On Postmodernism, Nationhood, and This Whole Antisemitism Business

“Hannah was standing by the window, the letter in her hand. She looked, suddenly, immensely, unutterably weary and as old as one of the mourning, black-clad women in the Cossack-haunted village of her youth. And indeed the hideous thing that had crept out from beneath Muriel’s honeyed, conventional phrases was as old, as inescapable, as time itself.”

Eva Ibbotson, The Secret Countess (2007); formerly published as A Countess Below Stairs (1981)¹

 

Jerusalem. Was there ever a more contested city?

My secondary school sometimes used to send little crews of supposedly Gifted and Talented students on day trips to special themed workshops and symposia. One such day trip took me to a Religious Studies conference in Cambridge, which would arguably have made a nice bit of foreshadowing were my life story being told in some sort of (very dull) novel.² It was at said conference that I was first introduced to the concept of postmodernism, as opposed to earlier modernism, as opposed to earlier medievalism.

To paint these three waves of western thought in very broad and slightly playful strokes, the general thrust of medievalism was: God knows best, and by extension the institutionalised Church knows best; your lot in life is divinely ordained, so just show your due loyalty to the authorities set over you and don’t ask too many questions. Then cue the Age of Enlightenment, and people went, no more rotting in blind faith and ignorance for us; we’re going to work to rationally understand the truth about the universe, and the more we understand, the more we’ll be able to achieve, and human civilisation is going to progress and improve, shedding what in it is old and redundant and mistaken, into an increasingly glorious future (that’s modernism). Then two world wars happened, and people went, gosh, all that all that human progress and achievement did was basically just make us even better at doing horrible things to one another: maybe there’s not so much in this whole rational-truth business after all. Hence postmodernism, which is all about how truth doesn’t really exist and everything’s subjective and there’s no grand arc of progress running through history and everything’s a social construct.

And each of these three waves of thought has been accompanied by its own concordant brand of antisemitism.

Jewishness is rather a multifaceted identity. On one level, it’s a religious identity; on another, it’s an ancestral, genetic, or ‘racial’ identity; on another, it’s a community identity, a people-group. These identities are obviously related, and they tend to overlap, but it’s only actually necessary to tick one of the boxes to be feasibly counted as Jewish. For instance, I read an article yesterday written by an irreligious Jew who had converted to Judaism in order to marry a Jewish lady; so he only really ticks box three, but he’s still definitely Jewish.³ This, as a bit of a side note, is why it’s insufficient merely to lump antisemitism together with other forms of racism and express a blanket opposition to them all: just as there’s more going on in Jewish identity than merely ‘race’, so there’s more going on in antisemitism than merely racism, and it therefore has to be dealt with as a distinct phenomenon.

Back to our three waves of western thought, then, and let’s do some matching up. Old-fashioned medieval antisemitism basically took issue with the religious aspect of Jewish identity: you lot rejected your own Messiah, so now God’s rejected you,⁴ and that means we reject you too, and will probably do all sorts of unpleasant things to you – unless you convert to Christianity (i.e. abandon your Jewish religious identity), in which case, all good. This, of course, makes perfect sense in the context of medievalist thought: submitting to the Church and other authorities representative of divine will equals Good, not doing so equals Bad. Then scoot forward to the modernist period, where the pursuit of science, rationality, and the progress of civilisation eventually birthed social darwinism and human eugenics, together with a brand of antisemitism that basically took issue with the ancestral/genetic/‘racial’ aspect of Jewish identity: you lot are inherently an inferior type of human and our nice civilised society could really do without you in order to progress into this glorious future we’re pretty sure is a thing. This, of course, is the category that the antisemitic activities of the Nazis fall under.

Do you see what I’m getting at? Antisemitism springs up in whichever form most readily aligns with the fashionable ideas of the time.⁵ Those fashionable ideas aren’t necessarily wrong in themselves, not at the core – ‘obey God’ isn’t a wrong principle; ‘search for truth’ isn’t a wrong principle – but, layer on layer on layer of deduced inferences away from that core, they do lend themselves to particular sets of wrong conclusions. They justify particular forms of antisemitism according to premises that sound good and commendable to contemporary ears.

It’s no different in the present day. People don’t tend to fall for medievalist, religious antisemitism any more, nor for modernist, ‘racial’ antisemitism, because they don’t subscribe to the relevant worldviews any more; but postmodernism comes with its own brand of antisemitism, one that takes issue with the people-group aspect of Jewish identity.

