'The Despised Blood of the Negro Flows Freely in the Veins of Jews'
Exploring antisemitism and colonial racisms; their connections, and ruptures.
I’m deeply influenced by Monique Wittig’s 1980 essay One is Not Born a Woman. The division between men and women and the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ themselves, Wittig argues, do not emerge out of nature or biology: they are symptoms of the oppression of women. This premise leads to a shocking conclusion:
…what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an ‘imaginary formation’ which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. They are seen black, therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore, they are women. But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way.
As French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir posited: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”.
This blew my little brain wide open when I read it in my early twenties. Of course, different bodies do different things: more specifically, there are two binary functions in sexual reproduction. But it is out of the need to control, and exploit, women’s role in sexual reproduction that these functions are reified into gender. Gender bounds the capabilities of our bodies and minds. It defines our social identity; our perception of, and relationship to, others; our aspirations and destinies. Gender situates us politically and economically, structuring our lives to be maximally profitable to those with wealth and power. None of this is natural; none of it is compelled by biology; none of it is pre-supposed by one role or another in sexual reproduction.
Workers make bosses wealthy. But who makes workers? Women. Social reproduction - the birthing and raising of workers - is prior to work. Without it, there is no labour force. Controlling social reproduction, therefore, is essential to the reproduction of wealth and power. Forced pregnancies, coerced sexual relationships, and rape controlled the social reproduction of slaves; guaranteeing the accumulation of plantation wealth. But control also exists at the level of our making as social beings. ‘Woman’ is constructed with a single mission, a sole reason for her existence, the task which every fibre of her being is crafted so perfectly to perform: create babies, raise workers.
So, the materialist feminist analysis goes, bodies have always existed, ‘man’ and ‘woman’ have not. Wittig summarises:
…by admitting that there is a ‘natural’ division between women and men, we naturalize history, we assume that men and women have always existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible.
Not Skin Deep
Materialist feminism gave me early access to the idea that race, too, might have its origins in systems of control and wealth accumulation, not biology. This led me to what some see as an unusual conclusion; if race is a product of social engineering that emerges through relations of domination, then racism it is not inherently bounded by any particular skin colour, or hair texture, or facial feature. Given the right circumstances, any set of bodily features can be used to construct, and re-imagine, a subservient racial group.
In some progressive quarters once your skin colour and bodily features grade too close to being classically ‘European’, you cannot experience racism. It’s as if putting pale skin under a microscope reveals a gene that reads ‘cannot, under any circumstances, be racialised as other’. According to this view, the ideologies that buttressed the Holocaust, or colonisation of Ireland, are entirely ontologically distinct to that of slavery, or the colonisation of the Caribbean or India. Why? Because the victims of the latter tended to have more melanin in their skin than the victims of the former.
This was the thinking behind Whoopie Goldberg’s infamous gaff, where she confidently declared the Holocaust was “not about race” and was actually about “two groups of white people” beefing. Aside from being a crass and ignorant understanding of antisemitism that veers into denialism, it accepts the core premise of racial essentialism. By rooting the experience of oppression in the immobility of bodily features, as opposed to foregrounding our analysis in the structure of the material world, we accept the racists’ first premise: that race, and the humiliations and degradations it comes with, are an immutable fact about our bodies.
That the social construction of race is almost completely mystified by the myth of racial biology is exemplified by W. E. B. Du Bois, a giant of Black intellectualism, admitting that he didn’t truly understand race until he visited the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto in 1949. In The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto he writes:
[Racism] was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly a hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery. It was not merely a matter of religion. I had seen religions of many kinds - I had sat in the Shinto temples of Japan, in the Baptist churches of Georgia, in the Catholic cathedral of Cologne and in Westminster Abbey. No, the race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status and was a matter of cultural patterns, perverted teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men. So that the ghetto of Warsaw helped me to emerge from a certain social provincialism into a broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become if civilization was going to triumph and broaden in the world.
Race is the voracious pursuit of wealth, power, and control branded onto our bodies. Our racialised bodies are used thereafter to justify, reproduce, and naturalise the reality of oppression - and its concomitant brutalities. The animalistic Negro. The greedy Jew. The violent Irishman. The thieving Gypsy. It’s all remarkably unoriginal; rehashed and repurposed for different groups, at different points in history.
From Middle Man to Middle Passage
Up until the eleventh century Jews had a comparatively tolerable position in Western Europe, where their primary profession as merchants trading between Europe and the wider world allowed them to become a relatively prosperous group. Eventually, Western European economies began a shift away from producing commodities for local consumption, to producing commodities for global exchange. The development of a Christian commercial class, occurring parallel with new forms of anti-Jewish religious and political persecution, led to Jews being progressively excluded from this economic position. In The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation Jewish Trotskyist theorist Abram Leon explained:
From this period on, the situation of the Jews in the cities of Western Europe is definitely compromised.
Simultaneously, the interplay between the rigidness of feudal society and antisemitism meant Jews were also excluded from upwardly mobile positions. Over time, Jews in Western Europe were forced into usury, or money lending. But the poor resented usury. Christians were condemned for being associated with it, and were actively barred from directly participating. Though usury was a scorned occupation, it remained an essential function of the economy at the time. Jews not only had to contend with religious persecution, but were also now dominant in a profession that inspired deep contempt.
What Abram Leon’s economic analysis doesn’t account for is how over the next few centuries antisemitism developed from sporadic and uneven religious persecution, to Jews being constructed, and oppressed, as a racial underclass outside of whiteness. This occurred through the ruling classes positioning Jews as both an economic and ideological buffer. Jews were the face behind which the Christian ruling classes hid, while usury extracted money that lined the coffers of the royal treasury. And when calamity hit, like during the Black Death, the propertied classes could always rely on stoking old Christian hatreds to scapegoat the Jews.
