimes by racialization.
The third, the ontological, is the most ambiguous, but also the most devastating. It suggests that there is something in the very nature of social reality that produces such hatred. This can sometimes be explained metaphysically, but more often, in regard to antisemitism, it is viewed theologically. What is striking, in my view, is the degree to which the third often lurks beneath the first two.
One important exception is the Jewish historian David Engel, who suggested in his essay, "Away From a Definition of Antisemitism," that the study of antisemitism as a historical phenomenon must remain limited to its terminology genesis in 19th century Germany in response to the resistance some German intellectuals had to Jewish emancipation.
Hannah Arendt makes a similar argument in her essay, "Antisemitism" from the 1930s. But notwithstanding these interventions-- and there are a number of other ones-- it remains common to conflate them all into a singular antisemitism, erasing these distinctions that would make particular examples contingent on specific circumstances or cultural contexts. Engel posits the problem as a lack of historical rigor. My question is, what if the ahistorical erasure of such distinctions is not haphazard, but rather calculated or at least meaningful?
So Afropessimism, in trying to explore this question, I found it useful to look at Afropessimism theorists, such as Frank Wilderson, III, who are quite explicit in embracing claims about ahistorical patterns, or what he calls political ontology. Wilderson, for instance, posits the civilizational position of anti-Blackness or anti-Black solidarity that permeates the construction of whiteness as a purportedly neutral state of being human.
He claims-- his claim is on the level of political ontology. In this sense, since as George Weddington puts it, Afropessimism describes Blackness not as solely a question of difference, but a political position that exists outside of, but is also essential to the construction of humanity. This is not to say that whites are by definition anti-Black. It is rather to claim that whiteness is at least in part produced by anti-Blackness. And this structural antagonism is constitutive of civilization, at least in its modern Western expressions, and especially in the United States.
I want to argue below that much of the Jewish discussion of antisemitism is marked by parallel assumptions that are pervasive, but remain largely unspoken. The dominant public discourse about anti-Blackness in the United States was long-dominated by white liberal models of approaching all forms of minority inequity as easily surmountable barriers to inevitable progress. Thus, focusing on solutions to rights, access, and representation.
But more than half a century after the Civil Rights Movement, it is clear that a focus on white tolerance and Black representation has not solved inequity. Afropessimists are among the most prominent thinkers to focus on Black theorizing of Blackness and anti-Blackness. And as Jarod Sexton suggests, Afropessimism is thus a claim-- not only a claim, but also a positionality. That is, it is more than seeing the world from a position that does not assume that whiteness speaks neutrally or universally to define what is the human.
But asserting white supremacy doesn't quite get to the claim of Afropessimism or Afropessimists like Wilderson, who goes beyond historical discussions about slavery, as well as structural claims about economics and incarceration in American society. By this measure, anti-Blackness is viewed as categorically distinct from other forms of racism and bias, but also uniquely constitutive. Sexton here riffing on Du Bois, writes, "The color line, as it were, operates here as the division of the world into regions of Blackness and non-Blackness, or slavery constracted to forms of freedom, including the possessive investment in whiteness, rather than whiteness and non-whiteness."
Wilderson echoes this sentiment when he says that the structure of the world's semantic field is, quote, "Sutured by anti-Black solidarity," end quote. And in this sense-- and it is in this sense that their claims become explicitly ontological. So, for example, U E Copeland recently put it, "Afropessimism at once reveals and reckons with the modern world a fundamental-- the world's fundamentally anti-Black antagonism, which in political ontological terms, structurally positions the Black as the slave, the void, the site of non-capacity that makes possible whiteness relationality in a word the world itself."
The claim is minimally a structural one about the anti-Blackness of America that cannot be remedied through legislation, but maximally it moves to the realm of the ahistorical. Wilderson offers a particularly stark and dark articulation of Afropessimism as founded on, quote, "A comprehensive and iconoclastic claim, that Blackness is coterminous with slaveness. Blackness is social death, which is to say there was never a prior moment of plenitude, never equilibrium, never a moment of social life," end quote.
By his reading, and this is quoting him again, "Blackness and slaveness are inextricably bound in such a way, whereas slaveness cannot be separated from Blackness. Blackness cannot exist other than slaveness." Something-- even more popular things that are known in his name. His point is that Afropessimism is founded on an ontological claim of anti-Blackness, which he distinguishes from racism, upon which human civilization, and not just America, is founded.
There are humans, and there are Blacks. "Blacks are not human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props, implement for the execution of white and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochistic pleasures." That's Wilderson. He kind of goes a little bit too far. Anyway, for Wilderson, anti-Blackness is not a social dynamic, but a requisite component of social life. And slavery is not a historical phenomenon, but a relational dynamic. It defines Blackness.
It is not that Blacks were slaves. It is that they will always be slaves, because that is their civilizational role. They are the negative opposite of the human, without which the human could not exist as it does. Blackness is the dehumanized human, which gives the human its positive status.
