mydidifferences & -essentialism as ~resistance ...


*~*
'racism & human rights'
[continued]

~*~


THE
Rabbis' insistence
on the centrality of Peoplehood
can thus be read
as a radical critique of PAUL
as well,
for if the Pauline move
had within it
the possibility of breaking out of
the tribal allegiances &
commitments
to one's own family,
as it were,
it also contained
the seeds of an imperialist
and colonizing
missionary
practice.



The
very emphasis
on a universalism
expressed as concern for all of the families of the world
turns very rapidly
[if not necessarily]
into a doctrine that they must all become part of our family of the spirit,
with all of the horrifying practices against Jews and other Others
which Christian Europe
produced.



The
doctrine
of the Apostle of the Free Spirit can be diverted,
even perverted,
to a doctrine of enslaving and
torturing
bodies.



As HB
has remarked
of late-fifteenth-century
Portugal:
Although the bodies of Negroes might be held captive,
this very fact made it possible for their souls to achieve true freedom
through conversion to Christianity.
And so the enslavement of Negroes took on a kind of
missionary aspect.
It was in keeping that christened Negro slaves
should enjoy certain small privileges
above their
fellows.



PAUL
had indeed written,
with notorious ambiguity,
"For though absent in body I am present in spirit,
and if present I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing
[lived with his father's wife].
When you are assembled and my spirit is present,
with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan
for the destruction of the flesh,
that his spirit may ne saved in the day of the Lord Jesus"
[1 Corinthians 5:
3-5].



It is
surely
Paul's own sense of self as divided into body and spirit,
so that his spirit can be where his body is not
- and he means this literally, not as metaphor -,
that permits some of his followers to practice torturing and killing bodies
to save the
souls.



[I am not,
of course, suggesting that this was
Paul's "intent."]



Disdain
for the bodies of others,
when combined with concern for their souls,
can be even more devastating
than neglect of
both.



~*~



As
sharply,
however, as this coercion to conform
must be exposed as a racism,
we must also be prepared to recognize that Jewish difference
with its concomitant nearly exclusive emphasis on caring for other Jews
- even when Jews are powerless and dominated -
can become an ugly lack of caring for the fate of others
and thus another form of racism,
logically opposed to the first
but equally as
dangerous.



The
insistence on "difference"
can produce an "indifference" [or worse]
toward Others.



The
ways
in which "benign neglect"
can and have become malignant in Jewish texts
can readily be
documented.



From
the retrospective position
of a world which has, at the end of the second Christian millennium,
become thoroughly interdependent,
each of these options
is intolerable.



A
dialectic
that would utilize each of these
as antithesis to the other,
correcting in the "Christian" system
its tendencies toward a coercive universalism
and in the "Jewish" system its tendencies toward contemptuous neglect
for human solidarity
might lead beyond both
toward a better social
system.



At
present,
rather than
the best of the two cultures
being allowed to critique each other,
the most pernicious aspects of both of these hermeneutic systems
are in an unholy alliance with each other,
so that ethnic/racial superiority has been conjoined with spatial,
political domination and the constraint towards conformity
in the discourse of nationalism and
selfdetermination.



For
five hundred years
we have seen the effects of such a conjunction
in the practices of Christian Europe,
and now we see its effects mutatis mutandis in many practices
of the Jewish
state.



Jewish
difference
can indeed be dangerous,
as Palestinians know only too well,
but Christian universalism has been historically even more dangerous,
as Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Africans, Asians, and others
have been forced to demonstrate
with their
bodies.



Insistence
on genealogical identity
and its significance
has been one of the major forms of resistance
against such
violence.



In
other words,
the rabbinic Jewish insistence
that there is a difference between Jew and Greek
and that that difference has value
can be a liberatory force
in the world,
a force that works for a contemporary politics of the value of difference -
feminist, gay, multicultural, postcolonial -
against coercive
sameness.



In
some of
the following myDiStories
I may be going to make the
perhaps surprising claim that geneology
as a grounding of identity, while suspiciously close to being racist and always in danger of becoming such,
need not function politically
as racism.



Indeed,
I will suggest
that grounding in geneology is necessary
for any secular notion of Jewish identity at all
and further that it plays the political role for Jewishness
that essentialism plays for feminism and gay
identity politics.

engel
29 aug 2005 - bewerkt op 21 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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