LA LABOR TRADUCTORA DE CONSTANTINO

a.

Research Question

The critical literature on law, religion, and race exposes law’s complicity in the construction and regulation of racial and religious difference, but it has paid little attention to the Jewish experience. While the studies by Didi Herman and Davina Cooper are a notable exception, in other work, Jews have often either been largely absent from analysis, acknowledged only as historical examples, or uncritically lumped together with the dominant group. On the other end of the spectrum, such as in the approach that Feldman takes, the relation between Jewish identity and law is reduced to Antisemitism, which, in turn, leaves little space for historical specificity. In this thesis, I aim to expand on this existing scholarship, while acknowledging both its contributions and limitations. Drawing on literature in the humanities, in history, literary, and Jewish studies and following the work of Davina Cooper and Didi Herman, I take an approach that is attentive to the particular nature of how Jewish difference is constructed.

My research question is this: How are Jews constructed in legal conflicts concerning practices that mark them as distinct? I approach this question through exploring, on the one hand, how legal discourse constructs Jews as different. What are the images, narratives, and rhetoric through which Jews are represented as different? Since different means always different from a norm, this is also an inquiry into the imagined ‘we’, from whom Jews are distinguished. Rather than approaching law as a set of abstract, neutral, and objective rules, I am interested in the identitarian dynamics running through legal encounters with those who are perceived as different. This thesis hereby builds on the insight of scholars such as David Nirenberg who highlight the centrality of the figure of ‘the Jew’ for the Western imagination in which Jews constituted the Other.104 _{Moreover, this thesis also explores} the tension around Jewish difference, which oscillates today between inclusion and exclusion and is evidenced by questions about Jewish whiteness or their belonging to the religious-cultural

103 _{Cooper and Herman, “Jews and Other Uncertainties: Race, Faith and English Law,” 341. Emphasis in} original.

104 _{David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York; London: WW Norton, 2013). On} Western thought and ideas about Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism see also Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body

(New York; London: Routledge, 1991); James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). On perceptions of Jewish women in British culture see Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

mainstream. This is an inquiry into how we conceptualise Jewish difference beyond stark binaries. Such a conception requires sensitivity to the dynamic, malleable, and complex ways in which societies create hierarchies of those it deems different. The aim is here to understand the particular positions of Jews in this hierarchy and the implications of their status, without resorting to assumptions about stable privilege or outright hostility.

b.

Jewish Difference, Semitic Discourse, and Ambivalence

My focus in this thesis is on the construction of Jewish difference. However, I do not approach Jewish difference through the lens of racialisation, as has been the predominant framework in the relevant literature to date.105 _{Racialisation shifts too much of our attention away from the specifics of Jewish} religiosity, potentially neglecting how the historical encounter between Christianity and Judaism resonates with contemporary notions of secularism in predominantly Christian societies.106 This is a problem similar to the one encountered by Mayanthi Fernando in her study of Muslims in France, The Republic Unsettled. Fernando argues for a framework of difference that privileges neither race nor religion, cautioning that:

Using a framework that flattens race, religion, and culture or that considers religion epiphenomenal to race and class often leads us to misconstrue the specific nature of certain forms of public religiosity and to misunderstand both the secular republican state’s exclusions and the kind of counterclaims that Islamic revivalists make.107

Attentive to the continuities and discontinuities of colonial as well as postcolonial constructions of religion and race, this approach allows Fernando to trace “how racialization and secularization intersect to produce contemporary forms of Muslim alterity.”108 _{As the literature shows, the Jewish} Other is also not produced by one discourse alone, even though one may predominate at a certain time. Historically, various discourses of difference, among them race and religion, constantly and frequently intersect, depending on the particular context, thereby upsetting any narrative which tries to explain Jewish difference through just one lens. “Jewishness’, Daniel Itzkovitz observes,

105 _{Racialisation is the approach used by Herman and Cooper. See the discussion of their work in the section} above.

106 _{Note, when I describe a society as predominantly Christian I do not mean an actual level of observance.} Rather, I acknowledge the historical legacy of Christianity which has shaped European societies and societies of European descent, such as Australia. Moreover, by using the term Christianity I do not aim to essentialise Christianity or to ignore its conflicted history and internal rifts. Nonetheless, as Didi Herman notes, “it is possible to acknowledge Christianity’s heterogeneity, while at the same time highlighting its dominating, imperial, cross-cultural, and transnational dimensions”. See Herman, An Unfortunate Coincidence, 19.