Here, Sylvia Wynter puts it this way. "While the Black man must experience himself as the defect of the white man, as must the Black woman vis-a-vis the white woman. Neither the white man or woman can experience himself or herself in relation to the Black man, Black woman in any way, but as that fullness of genericity of being human. Yet a genericity that must be verified by the clear evidence of the latter's lack of fullness, of this genericity."
Much of this political ontology is born from a specific reading of postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon. While Afropessimism generally does not compare anti-Blackness to antisemitism, Fanon often uses antisemitism in a comparative frame. Comparing Auschwitz to the Middle Passage, we read as follows. This is Fanon cited by Wilderson, who kind of changes it a little bit.
"Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a human Holocaust. The latter is a human and a metaphysical Holocaust. This is why it makes little sense to attempt an analogy. The Jews have the dead, the muselmann, among them. The dead have the Blacks among them."
The metaphysical nature of the fate of many varieties of Africans who entered the Middle Passage and all came out as Black, is thus viewed by Fanon as categorically different than the genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Whatever one makes a Fanon's claim, and Wilderson's use of that claim-- and it is certainly the case that the Jew who emerges from Auschwitz is not at all the same Jew who entered into its gates-- for Fanon, it is arguably the metaphysical component of his point that inspires the shift from historical and structural claims about slavery to the ontological claims of Afropessimism.
What does any of this have to do with antisemitism? In short, I think everything. The questions Wilderson, Sexton, Hartman, and Wynter, among others, wrestle with about anti-Blackness are not really much different than the questions Jews wrestle with in terms of antisemitism. What is different is that these theorists have been much more willing to think outside of, or even against the historicity of specific examples of racism to understand the persistence and power of the phenomenon. Where does it come from? When and where did it-- does it exist? What, if anything, could be done about it?
To my mind, scholarship of an antisemitism might also have something to learn from scholarship on anti-Black-- on anti-Blackness, not least in focusing less on origins and solutions, and more on how such phenomena function on social or even civilizational levels. Part of what is powerful about Wilderson' intervention, for instance, is that he proposes a thought experiment that is not solutions-based or otherwise framed in terms of a white gaze that sees racism as anomalous. His ideas have sparked much debate and disagreement within the community of scholars of Black theory and Critical Race Theory, Black Studies and Critical Race Theory. And they should continue to do so.
But it is precisely what has been valuable about them. What is pervasive, but typically left unspoken in much Jewish discussion of antisemitism might similarly be better honed if stated explicitly and openly-- and opened up to debate. Many Jews, at least according to my reading, seem to be locked into a dilemma regarding the genealogy of antisemitism. On the one hand, many Jews seem bound to view it or present it historically or circumstantially, with understandable resistance to any solutions that sound ahistorical, theological, or even ontological.
On the other hand, they habitually describe examples of hatred and hostility towards Jews, large or small, as instantiation of an antisemitism that everyone knows is everywhere and always. This seemingly incongruity can even be seen in historical studies. Many presenting antisemitism from different contexts as if different sorts of examples are all the same phenomena.
Some scholars, such as Amos Goldberg and Scott Ury, who happens to be sitting here this afternoon, have openly challenged the coherence of using antisemitism as an umbrella term to include all kinds of animus towards Jews. Since this remains largely unstated however scholarship on antisemitism has both ignored the ontological assumptions within much of the historical research and neglected to engage the political ontological theorizing outside of historical research.
Beyond the scope of this analysis, to invoke Arendt again, what do Jews get from talking about antisemitism? What pleasure or comfort is taken in the lachrymose depiction of their own history? And are these studies in some way feeding some of-- a sense of authentic Jewishness as linked to victimization? A sense that is hard to abandon, even in the contemporary context where Jewishness is no less linked to political sovereignty, as in Israel? Or to successful integration into non-Jewish cultures, as in America?
One example of what a more explicit discussion might look like is Kahane's reflexive comment that I cited at the outset. But I want to present one more modern example of openly framing antisemitism ahistorically, or something that comes close to the ontological, but even more strikingly, inevitable or necessary. This example pushes us even more toward the accounting of a theorizing paradigm that may be productive, even if we reject the premise.
This example can be found in a short treatise by Naftali Zvi Berlin of Volozhin, who died in 1893, entitled, "Se'ar Yisrael," "The Remnant of Israel." Berlin was a leading rabbinic figure in late 19th century Eastern Europe, who remains revealed in many traditional circles today. His essay was originally published in 1894 in a second edition of his Rinah Shel Torah. It was likely written sometime around the 1860s. It's an uncommon essay from the wellsprings of traditional Eastern European Jewry in that it is dedicated to the topic of explaining antisemitism. In fact, it is likely the first Hebrew word to use the term antisemitism explicitly.
