Back to Antisemitism and Genocide
it can not be conceived that someone would fight one kind of racism while at the same time defending the perpetration of genocide and other war crimes and crimes against humanity agains other groups
Sometime ago I had published the text below under the title “Genocide and Antisemitism”.
Its subject-matter continues to be relevant, or is even more so now than it was at the time. For this reason, an also because older publications are only visible to paying subscribers, I have decided to go back to the text and publish it again with just a complementary introduction.
Shylock and his true words
In Shakespeare's “The Merchant of Venice”, Shylock, the Jew, says in his powerful monologue:1
I am a Jew… Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that…
I like immensely this statement on the equality of all human beings and I notice, with some irony, how every Palestinian child could utter the exact same defying words in the face of the Israeli killing machine.
Later in the play, as he resists all calls for mercy, Shylock says:
What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong? You have among you many a purchased slave, which, like asses and your dogs and mules, you use in abject and in slavish parts, because you bought them - shall I say to you, let them be free, marry them to you heirs? Why sweat they under burthens? let their beds be made as soft as yours, and let their palates be seasoned with such viands? You will answer, 'The slaves are ours.”
As he affirms that the pound of flesh to which he is entitled by contract is as much his as the slaves were their owners', Shylock reminds us that, despite their human equality, there were among men those who could be, and were, free, and those who could be, and were indeed, enslaved, sold and bought.
Shylock himself could not be made a slave, even though, as a Jew, he could not enjoy all the rights and prerogatives that were reserved for Christians…
I don't mean to dive too deep into the interpretation of Shakespeare's text or into the consideration of the historical contexto of XVI century Venice.
I only wish to use these images to refer to an idea a friend once inspired in me: the idea that Jews in Europe could be seen as “the other within”, meaning that, they concomitantly belonged and remained somewhat strangers…
I, a semite…
Let's start with this: I am a semite. Or rather, if anyone in this world can be a semite, then I am a semite.
I don't mean by this that I am a descendent of Sem, the son of Noah, who, frankly speaking, I am not sure ever really existed.
In reality, being the a descendent of peasants, I have no coat of arms or genealogy tree that would allow me to reconstruct with precision the family past, even if an invented one.
But, as far as the collective memory of my ancestry can reach we know ourselves to be Arabs and to speak Arabic.
As it is widely known, someone someday decided to classify the linguistic families and call the one that gathers the languages that had originated and were at some point spoken in the Middle East “semitic”. On the fact that the so-called semitic languages relate to each-other and that they originate in one same protolanguage there is no doubt. The name given to the linguistic family may make more or less sense, but it has been consecrated.
It is less certain that something that could be called “semitic peoples” exists, in the sense that they would all share a same genetic ancestry, whether descendent from a mythical Sem or not.
What does this mean, concretely?
The Arabic language, no matter who speaks it, continues to belong to the semitic linguistic family that puts in close relation with Hebrew or Aramaic. On the other hand, an examination of my DNA could demonstrate that, although I only have knowledge of my family's past as inhabiting Lebanon, in reality my older ancestry came from, let's say, Iran, which language, the Persian, belongs to another linguistic family.
A semitic identity, in genetic terms, therefore, is something the existence of which is uncertain, especially if thought of in terms of purity.
Then, when I say that if someone can be a semite I am certainly one, this means that, being descendent from a Lebanese family who has always spoken Arabic, I speak a semitic language and the probability that I am the descendent of peoples among which the semitic languages appeared is relatively greater.
Other may say the same as me, but I don't know if anyone could say more.
One should note that all this has nothing to do with the faith or religion that I may or may not embrace or practice; there are Arabs who speak Arabic who are Muslims, Christians, Jews…
Antisemitism
Someone, nearing the end of the 19th Century, conceived of the term “antisemitism” to refer to what was known then as “the hate of the Jews” and that could also be said “judeophobia".
The timing of the invention of the new term wouldn't be an accident; it related to the emergence in importance of the so-said scientific theories on races.
It was also the moment in which an old problem was the object of intense debates in Europe: the question of the integration of the European Jews in the societies they live in and their belonging to the emerging nacional identities.