107 _{Fernando, The Republic Unsettled, 16. For a similar argument see Schirin Amir-Moazami, “Investigating the} Secular Body: The Politics of the Male Circumcision Debate in Germany,” ReOrient 1, no. 2 (2016): 147-70, at 149-50.

“fundamentally troubles the boundaries of numerous, ostensibly discreet, categories of identity (so every claim that the Jews are a race, for instance, is matched by claims that ‘religion,’ or ‘nation,’ best describes what Jews ‘are’)”.109 _{Jewish history illustrates that “discourses of religion, race and rights} are interrelated, dynamic and co-constitutive of each other.”110

A suitable lens through which to connect these various discourses of alterity is the idea of semitic discourse, a concept which I borrow from literary scholar Bryan Cheyette. A reading based on attention to semitic discourse “views the figure of ‘the Jew’ through the lens of certain dominant discourses – whether they be nation, religion or race.”111 _{The work that semitic discourse does is to “define ‘the} self’ in relation to a semitic ‘other’ ”, which gives these narratives the power “to segregate and exclude in the name of a higher ‘culture’.”112 Moreover, Cheyette emphasises the “lack of a fixed meaning in the constructions of ‘semitic’ difference”113 _{, which in turn suggests an openness to fluid} constructions of difference. Semitic discourse has the advantage of being attentive and flexible enough to approach Jewish difference within disparate contexts, such as Germany and Australia, two societies with their own distinct trajectory of constructing difference.

A focus on semitic discourses does not limit the analysis to Antisemitism, thereby leaving open the possibility that representations of Jews and Judaism may take a form which is not hostile or outright discriminatory. Narrowing the focus to Antisemitism as an analytical concept may in fact conceal more than reveal. As Bryan Cheyette points out, traditional accounts of Antisemitism tend to “stress mainly hostile and ‘persecutory’ images and violent acts against Jews”, as Feldman’s analysis shows.114 What I find when analysing my two case studies is far more subtle and less extreme: a persistent ignorance, an uneasiness, a lack of understanding and reflection, a historical amnesia, and an aversion with regard to Jewish difference.115 _{This is not to say that the debates about male circumcision or the} eruv were free of antisemitic language. They were not. Yet, such language represented just one end of a more complex spectrum of attitudes.

109 _{Daniel Itzkovitz, “Race and Jews in America: An Introduction,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish}

Studies 23, no. 4 (2005): 1-8, at 2. 110 _{Darian-Smith, Religion, Race, Rights, 3.}

111 _{Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman, “Introduction: Liberalism and Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Culture and}

History 6, no. 1 (2003): 1-26, at 5.

112 _{Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society. Racial Representations 1875-1945} (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9.

113 _{Ibid., 8.}

114 _{Cheyette, “English Anti-Semitism: A Counter-Narrative,” 24.}

115 _{This resonates with Didi Herman analysis of English judicial discourse in which she observes “not} ‘hatred’, but distaste, not ‘malice’, but unease and confusion.” Herman, An Unfortunate Coincidence, 25. Emphasis in original.

Critical Jewish studies scholars, such as Bryan Cheyette, propose that the term ambivalence may be better suited to capture this range of attitudes towards Jewish difference.116 _{“Ambivalence towards} Jewish particularity, rather than unequivocal hostility,” David Cesarani points out, “is probably a more useful category with which to explore such a spectrum of attitudes.”117 _{His suggestion is similar} to Zygmunt Bauman’s proposed term ‘Allosemitism’. For Bauman, Allosemitism – a term originally coined by the literary historian Artur Sandauer and derived from the Greek word ‘allus’ for ‘other’ – refers to a “radically ambivalent attitude” towards Jews and Judaism, all along the spectrum from Antisemitism to Philosemitism, both of which single out Jewish people for special treatment.118 Allosemitism describes the process of “setting the Jews apart as people radically different from all the others, needing separate concepts to describe and comprehend them and special treatment in all or most social intercourse”.119 _{Antisemitism is thus just one, albeit extremely hostile, variation of this} general sentiment which conceives of the Jew as Other. Ambivalence, as Tony Kushner notes, allows us to better understand the complex and at times apparently contradictory attitudes towards Jews, which could take the “form of praising westernized, assimilated Jews and rejecting those who were deemed foreign”.120 _{Thinking in terms of ambivalence sensitises us to the nuances and multiplicity of} attitudes that may surface in encounters with Jewish identity and allows us to understand how Jews are represented “as both inherently Other or as potential citizens”.121 _{My interest is thus not whether} the legal discourse is Antisemitic, but rather how it produces images of Jews as different from an imagined ‘we’ through semitic discourse, bringing to the fore ambivalent perceptions of Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism.