Decolonial Judaism

Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking

S. Slabodsky

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137345837
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking explores the relationship among geopolitics, religion, and social theory. It argues that during the postcolonial and post-Holocaust era, Jewish thinkers in different parts of the world were influenced by Global South thought and mobilized this rich set of intellectual resources to confront the assimilation of normative Judaism by various incipient neo-colonial powers. By tracing the historical and conceptual lineage of this overlooked conversation, this book explores not only its epistemological opportunities, but also the internal contradictions that led to its ultimate unraveling, especially in the post-9/11 world.

CHAPTER 1

Jewish Thought, Postcolonialism, and Decoloniality: The Geo-Politics of a Barbaric Encounter

The publication of Edward Said’s magisterial Orientalism (1978) heralded the beginning of Postcolonial studies in the Anglophone academy. This field’s engagement with modern Jewish thought, however, was slow to develop and is still in its initial stages. On the one hand, the limited cross-fertilization between the two fields comes as a surprise. The historical experiences of Jews and other collectives affected by colonial discourses have exhibited remarkable overlap. For the last five hundred years, Western discourses have established a common set of patterns of domination applying analogous tropes and stereotypes to Jews as they have to Muslims, Africans, Amerindians, and others. The end result of Jewish racialization was nothing less than a tragedy. As a result of the Holocaust and political colonialism, between the 1940s and 1980s, over half of world Jewry suffered systematic displacement and/or annihilation. During this period, Jews from around the world wrote penetrating accounts confronting the existential conditions of racialization and faced imperial narratives in parallel to other collectives affected by colonial discourses. Their prescriptive systemic proposals, however, have rarely been studied under a postcolonial optic and correlated with other anti-imperial struggles.

On the other hand, the scarcity of postcolonial Jewish thought should come as no surprise whatsoever. In the twenty-first century, only thirty years after the emergence of Postcolonial studies, the normative racial portrayal of Jews has undergone a radical inversion. Long seen as a threat to the West, Jews have been seamlessly integrated into a new re-articulation of the Judeo-Christian civilization. They are largely perceived by the formerly colonized as loyal, if not zealous, Westerners. Jews are frequently associated with Global neo-colonial policies and accused of perpetrating the same racist atrocities they themselves suffered in the past. American and European xenophobic discourses, moreover, serve to deepen the cleavage among colonized communities. Local Jewries are extolled as model communities of successful integration and assimilation in order to undermine the legitimacy of Muslim, Latin American, and African immigrants or minorities. This discursive re-classification of Judaism, with antecedents throughout modernity but with a last re-articulation and normativization after the 1940s, militates against investigating the decolonial aspects of their conceptual programs or correlating their historical resistances to imperialism with contemporary anticolonial struggles.

The field of Anglophone Postcolonial studies largely reflects this underlying tension. On the one hand, the field recognizes the persecution of modern Jewry. From the outset, Postcolonial theorists have acknowledged discourses on Jewish racialization as intimately connected to colonial discourses. Said himself not only associated Orientalism and European anti-Semitism but also critiqued the re-racialization of non-European Jews, including Arabs and Latin Americans.¹ In the last fifteen years, and following this early openness, disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (e.g., literature, cultural theory, history, and sociology) have increasingly focused on the Jewish existential conditions affected by colonial discourses and the patterns of dominations that emerged from them.² On the other hand, established Postcolonial theory has more difficulty in recognizing discourses of Jewish resistance as decolonial proposals. Scholars who emphasize the study of resistances sometimes employ Jewish critical intellectuals as theoretical records. On most occasions, however, they identify the eurocentrism or the ignorance of racialization among these proposals and ultimately reduce them to Western internal critiques of modernity instead of decolonial proposals. While this helps avoid the universalization of the Jewish case, it also raises the following paradox: the prototypical Jew is acknowledged as a historical victim of colonial discourses, but his/her systematic attempts of decolonialization go largely unrecognized. There is, however, a rich tradition in Jewish decolonial thought that seeks to address colonial narratives and programmatically confront them.