While it was surely written before the pogroms of the 1880s, rising animosity towards Jews in Eastern Europe, even in the middle of the 19th century, coupled with the widespread Jewish rejection of the tradition, could have inspired Berlin's interest. While Berlin remains wed to the exegetical theological frame common in his world, I suggest that "Se'ar Yisrael" is a rare example of moving to the realm of the ontological as a way to frame antisemitism.
The historian Arthur Hertzberg once said, the only thing more dangerous to Jews than antisemitism is no antisemitism. Hertzberg meant, I assume, that the absence of antisemitism opened the door to mass assimilation that he believed was always the occupational hazard of Jews in modernity. Writing in the 19th century, Naftali Zvi Berlin seems to have taken a different take on the same idea. Not that antisemitism prevents assimilation, but that it is a corrective to it.
Berlin's essay is founded in a much earlier principle stated by Saadia Gaon, who lived in the-- in the 10th century-- 9th-- 10th century, late 9th century, early 10th century, namely that the Jews only exist for the sake of Torah. In other words, there is nothing unique or special about Jews, per se, apart from carrying the tradition of divine revelation to the world. That's Saadia Gaon's position. The Jews, for him, are vessels for Torah and nothing more.
Without stating that precept outright, Berlin uses it to explain the enormity of the non-Jew toward the Jew. He never uses the maxim Esau hates Jacob in his essay, but he does use it elsewhere in his Torah commentary. Rather, he bases his theory on the acrimonious relationship between Jacob and Laban, but more-- his father-in-law-- but more specifically on a verse from the genealogies in Genesis 6:21. That's a picture of him there.
"Sons were born to shame. Ancestors of all descendants of Eber and the older brother of Japheth." That's the verse. The Jews are descended from shame through Eber, hence Shemites or Semites, a term that Berlin seems-- this is just my interpretation-- a term that Berlin seems to be referring to, as it was very much in use in his time, while the Japhetites were the people of reason, referring, I surmise, to Europeans.
The Shemites, or the Jews, are certainly higher than the Japhetites, but only when they carry the inheritance of Eber through Abraham. That is, only when they carry the tradition of Torah. When they don't, they are less than the Japhetites. And the Japhetites will understandably-- will understandably be despised by them.
The Jews are thus divided into two categories for Berlin. The first are Jews, those who live by the tradition of Torah. And the second are Semites, those who abandon Torah. Thus, Berlin writes, "It is debasing for us to be called Semites. For this is to be more lowly than to be identified with Japheth the Great. However, when we are called Israelites or Abrahamites, we are on a higher level than the Japhetites."
For Berlin, the only way for Jews to keep themselves higher than the Japhetites is separating themselves from them to protect fidelity to Torah. Responding to the massive assimilation of Jews in his time, Berlin seems to suggest that by abandoning Torah, Jews move from being Israelites, or Jews, to Semites, who are lower than the Japhetites, and who will be understandably hated by the descendants of Japheth. He goes even further by saying that when Jews abandon Torah they become almost subhuman, describing them as similar to monkeys-- kofim. He uses that term. They lose their Israelite form, and, to quote a verse from Hosea 8:8, "They become among the nations like an unwanted vessel."
"The nature of this matter"-- this is now Berlin, "The nature of this matter further indicates that when Israel violates its unique form, that is, when it abandons its Judaism, it becomes lowly and despised in the eyes of the world. This is a general principle in nature that every higher form that suffers the destruction of that higher form becomes much more lowly than something that does not originally have that particularly higher form." For Berlin, this enmity is not simply part of the natural-- it's not simply part of the web of natural law in the sense of the rabbinic dictum Esau hates Jacob, it is antisemitism. And this is a term that's very new when he was writing. And it has a divine teleology all its own. Antisemitism then for him can be viewed as a covenantal corrective.
Now it is clear that the unique form of Israel is their being alone and separate from others. It is therefore understood that what happens should be what happens when Israel tries to break out of its aloneness and imitate others, ending in the removal of its religious tradition of Judaism. How does the Holy One return them to their structural purpose? Animosity for Israel is stirred up among the nations. Israel, not referring to the country, referring to the people. They are pushed away from their lives and dwellings until inevitably the uniqueness of Israel is recognized and the works of God is established forever.
One could say that Berlin's assessment is empirically false. That is, antisemitism exists against Torah observant Jews as well as assimilated Jews. He responds to this with an observation about Jacob and Laban. "The Passover Haggadah contains one of the most oft-cited cases for the ontology of antisemitism. Indeed, in every generation they rise against to destroy us. However, the blessed Holy One saves us from their hands." Berlin focuses on what follows-- "Go and learn what Laban, the Aramean, attempted to do to our ancestor Jacob." This is basically taken right from the Passover Haggadah.
Berlin notes that while the context is that Laban was suspicious of Jacob, his enmity had two dimensions, the second being hostility toward Jacob's faith. What prevents Laban, or antisemites in this scenario, from succeeding is the divine protection initiated by the Jews' fidelity to the law. Once that disappears, they become merely Semites, unwanted vessels, to use the locution from Hosea. "And the Japhetites rightly hate them."