The phenomenon of the hatred towards the Jews, in its specifically European - and then Western - shape, that took place in circumstances in which the Jews did, at the same time, belong to the European social fabric and were seen - and saw themselves - as being partly foreigners, started to be known as antisemitism.
I think I have read somewhere something that has suggested to me the following conclusion: calling the hatred towards Jews antisemitism was in itself a gesture of dislike for the Jews.
Adherence to a religious belief, judaism, became a racial identity, a genetically determined identity. The Jew could be European, even if hated because of his or her religious specificity, but the same could not be said of the “semite”.
The semite was not just the “other”; he was the inferior other, a barbarian, uncivilized, destined to colonial domination and exploration.
In other words, calling the Jew a semite meant, not only that he was an inferior European, but that he was as foreigner as the Arab, that he was no different or better than the Arab.
The racial reading of what was before a religious belonging has prevailed until the genocide of the European Jews during the Second World War.
Ironically and tragically the same biologic conception of the identity of the “Jewish People” has become the cornerstone of the State of Israel and its purported definition as the “Jewish State”.
Antisemitism, as hatred towards the Jews or judeophobia, whether the Jew is seen as the member of a religious group or as racially inferior - for being a semite - is as grave a phenomenon as any other kind of religious, racial or class prejudice.
Because I am not innocent or naif, I say that prejudice is part of human nature. And I say that what we may call a civilizational conquest is the understanding of the fact that we must fight our inclination towards prejudice.
While we can not - and should not, I believe - police feelings, we must combat all expressions of prejudice and the concretization of prejudice in discriminatory acts.
This is true for judeophobia, for racism, for islamophobia…
A discriminatory act may be worse than another, according to circumstances, but, if it is true that all human beings are equal in dignity and that all peoples - no matter how we understand the term - are deserving of the same respect, then there is no hierarchy between racisms and prejudices.
Antisemitism and Genocide
As grave as discriminatory behavior may be, I believe that, beyond any doubt, there are worse things.
Among these worse things is genocide. As a phenomenon, the destruction in whole or in part of a racial or ethnic group, and as a crime, perpetrated by individuals or by states, genocide should mobilize us and outrage us more than any other phenomenon or crime.
It is true that each one of us, as human beings, can see himself or herself as belonging to one group or another and, for that same reason, may be more sensitive to prejudice that attains us that to others. In the same manner, we can feel with more intensity a genocide that victimizes our group or a group to which we feel certain proximity, be it cultural, religious or ethnic.
That would be natural. However, if we really believe in the profound equality between human beings, we must know that there are no racism that is more or less grave than another, and also that there are no acceptable genocide while others would be unacceptable.
Thus, it is perfectly legitimate for a Jewish person, or for an institution that gathers and represents Jewish individuals, to have a special sensitivity to instances of judeophobia or antisemitism - in the consecrated sense of the word - and to fight specially against that type of prejudice.
Such sensitivity and such fight, however, may not take place, for logical as well as moral reasons, if at the same time one exercises prejudice and discrimination against other groups.
For even stronger reasons, it can not be conceived that someone would fight one specific kind of racism or discrimination while at the same time defending the perpetration of genocide and other war crimes and crimes against humanity which have other groups as victims.
Is in fact the foundation of our fight against antisemitism is to be found in the belief that all human beings are equal in dignity, there would be an unsurmountable contradiction in the defense of genocide.
This contradictory and, to my judgment, indecent, stance is, none the less, that of may individuals and institutions, in Brasil and all over the world.
And, what adds injury to the obscenity is that those people and institutions not only pretend to fight antisemitism at the same time that there are in fact defending the genocide of the Palestinians, but they are actually using the accusation of antisemitism against all those who denounce the genocide, as if to make the defense of the latter even more perfect.
The acts of genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians by Israel do not help the fight against antisemitism.
The unconditional support of certain individuals and institutions to Israel lead us to doubt the sincerity of their belief in the equality of all human beings.
The same unconditional support given by the West - specially by its governments - to Israel reveal that that same West has never believed its own lie about the universality of Human Rights…
The text is taken from the bilingual edition by Flammarion, Paris, 1994