Some of the most provocative Jewish scholars confronted this paradox and have offered correctives to central aspects of the field. These studies either tend to re-evaluate the area’s sweeping generalizations or, conversely, its excessive narrowness. Mizrahi studies follow the former trajectory, which is perhaps best exemplified by the pioneering work of Ella Shohat. The field acknowledges that while some European Jews did benefit from colonialism, often times they did so at the expense of non-European Jews. The colonial divide, however, is veiled by a Western historiography that subsumes Jews within a single, undifferentiated European experience. This trend serves to correct the reproduction of this all-encompassing discourse and enables the decolonizing potential of Jews with origins in the Islamic world.³ Intellectuals of Levantine and Maghrebian provenance, such as Ammiel Alcalay and Gil Anidjar, have formulated groundbreaking accounts of a Postcolonial turn that could eventually radicalize Jewish thought.⁴

A second trend is well represented by intellectual historians of modern Europe, and is especially in evidence in Susannah Heschel’s incisive work. While this field acknowledges that Jews significantly reproduced colonial discourses such as Orientalism, it also recognizes the way in which certain Jewish circles creatively interacted, re-imagined, and sometimes even initiated the discourse, employing it to critique the West and not merely as a racial construction of an imagined East. The field thus criticizes narrow interpretations and insists that what Postcolonialism may disregard as a colonial discourse can in certain instances be better construed as a European Jewish subversion of colonial narratives.⁵ Critical theorists, moreover, have complemented the work of intellectual historians. Daniel Boyarin and Sander Gilman, just to name two leading voices, consider post-Saidian developments of the field. They further explore not only the possibilities but also the limitations of Jewish discourses especially in central locations like the United States, Europe, and Israel. Such historical and cultural critiques challenge many presuppositions of both Jewish studies and Postcolonial theory.⁶

These two scholarly trajectories have fundamentally different objectives. Consider Shohat’ and Heschel’s contributions. The former represents a dialogical qualification of several major tenants present from the outset of the field while the latter is a thoroughgoing criticism of some of these central locations. Putting both projects in dialogue is productive as it enables an opportunity and the formulation of one question. In combination these critiques bear witness to the existence of innumerable Jewish experiences—sometimes in overt rivalry with one another—that can be re-analyzed and/or unveiled by one of the most provocative fields of current scholarship. The tension between the two proposals, moreover, invites us to consider whether current Postcolonial studies is the only framework within which to study the decolonial features of modern Jewish thought. The fact is that even Shohat, a pioneer in the study of Jewish Orientalization, is of the most lucid critics of contemporary developments of the field.⁷ This book, deeply influenced by recent studies of Jewish resistance, intends to offer a complementary locus of analysis. There exist a set of decolonial frameworks that, for conceptual and historical reasons, offer another illuminating platform to investigate overlooked resistances to racial re-classifications.

This book seeks to complement the contributions made by Anglophone Postcolonialism. This branch of the field will be crucial for this project. For example, I will mobilize English-speaking sources to explain modern racialization in the next chapter and to illuminate the limits of Jewish decolonial discourses toward the end of the book. Nevertheless, to explore my core interest, the formulation of a Jewish decolonialism, the reader will find limited references to well-known categories employed by contemporary Postcolonialists including, for example, Homi Bhabha’s hybridity and Gayatri Spivak’s subalternity. In its place, and influenced by other Jewish resistances, she will find alternative categories such as pensamiento fronterizo, filosofía de Liberación and especially barbare (border thinking, philosophy of liberation, and barbarism) developed by intellectuals such as Walter Mignolo, Aime Cesaire, and Enrique Dussel.