Berlin summarizes as follows. "From this we learn that all the nations among whom we live hate the name of Judaism. However, they do not have the opportunity to actualize their enmity until the high Providence wishes to punish us and a pretext is found for an attempt to destroy us completely. The story of Laban and Jacob is a lesson to all Jacob's descendants."
For Berlin, antisemitism, thus, has two forms. The first is hatred for a lowly people, the Semites, who have abandoned Torah and relinquished their lofty status as Eberites, who are descendants of shame, who carry through the tradition of Abraham. This hatred, he claims, is understandable, even justified, since Israel becomes, in the words of Hosea, an unwanted vessel. The second is Laban's desire to uproot Israelite faith. In the second instance, Israel is protected by God.
Berlin was living at a time when Jews were both abandoning the tradition at the very same time that antisemitism was on the rise. He was a leader of the Volozhin Yeshiva, one of the great Torah institutions in modern history. And yet around him, assimilation was rampant. The fear was that the behavior of the Jewish Semites would also impact the lives of the Jewish Eberites.
Thus, he calls his essay, "Remnants of Israel," a phrase taken from Isaiah 10:20. "And in that day, the remnant of Israel, and the escape from the House of Jacob shall lean no more on him that beats it, but shall lean on the Lord, the Holy One of Israel." For Berlin, antisemitism is simply part of the fabric of human civilization, which is why I think he draws it from the genealogy of the descendants of Eber.
While Berlin does not speak openly here in metaphysical ontological terms, he certainly viewed antisemitism in de-historicized terms, not linked to specific historical circumstances or societal structures, but rather functioning as a fundamental and even necessary part of human civilization, activated in part by Jews becoming Semites, by abandoning Torah. "The Jew avoids the brunt of antisemitism by living under the wings of divine protection, but if they step outside, antisemitism will eventually rise to destroy them."
Esau hates Jacob is not necessary for Berlin because he places antisemitism long before that. The remnant of Israel may be salvaged, but the Semites, in his view, will be justifiably erased. Antisemitism purges the Semites who have left Torah, according to Berlin, or alternatively, it wakes them up to return to reside under the wings of divine protection.
So this analysis points to some of what I mean when I say Judeopessimism, which makes claims about antisemitism that are akin to the political ontology of anti-Blackness that we find in some Afropessimists. Just as Afropessimists claim that America is a white supremacist nation, or as Wilderson would have it, that the world as we know it is founded on anti-Blackness, some Jewish thinkers see the non-Jewish world through the lens of antisemitism. Hatred of the Jew is treated as definitive of the non-Jew.
A question that I think is worth asking is the degree to which Judeopessimism also underlies discussions of antisemitism more broadly. Are Jewish scholars of antisemitism similarly claiming this antipathy to the Jew underguides much of human civilization? And if so, exactly what would that mean?
There's an understandable discomfort for historians or modern Jews generally to make claims of this sort in explicit terms, to argue for an ahistorical persistence of antisemitism seems anathema to a people who have invested so much energy normalizing in the world, either through successful integration in America and other parts of the diaspora, or through nationalization through Zionism. The theological analysis of Berlin may seem creative and suggestive, if not outrageous, but hardly a template for how American can-- for how contemporary Jews now see themselves in the world.
Kahane offers a secularized version of Berlin, simply stating that "The failure of historians to understand the why of antisemitism leaves us with Shimon bar Yochai's natural law of Esau's enmity for Jacob. And bar Yochai's comment, likely initially directed only at the Roman Empire, has become universalized by the expansion of Esau as the Goy in modern Jewish literature, so that Jewish nationalism does not, in fact, place the Jew as a nation among nations, but rather in a binary model of Israel and the nations or Israel against the nations.
In practice, Jewish historians of antisemitism tend to describe enmity towards Jews in many historical and societal contexts, without particularizing those contexts. Varied expressions of hostility towards Jews and Judaism, from Christian theological supersessionism, to conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination, to anti-Zionism, are all just simply called antisemitism, as if they are all essentially the same. In effect, if not in intent, such scholarship is thus engaging in a theological project that is arguably no less ontological in its claims than the theories of anti-Blackness noted above.
To imply, even if not stated openly, that antisemitism is everywhere and always is not a historical claim. It is a theological, or even ontological claim. Even if we leave the reason to mystery and reject Berlin's analysis of antisemitism as the natural consequence of assimilation, transhistorical or transterritorial phenomena all described as one thing, antisemitism, is not a historical claim, even if one-- even if one might make that claim using historical methods.
This is why Engel's essay "Away from a Definition of Antisemitism" is such a welcome and crucial, if not also problematic and in need of further examination, an intervention into the conversation, even if one disagrees with it. And interestingly, why it was so critically received in Israel in a recent volume of Zion which had a Hebrew version of Engel's essay, and then a series of responses, one of them by Susannah Heschel.
