“Remembering Semitism” or “On the Prospect of Re-Membering the Semites”

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.1.2.0192
• Published date: 01 April 2016
• Date: 01 April 2016
• Pages: 192-223
• Author: Gil Z. Hochberg
• Subject Matter: Semitism,Jews,Muslims,Arabs,Christianity,Islamophobia,anti-Semitism,re-memory,re-membering

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Gil Z. Hochberg, University of California, Los Angeles.

Hochberg@humnet.ucla.edu

“REMEMBERING SEMITISM” OR “ON THE

PROSPECT OF RE-MEMBERING THE SEMITES”

Gil Z. Hochberg

Abstract: Today, a growing number of French Jews embrace the far-right French Front

National party, which has a long history of anti-Semitism – how did we get here? How is

it that Jews turn to the French authorities for protection against so-called Muslim anti-

Semitic violence? How is it that we see a similar pattern across Europe: in Belgium, The

Netherlands, Denmark, and Britain? This essay addresses these questions by calling atten-

tion to the role played by the absent-present Christian West in creating and aggravat-

ing tensions between Jews and Muslims while seemingly fulfilling the role of mediation

between the two. The essay suggests that current popular images of Jews and Muslims

circulating in Western media ironically echo nineteenth-century European depictions of

Semites – both Jews and Muslims as devoted monotheistic fanatics controlled by zeal

and despotism and in need of external salvation. The bulk of the essay thus focuses on

“Semitism” and examines the role of nineteenth-century European philology in dissemi-

nating Western perceptions of Jewish and Muslim inferiority. Finally, the essay advocates

a re-appropriation of Semitism as an alternative memory, or rather a re-memory which

as such is also a re-membering of Jews and Muslims along their shared historical position

as radical Others within the hegemonic, Western, Euro-Christian epistemological order.

Keywords: Semitism, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Christianity, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, re-

memory, re-membering

The Looming Presence of Christo-Europe

French Jews are ready to discard decades of distrust of the far right by voting for

the National Front as a bulwark against radical Islam. (Sage 2015)

Today, a growing number of French Jews embrace the far-right French Front

National party, which has a long history of anti-Semitism – how did we get here?1

How is it that Jews turn to the French authorities for protection against so-called

Muslim anti-Semitic violence? How is it that we see a similar pattern across

Europe: in Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, and Britain?

“REMEMBERING SEMITISM” 193

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We know the basic facts and numbers, and there is really no need to rehash

them. Yes, violence has increased; yes, many European Jews feel threatened; yes,

since 2012 about 7,000 Jews have left France for Israel, many of them claiming

that they no longer feel secure living in Europe; and, yes, most of these fears are

attributed to undeniably rising tensions between Muslims and Jews across Europe,

and the upsurge of radical Islam across the world. No reasonable person, including

this essay’s author, can deny any of these factors. The deep connections between

the ongoing Israeli violence against the Palestinian people and the rise of visible

anti-Semitic symbols and chants across Europe (such as “gas the Jews”) also need

little proof.2 These tensions openly manifested during the last Israeli attack on

Gaza in 2014, followed by numerous debates about the relationship between anti-

Zionism and anti-Semitism.3 I mention these factors here only in passing, as they

are not the focal point of this article.

Indeed, instead of citing, once again, either undeniable Israeli crimes against

Palestinians or the rise of radical Islam as the ultimate reason for, or center point

from which to understand, today’s growing relationship of hostility, mutual suspi-

cion, fear, and animosity between a great number of Jews and Muslims in Europe

and across the world, I want to direct attention elsewhere – to the “third party” as

I shall call it: the always absent-present Christian West, which intrudes, navigates,

manipulates, and maneuvers the interactions between Jews and Muslims but itself

remains a largely invisible force. If the absent-presence of the Christian West

holds true for Medieval Christian Spain, it undoubtedly also holds true for modern

colonial times as well as for the post-World War II (WWII) period up through to

the present. Indeed, today as in the past, this third party looms in the background,

often “too large to be seen” (Nirenberg 2002: 33).

This third party, which we can identify as Europe, the US, or, more broadly

speaking, “the West,” is always already the arbitrator: the receiver of claims and

appeals made by both Jews and Muslims (and more specifically and recently by

Palestinians and Israelis) who often, and not always wisely, play against each

other by circulating what are unquestionably, originally, and primarily Christo-

European ideologies, whether anti-Semitic, Orientalist, or Islamophobic. This is

evident when Zionist Jews defend Israel as a “Western nation” or “modern democ-

racy” (“the only one in the middle east”), which as such protects Western values

from the barbarism of Arabs or Islam.4 It is similarly evident in the words of

Muslim leaders who name Jews as the enemies of Christ, humanity, or Islam.5

Faced with such declarations, we must remember that they tell us little about

Jewish-Muslim relationship per se, and much more about the ongoing legacy and

political impact of Western, Christian, and European ideologies: Orientalist, colo-

nialist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic.6

194 REORIENT

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Thus, the third party, always present but rarely fully visible (“too large to be

seen”), is my focus here. We must, I believe, challenge and question, rather than

serve and reinforce, its appearance as a neutral and laissez faire external entity,

which is articulated in terms of “objectivity” and “rationality,” and that in the

French context is often given the name “secularity,” defended by so-called social

scientificism (Grosfoguel 2010: 34-6). And I want to suggest that we do this as a

decolonizing discursive practice by instead highlighting the West’s complicity,

insofar as it creates and aggravates tensions between Jews and Muslims – those

two halves of the Semites that Europe first created “as one,” and then pulled apart

(Anidjar 2007: 18-9).

Given the frequent naturalization of the enmity between Israelis and Palestinians,

and the echoing tensions between Jews and Muslims worldwide (insofar as the

political conflict in Palestine becomes a vehicle for manipulatively depicting a

fabricated yet long-lasting theological or theological-political tension between

Judaism and Islam), we must, I argue, look closely and with greater scrutiny at the

bitter irony of the West’s ongoing involvement in this tragic drama. The fact that

the so-called “solution” to the Jewish question (in Europe) and the problem of

anti-Semitism (in Europe) involved settling the remaining Jews (of Europe) out of

Europe7 (in Palestine), which in turn created a new colonial situation in the Middle

East at the very moment that Europe pulled out of, or was rather forced to pull out

of, its final colonial enterprise, must be seen for what it is: Europe’s way to cleanse

itself from its two modern historical crimes – anti-Semitism, on the one hand, and

colonialism on the other – by transferring their weight onto its primary historical

victims. With Jews as the new and latest colonizers (in a post-colonial world), and

Muslims now accused of becoming the new anti-Semites (against which European

leaders, including right wingers such as Marine Le Pen, must protect “their Jews”),

Europe presents itself, once again, as the voice of reason, enlightenment, and tol-

erance: a fantasy by which we must actively forget and displace the long European

legacy of colonialism, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism.8

Indeed, only such forgetting explains Western media’s widely circulating

images of Jews and Muslims, or, in narrower terms “Jewish Israelis” and “Arabs”

(the latter are rarely referred to as Palestinians), who appear time and time again

as unreasonable, emotional enemies caught in a conflict too large for them to over-

come, and who need the help and intervention of a wise (impartial) third party. I

want to suggest that such images ironically echo nineteenth-century European

depictions of Semites – both Jews and Muslim (at times referred to as “Muslim”

and at other times as “Arab”) – as devoted monotheistic fanatics controlled by zeal

and despotism, and as victims to a submissive mentality that prevents them from

acquiring modern rational skills that, alas, only belong to their Western