My decision to draw from conceptual frameworks and terminology at the intersection of Hispanophone and Francophone decolonialisms is inspired by the very Jewish theorists I detail in this book.⁸ During the period of my study (late 1940s to late 1980s) some Jewish decolonizers grounded their programs in a thoroughgoing engagement with Spanish- and French-speaking decolonialists. If Tunisian Jew Albert Memmi was influenced by the Afro-Caribbean thought of Cesaire, Lithuanian Jew Emmanuel Levinas changed his perspectives on decolonization after his engagement with the thought of Latin American Dussel. It is precisely the historical encounter between Spanish- and French-speaking Postcolonialism and Jewish thought that enables some Jews to offer a programmatic resistance against their re-classification as a Western population. And it is in this very tradition that Decolonial Judaism is located.

Barbaric Encounters

Most of the conceptually and theoretically innovative work I cite above is born of dialogue. Memmi encountered Cesaire in the 1950s, Levinas meet with Dussel in the 1970s. As a young scholar in the early 2000s, I was part of another encounter. I was visiting for the first time the University of California, Berkeley—not far from the location twenty-five years earlier Said had written Orientalism. During a conference, the leading Latin American decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo challenged me with an intriguing question. “What language does the barbaric Jew speak?” I paused before answering the question, reflecting about why a scholar deeply sensitive to the geo-politics of racialization was relating Jews with barbarism, commonly associated with seditious perversion and rejection of rationality. What at first seemed like a confusing question succeeded in penetrating the very essence of a lengthy and overlooked collaboration between Jewish theoreticians and Spanish/French Postcolonial theorists: the re-appropriation of barbarism.

Mignolo belongs to a provocative tradition of decolonizers who problematize the regnant dualisms of imperial discourses, and reinvest traditionally pejorative terms with positive valences. While Western thought defines the barbarian by her/his incapacity to achieve rationality, the barbarian herself/himself affirms that there is an alternative to the monopolistic rationality of civilization. This affirmation affords the barbarian an epistemological advantage defined as a double register. She/he is acquainted with regnant understandings of civilizational rationality given that it was imposed on the colonized as the only acceptable framework of thought. But her/his experience within her/his community enables the barbarian not only to understand the dark outcomes of the system’s rationality but also to imagine alternatives that arise from discarded thinking. This critical engagement with her/his double register is what constitutes Mignolo’s conception of “barbaric thinking.” The South American semiologist, who in his work Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) identified a large number of Jews as barbarians, was simply challenging me to discern the barbaric alternatives within Judaism that meaningfully confront Western rationality.⁹

“Aramaic!” I belatedly concluded without knowing I was not the first to answer the question. For Aramaic was the language of rabbinical literature, which was predominantly written during moments in which Jews faced imperial subjugation, forced to accept the tragedy and humiliation of exile. Given these cultural and political circumstances, rabbinical texts exhibit a deep knowledge of host imperial nations and bear witness to the Jewish struggle to retain its local distinctiveness and particularity. They react to what they experienced as the repressive behavior of ruling societies by emphasizing ethical community living and theological metaphors to articulate an alternative power that surpasses that which oppresses them. Jews write with a double register when confronting their subjugation and re-claiming their community as an alternative source of rationality. Aramaic, I argued then, furnished a compelling paradigm for Jewish barbaric theorizing.¹⁰

A few hours later, however, another conversation partner would articulate an alternative to my formulation. “I start from [Biblical] Hebrew,” Dussel, the prolific and influential founder of the school of Liberation Philosophy explained. While Athens and Jerusalem have served as symbols of two antithetical modalities (i.e., reason and faith) for over two millennia, Dussel expanded this notion beyond the symbolic to encompass language itself. For while these Greek imperial categories, developed and elaborated by conquistadors, preempted the possibility of “slave emancipation,” Biblical Hebrew, a vocabulary developed by the vanquished, enabled “the possibility of the revolution of the poor.” To philosophize from Latin America, a continent of “colonized, humiliated, and dependent” peoples, it was necessary to begin with the categories developed by the historically defeated who were symbolically represented by Jerusalem. Dussel, who uses conceptual categories of Biblical Hebrew in his seminal Filosofía de la Liberación and Etica de la Liberación (1973 and 1988), told me he learned the power of this language while working as a laborer among Christian Palestinians in Israel/Palestine in the 1960s. He further extended his decolonial orientation after encountering Levinas, a Talmudic interpreter who—as we shall see later—refers to the rabbinical Aramaic text as “Hebrew.” Dussel added that the orientation of Levinas and the biblical Hebraic categories enabled him to start elaborating a “barbaric philosophy.”¹¹