It is here that I think Afropessimism can be of use to scholars of antisemitism, precisely because it is willing to make its ahistorical claims explicit, and thus, put them up for debate. Many Critical Race Theorists blanch at Wilderson's [INAUDIBLE] because it problematizes any solution or make solutions inadequate. There is no solution to anti-Blackness, or at least no easy solution, and no solution that would leave civil society intact since it is constitutive of the construction of the human, at least in the modern West. Anti-Blackness cannot be undone without also undoing much of what we now consider to be civilization. That's the Wilderson's claim.
But Berlin and Kahane's assessments, and the ways that they have shaped the popular Jewish imagination also reject any solution. Yes, Jews can separate themselves and even establish their own country, which Berlin tacitly supported. And they can live by the dictates of Torah, but that will not erase antisemitism, as rooted for Berlin in Laban's animus towards Jacob. It only minimizes its potential damage. And one can respond to antisemitic violence through violence, following Kahane, or live under the auspices of divine protection through fidelity to Torah, but that too will not erase antisemitism, only manage it or mitigate it. Antisemitism, for them, is intractable. Kahane, at least, openly admits that he believes that.
While very few, if any, historians of antisemitism make such dire predictions, the transhistorical way they often present their historical data seems to me to point in that same direction. The unwillingness to pose an answer to the question of why there is antisemitism, especially since it appears to be transhistorical, is taken up by Berlin. And in doing so, he dehistoricizes it and places it into an ontological or theological frame.
Antisemitism is what happens when Jews become Semites by abandoning Torah. In other words, without Torah, the natural animus of Japhetites towards Semites becomes manifest. Historians will certainly resist such an explanation, even finding it absurd. But aren't they in some inchoate way contributing to it as well? Put otherwise, are many Jews not living in an orbit of Judeopessimism without owning its consequences? What does antisemitism everywhere and always mean in terms of being a Jew in the 21st century?
The study of antisemitism, as I read it, has not yet developed a critical theory of its subject, whereby it can be analyzed in the fullness of itself. In short, perhaps we need to initiate a school of Critical Jewish Theory. Scholars of antisemitism understandably feel uncomfortable with older Jewish theorizing or of non-Jewish hatred towards Jews, such as we've just seen in the theological diagnosis of Esau hates Jacob or Berlin's reading of all of Jewish history through relationship between Laban and Jacob.
Scholars of antisemitism might benefit from a deeper engagement with Afropessimists and Critical Race Theorists more generally, who are grappling with anti-Blackness and theorizing its broader implications for human civilization, not as a cause of racism, but as a way of understanding why we can't seem to get beyond it. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Scott, Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thanks, Shaul, that was great. Really a great way to start the weekend off. So many questions, I have to choose one. I really like this term pessimism. I know Susannah has [INAUDIBLE] But I want to push you a little bit and ask you, what are the implications of the term pessimism, or Judeopessimism, or Jewish conceptions of difference? What does it really mean for Jewish conceptions of difference here in the States or in North America? In particular, [INAUDIBLE] in reference to whiteness-- let's talk about whiteness.
SHAUL MAGID: Right.
AUDIENCE: Does that finally decide the question of whether or not Jews are white?
SHAUL MAGID: Right. This is a really good question. It makes a lot of Jews very nervous, which is why there's been such pushback against Critical Race Theory in general among Jews-- wokeness among Jews, the sense of being white, of being in a certain sense not only the persecuted ones, but the persecutors, in a sense. Moving from one side of the ledger to the other.
I published a piece in Contending Modernity last year or two years ago, called "The Price of Non-Whiteness," which what it would mean-- what it would mean-- what does it mean for Jews to own whiteness and, therefore, own what whiteness is, even though it may have-- they may have-- they may not have been in America during slavery, and that's always a case that Jews make against reparations-- but they're beneficiaries of that whiteness. And that whiteness in certain sense excludes them from certain progressive political models-- Black Lives Matter, one example. Zionism also does that.
What would it mean to actually own the non-whiteness, right? What would be the price? Because in a certain sense, it seems to me-- and again, I'm just really speaking off the top of my head here-- where it seems to me that many American Jews in this case are caught between wanting the benefits of whiteness and wanting the politics of non-whiteness.
And when that doesn't play out, for a variety of reasons, they see that as antisemitism. Right? Because that's always the way it goes. It always goes back to that. So the antisemitism, of the left or the antisemitism of woke Black Lives Matter culture, and the antisemitism of Charlottesville. And they see themselves situated in both of those-- in both of those cases.
