Abstract
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 com- mon set of patterns of domination applying analogous tropes and ste- reotypes 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 dis- placement and/or annihilation. During this period, Jews from around the world wrote penetrating accounts confronting the existential condi- tions 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.
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Notes
Edward Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” in The Question of Palestine (New York: Random House, 1992), 77–78 and Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), xxiv.
A revision of Orientalism in a framework of Jewish studies can be found in Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar, eds., Orientalism and the Jews (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004). Other works in the field of Jewish Postcolonial studies that pay special attention to the racialization of Jews and the Jewish racialization of others in literature, anthropology, history, and sociology include Brian Cheyette and Laura Marcus, eds., Modernity, Culture and the Jew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Rebecca Stein, Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Aziza Khazzom, “The Great Chain of Orientalism: Jewish Identity, Stigma Management and Ethnic Exclusion in Israel,” American Sociological Review 68.4 (2003): 481–510.
Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35. Another complementary trend in the field is Yehuda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion and Ethnicity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minessota Press, 1992) and Gil Anidjar, The Arab, the Jew: History of an Enemy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 19–21. See also Jonathan Hess, Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2002), 13–15. This later trend have gone beyond intellectual history and included philosophers who understand European Jewish thought as an opportunity to challenge the relation between global Jewry and Israel. One of these examples (but in contraposition to the trend questioning Said) is Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) and Sander Gilman, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories and Identities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In collaboration with the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town, Gilman has extended his superb critique to other locations. See Sander Gilman and Milton Shain, eds., Jewries at the Frontier: Accomodation, Identity, Conflict (Campaign: University of Illinois Press: 1999). I would like to thank a lively conversation I shared with Prof. Shain about this topic when his center and the department of religious studies hosted me during a visit to UCT in 2009.
Ella Shohat, “Notes on the Post-Colonial,” Social Texts 31/32 (1992): 99–113.
Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 209–303. This tradition, in Latin America and the Caribbean, includes works such as Rodolfo Kutsch, La seducción de la barbarie (Buenos Aires: Raigal, 1953); Leopoldo Zea, Discurso desde la marginación y la barbarie (Barcelona: Anthopos, 1987); and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Algunos usos de civilización y barbarie (La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 2003).
See also Enrique Dussel, “Autopercepción Intelectual de un Procesor Histórico,” Anthropos 3 (1998): 13–36.
Albert Memmi, La statue de sel (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 145. Edouard Roditti, trans., The Pillar of Salt (New York: Beacon Press, 1992), 165.
Aime Cesaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1955),
John Pinkham, trans., Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 36.
Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 98. Charles Markmann, trans., Black Skin/White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 122.
See a description of the oscillation in Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 143.
See Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-System, ” International Journal of Comparative Sociology XXIV (1983): 100–107.
This reflection is based on Enrique Dussel, “La colonialidad del saber,” Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas, in Edgardo Lander, ed. (Buenos Aires: Clacso 2000), 41–53.
An alternative reading of this assertion that associates Christian supressionism with Jewish irremidibility can be seen in Jonathan Boyarin, The Uncoverted Self: Jews, Indians and the identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 137–138.
See the collective sustaining this narrative in Mabel Morana, et al., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). One of the few exceptions within Anglophone Postcolonialism who sets an early beginning of modernity is Jamaican cul-tural theorist Stuart Hall. See Hall, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (New York: Blackwell, 1996), 7–10. I would suggest the same may be inferred reading the Arab Jewish challenge to Jewish history offered by Ella Shohat in “Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine and, Arab-Jews,” in Taboo, Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006): 201–206.
A deep understanding of the generation of the laws in Spain and the extension beyond the metropolis can be found in Maria Elena Martinez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 25–41 and 173–199.
For the return of identity see the work of Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the Inquisition in the Fifteen Century (New York: Random House, 1995), 975–980 and The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–4. I must confess I feel uncomfortable employing a “Zionist revisionist” political historiographer (and father of two national Israeli figures including a cur-rent prime minister) to justify a decolonial reading of Judaism. I would like to think this is one of the few times that the polar critiques of mainstream readings help in the construction of a new perspective. But I believe it is fair to acknowledge this ideological tension of my work and return to this problem in my epilogue.
Mignolo, “Dispensable and Bare Lives: Coloniality and the Hidden Political/Economy Agenda of Modernity,” Human Architecture 2.7 (2009): 77.
Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” Nepantla: Views from the South 1.3 (2000): 533–580.
Enrique Dussel, “Para una fundamentación filosófica de la liberación Latinoamericana,” in Liberación latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas, Enrique Dussel and Daniel E. Guillot, eds. (Buenos Aires: Bonum, 1975), 8.
A previous employment of conceptual Jewish counter-narratives can be found in Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
The sociology of Jewish knowledge was explored for pre-Holocaust intellectuals by Michael Lowy, Redemption et Utopie: Le Judaisme libertarie en Europe central (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1988), 7–9. Hope Heaney, trans., Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 2–3.
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© 2014 Santiago Slabodsky
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Slabodsky, S. (2014). Jewish Thought, Postcolonialism, and Decoloniality: The Geo-Politics of a Barbaric Encounter. In: Decolonial Judaism. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137345837_2
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