While Medieval Aramaic guaranteed the continuity of Jewish barbarism, Biblical Hebrew represented the Jewish influence on other barbarians. What impressed me was not Mignolo’ and Dussel’s alternative formulations; what I found particularly striking was their underlying similarity. Both Spanish-speaking intellectuals—one a semiologist and one a philosopher, one living in the United States and the other in Latin America—considered the Jewish people among the colonized. Jews not only belonged to the underside of history, but the interrelation between them and other racialized collectives seemed to find a natural point of convergence in the decolonial re-appropriation of barbarism. Here were two leading Latin American decolonialists who not only found a place for Jews within their frameworks but also associated them with the barbaric resistance.

Spanish-speaking decolonizers, however, were neither the first to re-appropriate the concept of barbarism nor the only ones to relate it with Judaism. Before the flowering of Postcolonial theory in the English-speaking world, the French-speaking decolonialism in the Maghreb and the Afro-Caribbean had made the connection. Both Albert Memmi and a Cesarian influenced Frantz Fanon considered Jewish life to be an experience deeply affected by discourses of colonization.

Early in the post-war process of decolonization, Memmi became a leading voice in this emerging field, publishing the well-known Portrait du colonisé, précédé du portrait du colonisateur (1957). In addition, his abiding interest in Judaism led him to write his landmark Portrait d’un Juif (1961) and Juifs et Arabes (1974). His early autobiographical novel, La statue de sel (1953), considered the affinity between Jewish identity and decolonial epistemologies. The novel’s Jewish protagonist, Mordechai Benillouche, offers a particularly penetrating observation. He attempted to achieve a Western conversion but soon discovered he could only engage in mimicry because he was “a native in a colonial country, a Jew in an anti-Semite universe, and an African in a world dominated by Europe.” He follows this reflection with an acknowledgment of a “self-evident truth.” When he faces the Western and non-Western identities, those “ancient and monotonous melodies” of his Jewish African quarter and “all the great music of Europe,” he cannot help himself in feeling “far more deeply” for his “African” Judaism. He has, then, no option but to declare himself an “incurable barbarian.”¹² As an alternative to later deconstructivist Postcolonialism, an Arab Jew identified himself with a barbaric decolonial aesthetic, challenging preconceived cultural conceptions of colonial European universalism.

This identification of Jews with geo-political challenges was thus accomplished by Jews themselves as well as by some of the most iconic figures of the French-speaking decolonial struggle. In Algeria, for instance, the Martinican social psychologist Frantz Fanon discerns a natural af...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   The Past Was Worse (and We Miss It)
• 1 Jewish Thought, Postcolonialism, and Decoloniality: The Geo-Politics of a Barbaric Encounter
• 2 The Narrative of Barbarism: Western Designs for a Globalized North
• 3 Negative Barbarism: Marxist Counter-Narrative in the Provincial North
• 4 Transitional Barbarism: Levinass Counter-Narrative and the Global South
• 5 Positive Barbarism: Memmis Counter-Narrative in a Southern Network
• 6 Barbaric Paradoxes: Zionism from the Standpoint of the Borderlands
• 7 After 9/11: New Barbarism and the Legacies in the Global South
• Epilogue   Duped by Jewish Suffering (Analectical Interjections)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index