This buffer position would have devastating consequences. Tensions between Jews and the nobility grew, due to the latter’s dispossession from unsustainable debts. The 1189 massacre of Jews in London was instigated and encouraged by the embittered nobility. The Exchequer of the Jews (yes, this was real) recorded every debt handled by Jews, ensuring each debt generated tax for the royal treasury. Though the royals were invested in the activities of Jews, they benefited enormously from antisemitism. After antisemitic massacres the assets of dead Jews were seized for the royal treasury. Periodically Jews would be expelled, have their assets seized, and then charged hefty sums for the privilege of returning. Antisemitism was big business.
During the Enlightenment racial pseudo-science made antisemitism a respectable intellectual pursuit, not just the hobby of angry mobs: that Jews were ‘greedy’, ‘untrustworthy’, ‘scheming’, and ‘power hungry’ was the expression of essence, the true nature of the Jew. It’s also during this time the idea that Jews were genetically related to Negros, and had Negro blood running through their veins, proliferated amongst racialists. Jews had become a race, cast outside of whiteness; less civilised and less human, therefore less entitled to rights and freedoms. Antisemitism was so pervasive, so seductive, it found a home even in the class consciousness of the developing proletariat: Jews were capitalism, so antisemitism was socialism.
As Rachel Shabi highlights in Off White: The Truth About Antisemitism the racialisation, dehumanisation and scapegoating of Jews in Europe was recycled, and expanded, as a framework for rationalising colonialism and slavery. We can think of colonial racism, then, as an export of European antisemitism:
Racism doesn’t translate word for word, pigment for pigment. It targets different minority groups in different ways, but it echoes as it travels, morphing and adapting to the requirements of those in power.
And there they were - the white, European, Christian ruling classes - everywhere in the world, lapping up the riches of race.
Ruptures, and Connections
There has always been an intimate connection between antisemitism and anti-Black racism. In Hitler’s 1928 second book he praises Jim Crow for it’s integration of racial hierarchy and segregation within the legal system of a supposed democracy. The Nazis modelled aspects of the antisemitic 1935 Nuremburg laws after Jim Crow.
The 1904 Namibian genocide was a petri dish for the eugenicist ideology and annihilationist tactics later used in the Holocaust. In Namibia, Germans set up concentration camps where they performed horrific experiments on captives; subjected them to forced labour; and starved them to death. Even the personnel overlapped: Eugen Fischer conducted experiments on the skulls of Namibians, before later becoming an influential member of the Nazi party.
In the UK, the 1971 Immigration Act, as Nadine El-Enany points out in (B)ordering Britain, banned non-white immigration to the UK:
…those exempted from control under the 1971 Act were primarily those born in Britain or with a parent born in Britain, thereby linking the right to enter Britain to whiteness… In 1971 a person born in Britain was most likely (98%) to be white.
This built on the principle of racial exclusion first pioneered by the 1905 Aliens Act, which specifically targeted poor Jews fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe.
This connected history has, many times, led to joint struggle: from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union bringing Jewish and Black women together on the picket line, to the antifascist victory of Cable Street where the East End working class beat back the Metropolitan Police and the British Union of Fascists. But there have, alongside this, been ruptures.
In a bid to rehabilitate its moral image after the industrial slaughter of Jews during Holocaust, and restrictive immigration policies that largely prevented Jews from seeking refuge in Europe and the US, the West fabricated the idea of a ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’. As we have seen, this so-called tradition consists almost entirely of Christians persecuting Jews. But this re-frame granted eligible European and American Jews entry into whiteness for the first time, giving some Jews access to the material and psychological wages of whiteness. This birthed a new mode of divide and rule, where Jews were held up as the model minority against which others were judged, and denigrated.
In what was both a seminal and controversial essay, James Baldwin elucidates the impact of this assimilation on Black and Jewish relations:
In the American context, the most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man--for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America, and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro's understanding. It increases the Negro's rage.
When it’s pointed out that the mainstream media and politicians of today give preferential treatment to Jews and antisemitism, over other forms of racism, this isn’t imagined. It is a product of revisionism, the West re-appraising its relationship to a sordid history of racial violence and exploitation in service of fortifying the latest iteration: Islamophobia.
But there is something more specific going on. When ICE kidnaps a Palestinian organiser, Mahmoud Khalil, and the White House tweets out ‘Shalom, Mahmoud’ with promises to expand attacks on migrants, do you not recognise an eery resemblance to the positioning of the medieval Jew? When Palestine freedom marches are decried as no-go-zones for Jews as a pretext for expanding an authoritarian crackdown on protest and free speech, is it not the case the Jew is once again being positioned between ruler and ruled, between oppressor and oppressed? When boycotts and divestments are disparaged as antisemitic, and banned to protect wealth and business interests, does the Jew not remain the buffer? Is this not, simply, the old antisemitism repurposed in a post-Holocaust world?
I’d like to return to Monique Wittig. What is striking about reading a materialist feminist critique of gender today is the realisation that something once well illuminated can so quickly be cast back into the dark. The gender essentialism feminists once buried, has risen from the grave, and become re-animated in the body of the anti-trans moral panic. Without being overly romantic, there was a time when liberation politics had a much better understanding of antisemitism. There was a time when movements against racism were much more integrated with each other. There was a time when solidarity reigned, and we showed up much more readily for each other. Is it not time, once again, to find our way out of the dark?
Finally got round to reading this. Absolutely fascinating
Phenomenal essay, thank you!