mydiras ras ras rijdt de koning door de plasjes???

*!*
THE
most common
language for the description of Jewishness historically
is the language of race.
RACE, however,
certainly did NOT mean in the premodern period
anything like what it
means today.

-!@!-



-!@!-

The term
has taken on
an entirely different set of connotations
in a recent epistemic shift,
analogous to the epistemic shift
that Foucault & especially Arnold Davidson have identified
in the discourse of
sexuality.

-!@!-

If Foucault could write,
"Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities",
we can also claim that our epoch has initiated
racial heterogeneities in almost
the same fashion.

-!@!-

"Race,"
which was once
the signifier of a set of relations with other human beings
determined in the first instance
by a common kinship and historical connection,
has become the signifier of distinct,
heterogeneous human essences,
at just about the same time
that sexual practices were transformed
into the signifiers of
different categorical essences
of human beings.

-!@!-

As L.T. has put it:

'In these old &
ever-popular usages,
"race" bears two sometimes overlapping connotations:
on the one hand, an ethnic group, a people, or a nation;
and, on the other hand, a somatic type defined in terms of perceived
skin colour, hair type, and morphology -
a concept of "race" that dates from the latter part
of the seventeenth
century.'

This shift in meaning has,
of course, enormous implications;
the fact that it took place in tandem
must also be meaningful!

~!@!~

Let us begin, then,
by exploring the sense that "race" might have had
for premodern and particularly
late-antique people.

Symptomatic
perhaps of this shift
is the following statement from Dio Cassius,
"I do not know the origin of this name [Jews],
but it is applied to all men, even foreigners,
who follow their customs.
This race is found
among Romans."

Now
it is quite clear
from this quotation
that for Dio the word "race" does not imply
some sort of biological essence,
since it can be applied to Romans
who have chosen to follow
the customs
of Jews.

In short,
one can convert
to a race.

"Race"
is thus the signifier of a concept for which we have no word at all
in our language, something like family writ
very large.

Just as family for us
is primarily the signifier of a genealogical, that is,
biological connection, but one that does not in any way presuppose
some biological essence, so also "race"
in premodern usage.

Furthermore,
just as family includes people who are not in the primarily physically defined grouping but have joined it secondarily,
either through marriage or adoption, so also
people can join a race
in Dio's usage.

~!@!~

Jewishness was,
therefore, in antiquity,
something - I do not say an essence - that could be referred to
via the language
of race.

We no longer do so,
although oddly enough,
it seems that the modern sense of race has been constructed originally
precisely against the Jews.

This occurred at two points in the development of the modern concept.

The first
is in the Spanish "purity of blood," limpieza de sangre,
to which I will have further reference.

This term signified one whose blood had not been tainted
with the blood of conversos, converted Jews, and was, therefore,
purely Spanish and purely Christian.

The second
is at the development of modern "scientific" racism,
which is, originally, the founding ideology of
anti-Semitism.

~!@!~
~verdrietigliefdesverdrietverward~
engel
02 sep 2005 - bewerkt op 22 mrt 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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