Postmodernism doesn’t really believe in nationhood. The idea that a people-group with a shared history and culture should be able to inhabit a defined chunk of land and govern itself, just isn’t a very ‘in’ one right now. The idea of a people-group’s shared history, says postmodernism, is questionable, probably mostly agenda-driven myths told by the traditional elite; the idea of a people-group’s shared culture (which is probably entrenched in patriarchy, by the way) is exclusivising and implies that some cultures must be better than others. The differences between people-groups are social constructs. National borders are social constructs. Everything is a blooming social construct. Reputable scholars argue that national sovereignty wasn’t really a thing before the Peace of Westphalia in 1648;⁶ they argue that the tying together of a people-group and its land is a concept born out of the modern era.⁷ And I’m like, guys, have you ever opened a copy of, say, the Hebrew Bible at all? Because even if you don’t affirm the historicity of the events described therein, there’s no denying the authors’ preoccupation with the notion of a particular people-group, with a shared history and culture, inhabiting a defined chunk of land and governing itself.⁸

But no, according to postmodernism, nations are a totally imaginary invention of the modernist era. And wouldn’t it be nice, it adds, if we could leave them in the dust along with it? Wouldn’t it be nice if our present world of globalism and internationalism was globalised and internationalised further, to the point where the borders were no more and we just got on with one another as humans, without drawing all these self/other lines that always seem to cause so much conflict and suffering?

Because the present, postmodernist wave of western thought has that sort of an ideal-to-aim-for in the back of its mind, it’s therefore really not keen on prioritising the principle of national sovereignty. And of course, that in itself isn’t at all antisemitic, any more than the principle of obeying the Church, or that of seeking human progress, is antisemitic; but, like they did, it provides a way for a particular brand of antisemitism to make itself look acceptable to the fashionable thinkers of the age. Namely, it has become acceptable in certain circles to deny the Jewish people-group its right to self-determination.

Let me clarify. It’s not antisemitic to say, I think such-and-such an action taken by the Israeli government was a morally wrong decision. It’s not antisemitic to say, I think such-and-such an aspect of the manner in which the modern state of Israel was set up was a morally wrong decision. It is antisemitic to say, I think the mere existence of a Jewish nation-state is a morally wrong decision – ‘Israel is a racist endeavour’, or however you want to put it. That amounts to saying, the Jews, as a people-group, didn’t ought to exist – just as medievalists said, the Jews, as a religious community, didn’t ought to exist; and modernists said, the Jews, as a ‘race’, didn’t ought to exist. In every case, the point was made to sound acceptable by its alignment with the fashionable ideas of the time. In every case, an awful lot of people fell for it.

Please don’t fall for it. Just because today’s antisemitism doesn’t look quite the same as yesterday’s, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still antisemitism.

Footnotes

¹ The Secret Countess is one of my favourite books and you should totally read it: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Eva-Ibbotson/The-Secret-Countess/16135626. I wrote a post about it a couple of years ago: ‘Thoughts on Love 3: Susie Rabinovitch Syndrome’, under October 2015 in my blog archives. Also, PS, Eva Ibbotson very much knows what she’s on about when it comes to antisemitism, because she was from an Austrian Jewish family that fled abroad when Hitler came to power: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8086363/Eva-Ibbotson.html.

² Because I’m now reading for a PhD in a Theology & Religion department, is the joke there.

³ This was the article in question: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-09-06/times2/i-converted-to-judaism-when-i-married-and-discovered-what-antisemitism-feels-like-l5mmvxj63.

⁴ Clearly none of them had read the epistle to the Romans very carefully: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+11&version=ESVUK. “I say, then, surely God has rejected his people? By no means!/Not at all!/No way!/God forbid!/however else you want to translate μὴ γένοιτο.”

⁵ That’s not to say it doesn’t also manifest in other forms among certain communities at any given time, but as I say, I’m dealing in broad strokes here.

⁶ I was taught something along such lines in my second year at university. Here’s what the Encyclopaedia Britannica has to say about it: https://www.britannica.com/event/Peace-of-Westphalia.

⁷ I couldn’t find the video I really wanted to link to, but this one makes a pretty similar point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ark8cRiSw&t=96s. Like, it’s not as if everything about what the guy’s saying is totally factually inaccurate, but look at the way the story’s told: postmodernism is as eager to throw off the narratives and values of modernism as modernism was to throw off the narratives and values of medievalism.

⁸ Like, go and read the stuff about the allotment of land in Joshua 13-20, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Joshua+13&version=ESVUK, and then try to tell me that nobody before the modern era was particularly interested in national borders.