Alas, a Blog

This was originally to be Part IV of my anti-Semitism series. I’ve mostly been side-tracked from it — I don’t think the rest of it flows organically from discussions we’ve been having. This post, though, I think remains important on its own merits.

When Christianity first came about, it did not see itself as a rival to Judaism. Rather, it viewed itself as its completion. The coming of Jesus was the next step in the natural progression of Jewish history. Early Christians were thus surprised when Judaism refused to die off in the face of its claims. This presented a problem: if Christianity is merely the new and improved form of Jews (as they like to see themselves, hence names like “The New Testament”), what does it mean if there continues to exist a live and vibrant Jewish community that rejects the divinity of Christ?

Christian theologians solved this problem by holding that post-Christ Judaism was vestigial, a dead tree that would bear no more fruit. This doctrine, of course, runs into trouble insofar as Jews still were running around making theological claims and arguments, and Christian rulers worked extraordinarily hard as a result to suppress Jewish religious practice and particularly the creation of Jewish religious scholarship. The goal was make the declaration of Jewish irrelevancy a reality, by force if necessary. Christianity could only be said to be complete insofar as it was totalizing; it could only be totalizing if it entirely incorporated (dominated, colonized) Judaism.

As the Enlightenment swept through Europe (and came to America), a similar problem emerged. Like Christianity, Enlightenment Liberalism was a totalizing ideology. Its assertions of universal human rationality were colored by the experiential backdrop of the persons making the claim. What was said to be “universal” was, in reality, primarily a reflection of the values of the dominant castes: European (later White), male, middle-class, and secular/Christian. Some Enlightenment thinkers were Christian, and others were not, but regardless of their religious affiliation they had to make allowances for the overwhelmingly Christian majorities they represented. Explicitly sectarian rules were abandoned, but they principles which replaced them did little to undermine Christian hegemony.

Once again, though, Jews presented a problem. Jewish difference was incompatible with the universalism that characterized Enlightenment thought. “Neutral” laws written with the Christian majority in mind did not fall equally upon the Jewish community – for example, Sunday closing laws, which are easily defended as neutral in purpose (to give people a day off) and selection (Sunday is the day most people would want off). Even the vaunted separation of Church and State, an enlightenment triumph and a hallmark of efforts to protect minority faiths, has been operationalized to perpetuated the social subordination of Jews. In such situations, once again the Jew was called upon to erase her or himself. Jewish requests for accommodation were shot down as special pleading or violations of equal treatment. But conditioning equality upon sameness, as Catherine MacKinnon argues, “simply means that…equality is conceptually designed never to be achieved. Those who most need equal treatment will be the least similar…to those whose situation sets the standard against which one’s entitlement to be equally treated is measured.” As Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jew and one of the key figures in contemporary post-colonial philosophy, memorably put it in The Liberation of the Jew, Jewish inclusion into majority Christian “secular” institutions was done under the conditions of “the poor man who enters a middle-class family: they demand that he at least have the good taste to make himself invisible.” The idea that Jews could only become equal by abandoning their Jewishness was sometimes expressed in distressingly violent terms. In 1793, the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte wrote that “As for giving them [the Jews] civil rights, I see no remedy but that their heads should be cut off in one night and replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea.”

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