Abstract
The task of this chapter is to provide some kind of a general conceptual and historical framework for thinking about the categories of “insiders” and “outsiders” and for rendering explicit some of the assumptions and problems regarding these notions that usually remain implicit in treatments of this subject.1 This is no easy assignment, for it would appear that “insiders” and “outsiders” are universal organizing categories. Societies, cultures, and individual as well as collective identities are constituted and function by dint of the fluid dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, by defining the conditions and content of “normalcy” and “abnormalcy,” by openly or tacitly invoking conditions of belonging and nonbelonging, through the setting up of often ironically unstable and permeable exits and entrances.2 For every in-group there will be those who are without, excluded.
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Notes
This piece, slightly revised in the present version, was originally written as the introduction to a volume (in honor of Ezra Mendelsohn), dedicated to an exploration of “insiders” and “outsiders” in modern East European Jewish history. See Richard I. Cohen, Jonathan Frankel, and Stefani Hoffman, eds., Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010).
The classic work by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), remains one of the most insightful general approaches to the question.
See William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 235. In the chapter in the present book, “The Ambiguous Political Economy of Empathy,” I provide a somewhat different perspective on the problem.
See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973);
also Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
See Shulamit Volkov’s “Excursus on Minorities in the Nation-State” in her Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Chapter 8.
See Simmel’s “The Stranger” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed., Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 402–408.
For a provocative discussion of these issues in general, and with regard to matters Jewish in particular, see Michael P. Steinberg’s impassioned plea against essentializing conceptions in his Judaism Musical and Unmusical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
For an interesting analysis of this condition see Rael Meyerowitz, Transferring to America: Jewish Interpretations of American Dreams (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), especially pp. 262–263.
See the introduction to David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susan Heschel, eds., Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 5.
See especially Mosse’s Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985).
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. xiv.
See, most prominently, George L. Mosse’s German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).
For a more popular treatment, see Frederic V. Grunfeld, Prophets without Honour: A Background to Freud, Kafka, Einstein and Their World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).
See Strauss’ preface to the English translation of his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), p. 24.
Thus Freud to members of the Viennese B’nai Brith, May 6, 1926. Quoted in Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 137.
Leszek Kolakowski, “In Praise of Exile” in his Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 56–57.
See Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003). The quotes are from p. 16 and p. 54 respectively. I am fully aware of the highly ideological and political charge contained in Said’s book. I am using this piece agnostically and as yet another example of the ways in which Jewish intellectuality, dual outsiderdom, and a certain cosmopolitanism have been linked. In critiquing Said’s advocacy of the non-Jewish Jew, a rather outraged Leon Wieseltier asks, “then why not the non-Palestinian Palestinian?” See his piece entitled “The Ego and the Yid,” The New Republic, April 7, 2003, p. 38. Said and Wieseltier represent diametrical opposites. The former insists upon denying and opposing “essentialized” identity while Wieseltier writes: “The Jews are not Europeans and they are not non-Europeans. They are Jews, an autonomous people with an autonomous history that had directed them, in different times and in different places, against their will and according to their will, toward certain peoples and away from certain peoples.” But for “outsiders” both “non-essentialist” and “autonomist” assumptions may be problematic and their choices in practice more gray, and less stark.
See Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), Chapter 2, “The Practice of Social Criticism,” especially pp. 35–40.
For a sensitive philosophical and historical treatment of these questions in general, see Jerzy Jedlicki, “Heritage and Collective Responsibility,” in Ian Maclean, Alan Montefiore, Peter Winch, eds., The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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© 2012 Steven E. Aschheim
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Aschheim, S.E. (2012). Reflections on Insiders and Outsiders. In: At the Edges of Liberalism. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002297_12
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