There is interesting historical precedent to this. When people went down in the Freedom Summer in 1961 to register Black voters in the South, and many of them were Jews-- of course, two of them were lynched-- the Jews in the South were not very happy about that because it really destabilized a very fragile relationship that Southern Jews had with white Southerners. So the argument was is that these liberal Jews are coming down from the North and evoking the ire of the white Southern-- white Christian Southerners, and then going back to their places in Cambridge and New York City. And then the-- and then the Southern Jews were suffering as a result of that.
So I think that you're absolutely right that the question of difference, I think, today is really situated for American Jews on the question of whiteness in the way that it isn't in Israel. I think it's a different dynamic in Israel and the race relations are different. But that-- but again, this is something that I feel is not really being theorized. Nobody's really sitting and doing the work.
I shouldn't say nobody-- some people, but not enough people are sitting and doing the work of theorizing Jewish whiteness, theorizing the relationship of that to the difference in terms of identifying with Blackness, and also engaging in this Critical Race Theory experiment. I can't remember his name right now-- wrote a really interesting article that was tucked away in some regional Jewish newspaper about-- if Jews reject the concept of wokeness, basically, or if Jews accept-- if Jews reject Critical Race Theory, then they can't teach Jewish history. Because Jewish history is the history from the perspective of the victim.
So if we want to say that one of the tenets of Critical Race Theory is basically to teach about slavery, the 1619 Project, from the perspective of the victim. If the Jews are basically going to contest that, because then they are on the white side of it, then they basically make it impossible to teach Jewish history, which is exactly the way it's taught. We don't learn about the expulsion from Spain from Spanish court documents. We learn it from, for the most part-- Jewish history is taught the expulsion from Spain from the writings by Jews.
Yes, please.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. I have a question about how to [INAUDIBLE] a historical analysis of antisemitism to contemporary manifestations of philosemitism. So on the one hand, there's right wing philosemitism [INAUDIBLE] maybe influence [INAUDIBLE] and embrace both Israel [INAUDIBLE], but also [INAUDIBLE] politics [INAUDIBLE].
SHAUL MAGID: Sure, sure, yeah. In her book-- in her book, Antisemitism Now, or-- Deborah Lipstadt's book. I forgot the title right now. She makes that comment--
AUDIENCE: Here and Now.
SHAUL MAGID: Here and Now-- she makes the comment that philosemitism is also antisemitism. Now in a certain way, there's a logic to what she's saying, but I would say-- I would even go further on some level. And this is stuff that's-- work that's been done by Daniel Boyarin and others. There is some-- there is some discernible way that Zionism is also antisemitism.
If you look at the early Zionists, the way they depicted the diaspora Jew-- sickly, diseased, weak. They're borrowing from all of the antisemitic tropes as describing what the Jew is who lives in the diaspora. And the new Jew is the obviously right-- the nationalized Jew, the Zionist Jew, is the one who undermines all of that. So in a certain sense, the Zionists are basically saying, kind of, in some way, that yeah, the antisemites were right. In the diaspora, the Jew is a sickly, weak, diseased, parasitic person. And we have to undo that by actually creating some kind of a national entity.
So I think-- I don't know if I really answered your question, but I think that the way in which-- and here, again, I'm not talking about the thing itself. The way in which it's perceived, the way in which antisemitism is perceived is that any-- it-- it goes to Elad Lapidot's book, Jews Out of the Question. Basically says the only way not to be an antisemite is not to talk about Jews at all. and then David Baddiel comes and says, well, if you don't talk about Jews at all, that's also antisemitism. Right? because. You're excluding them.
But any time you actually talk about-- Lapidot's argument is any time you talk about the Jew, that already raises the question of antisemitism, certainly from the perspective of the Jew. So again, these are things that-- these are things that exist in the ether. I think they just really have to be carefully theorized. And it just seems like Jewish Studies scholarship on this question-- and again, there are some exceptions. I mean, Susannah has really done some real work on this. But you have to begin to theorize the question of transhistorical and historical, and not hide behind history. And that's what the contemporary discussion is doing. Yeah. Well, Janet and Susannah, yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for a really interesting talk, very clear and I [INAUDIBLE] And this is a really important subject to start to-- and not enough people are theorizing it. It really seems like [INAUDIBLE] really important. Just wanted to just point out it almost seems like a Jewish joke in my head that there's like a slippage between the historical and this ahistorical and metaphysical, in the sense that you can start out attributing things to particular historical circumstances, but when it keeps happening over and over again, and it happens here, and it happens there, and it happens here, you start to say to yourself, maybe there's a reason that it's always happening. So one [INAUDIBLE]
SHAUL MAGID: Right.
AUDIENCE: And I can see that as, like, a little joke. But anyway, my question though is that you brought up Kahane-- so does Judeopessimism inevitably become a kind of militaristic, violent, anti-other, racist kind of incarnation in the way that we're seeing it now on the right in Israel? So does it necessarily have to be that? And I've heard people talk like this, that everyone's going to hate us for all time, and therefore, there's no point in trying to make friends with the Arabs. And that the only thing that's going to protect us is to just be as tough and as violent as everybody else and just [INAUDIBLE].
SHAUL MAGID: Right.
AUDIENCE: So is that the-- are there other directions out of this Judeopessimism [INAUDIBLE]
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] meaningful, positive [INAUDIBLE].
SHAUL MAGID: Right. I think, as others have said, that the weaponization of antisemitism sometimes results that antisemitism becomes the foreign policy of Israel. And that's kind of what you're saying, right? That everybody hates us anyway, so we should just-- we could just do what we want.
AUDIENCE: Is that the natural result of this kind of pessimism or are there other tracts? Because I think by raising this concept, we want to know what it is-- does it necessarily become this inevitable--
SHAUL MAGID: Right. I don't think-- I don't think anything necessarily becomes-- I mean, I don't think anything is inevitable. Certainly, if you take this particular mindset, and especially if it's not openly spoken about, but kind of subterranean, and then you add in the mix of political power and military power, this is-- that's one iteration. It just becomes purely domination, basically. And I think that Vincent Lloyd's recent book on destiny talks about this concept of domination. Yeah, so that's certainly what we're seeing.
Are there other alternatives? I think there are other alternatives. I don't know what they would be. They certainly-- they certainly-- Kahane's militancy is one alternative who is looking to kind of-- he's looking for a solution to the problem that has no solution. So basically, it's all about just deterrence and protecting yourself. But again, I think there's so much more theorizing to be done before we get to the place of, well, what do we do about it?
And this becomes kind of the pushback with Wilderson too. People like Fred Moten and others, and even Terence, or-- we don't want to enter into an ideological mindset that doesn't allow us any possibility of not a solution, but a way to live happily, to flourish in that context. So that's way down the line for me, but it's certainly a legitimate point. Susannah.
AUDIENCE: So thanks, it was great. I guess I want to first distinguish between the historians, or make a defense of the historical profession, because I think they are far more nuanced. When I think of Eleanor Sterling, or Horkheimer, or Adorno, and [INAUDIBLE], because that's a different approach to antisemitism.
But what you're talking about in the books that you cited, the popular books-- and some of this has to do with-- and what I want to ask you is to contextualize it then, because Afropessimism emerges as left wing. And by the way, there is a theological religious response-- Cornel West and Andrew [INAUDIBLE] and others.
But Judeopessimism is a right wing phenomenon. And what really seems to be going on with those books that you cited, [INAUDIBLE], et cetera, is not so much that the Goy hates the Jew, but rather to provide an excuse for Jews to hate other Jews, namely hate left-wing Jews. So it's more of an internal problem. It's the Jew against Jew phenomenon, more than the worry about the Goy factor. It seems to me that Christians are often treated with greater-- not only respect, but love and warmth by the people who write [AUDIO OUT]
SHAUL MAGID: Right, yeah.
AUDIENCE: Christian Zionists, et cetera, et cetera.
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: But it's Jew against Jew. So what would you say--
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, a couple of really good points. I think you're-- I think you're right. I notice that too. This Judeopessimist sentiment is really a sentiment that comes in some sense from the right-- I don't know how right-- whereas, Afropessimism is really actually coming from the other side. And have to figure out how those things actually work with each other.
It is true with some of the people you spoke about-- and I'm thinking not only of the more popular books that I mentioned, but also Robert Wistrich and the influence of that. And David Nierenberg, even though he claims not to be wanting to do that, and even Yehuda Bauer. So I think the camps, there are different camps, obviously, right?
I don't think-- I would say it this way. Since I'm really kind of interested here in reception, and I don't think that American Jews are reading Israel Yuval, right? They are reading Robert Wistrich. They are reading a very particular iteration of the antisemitism from-- what was it-- From Sinai to the Global Jihad or something like that? Antiquity to the Jihad, something like that. And in David Nirenberg's anti-Judaism book, he has a chapter on ancient Egypt, which the publisher kind of forced him to write. But nonetheless, he wrote it and put his name on it.
So I think that it's how this stuff-- how this translates down into a more popular idiom. And I do think that the very, very strong move of some sectors of the American Jewish community, certainly in its support of Israel, but also even to the political right in America, is that they're kind of buying a Judeopessimist project without really even knowing what they're buying. They're buying an idea that antisemitism is everywhere and always to some degree.
And you could see this-- this has come up a lot in terms of the mention of George Soros in relationship to Alvin Briggs. Like what's really being said there? And how that's being heard within that community. And what's being cultivated? Again, I think, this is in an American context Baddiel's writing from Great Britain. And the European context is very different. I know in Germany things are very different also. And in Israel, they're very different.
AUDIENCE: But the Judeopessimism isn't to make Jews feel that non-Jews hate us, it's to make Jews hate other Jews for not agreeing politically. The function is different. Wilderson would never want Black Americans to hate other Black Americans.
SHAUL MAGID: Right. Right, so you're saying that-- I hear what you're saying. So you're saying that just as antisemitism gets weaponized, Judeopessimism is getting weaponized also. But it's really-- it's like allowing Jews to hate other Jews because those other Jews are not recognizing that the nations hate us, right? In some way? OK. You'll correct me later, I'm sure. Terence.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, we're going to go through all the-- let me ask you a question in terms of, what do you think we'll do about [INAUDIBLE] climate? My question is really [INAUDIBLE]. And [INAUDIBLE] argues that Wilderson in some ways takes the [AUDIO OUT].
SHAUL MAGID: Takes the--
AUDIENCE: Landlessness of [AUDIO OUT] and this idea that because whites see the Black as a slave without feeling [INAUDIBLE]. So I'm wondering, what extent is-- it sounds like Wilderson is making a claim around powerlessness in terms of patriarchal power, versus [INAUDIBLE] and yet, there's a way to find freedom within the wilderness, in terms of what the engagement [INAUDIBLE]
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: How do you take that? [INAUDIBLE] Wilderson seems very much concerned with-- [INAUDIBLE]. We did that in Zionism, the way that we think of ourselves, as historical people with a land, trying to claim our humanity. Whereas, Wilderson-- Wilderson's like well, I'm not sure that that's actually the correct path, because now you're recreating a certain kind of harm that we're actually fighting against in terms of thinking about community, into the wilderness, and how will we respond.
In other words, Wilderson's-- [INAUDIBLE] respond to a condition. Not neccarily based on how well they know about it, but how one responds is the very materiality of [INAUDIBLE]. And Wilderson and company seem to abhor it. And I'm wondering if that [INAUDIBLE], because thinking about Black Lives Matter, these women are like Black Lives Matter, not that we are slaves. Black Lives Matter matter, now I want you to acknowledge it, and we'll use this as a source of protest and as a source of [INAUDIBLE] agency that always denied with Sexton and Wilderson.
SHAUL MAGID: Right. So you don't see-- you don't see Black Lives Matter as a claim of we are human? Is that the--
AUDIENCE: I do, but I don't think Wilderson will say it's primarily-- it's called respect.
SHAUL MAGID: Because?
AUDIENCE: Because why does that [INAUDIBLE] white association? There's nothing analogous to the inhumanity of Black [INAUDIBLE]. Which is why I used that example-- even the Palestinians like, oh, I was searched by--
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, in Wilderson's book, right. Samir, right-- right. Right.
AUDIENCE: Any effort to try to-- either convince whites or engage in Black sympathy is that faith [INAUDIBLE], because it doesn't lead to anything. It leads to momentary happiness, but [INAUDIBLE] Where I think-- so what's interesting with Black [INAUDIBLE], I'm not sure they're using my work in the way which I would necessarily support. And [INAUDIBLE] is saying, look, we have the agency even in the wilderness, which I don't think Sexton wants to account for.
SHAUL MAGID: Right, right. Well, wouldn't you say Fred Moten kind of moves in that direction also?
AUDIENCE: I would say with the physical element, he's giving-- he's actually providing a different kind of superiority that I don't think is present within Wilderson or Sexton.
SHAUL MAGID: Right. It's fascinating, yeah. I don't know how much I can answer. I really look forward to sitting and having a coffee with you for a few hours to kind of-- it's funny, when I first came upon this, I read Wilderson. That may not been the first thing I should have read. But I read Wilderson, and I was really totally taken in by it because I was trying to figure out how to write a chapter on race in Kahane. And I don't know, for some reason, I kind of just fell into this Wilderson pit.
And I was having lunch with Jay Carter, who's a friend, at an AR conference. And I was just like going on Wilderson full on. And he's just saying slow down. There's this whole critique, right? And I came to see that. One of the things that I think is so, for me, valuable about Wilderson, not really being inside that conversation, is not that he's right, but that he throws down a gauntlet, that then requires everybody to come up with alternative ways of seeing-- of seeing those kinds of things. And that's become the value for him, for me, anyway, in terms of Judeopessimism.
I think that-- it's interesting that you brought up this idea of nationalism. Because, of course, nationalism was an alternative for African-Americans at a certain moment in history. And not only that, but if you go back to Du Bois and Garvey, they saw Zionism as somehow a model. That was going to be the model that they were going to use to get themselves out of this situation, which had its time and made its contribution. And then it kind of petered out for a variety of reasons.
So it's kind of-- I think there's more-- there's more-- there's much more to say in terms of the interchange between those two things that is not really talked about anymore, both in terms of nationalism and in terms of the question of landlessness and what that actually means. Yeah, did you have a question? We're out of time?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SHAUL MAGID: OK, I'm good whenever you are.
AUDIENCE: Well, I can't see behind me how many hands are up.
SHAUL MAGID: I think we're good.
AUDIENCE: We're good. All right. Let's thank Shaul one more time.
[APPLAUSE]
SHAUL MAGID: Thank you.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.