religeous massmurder/racist horror in modern times

*
IN his
brilliantly suggestive paper,
Marc Shell has discussed the history
of the ideologeme of
"pure Spanish
blood."

Thus,
Shell argues,
the Spain of the Reconquista "
plays a central role in the European history
of the idea of caste or race,"
and when that is combined with the Christian doctrine of
"All men are brothers,"
we end up with a dehominization of all
who are not Christian
Spaniards.

Since they
are not brothers,
they must not
be human!

THE result
was expulsion of Jews and Muslims
and even religious mass murder,
such as the slaughter of the innocents in California,
practices which, as Shell points out,
were nearly unknown
under Muslim rule.

The doctrine
of "purity of blood" [limpieza de dangre]
that developed in this period,
whereby a Christian was defined as someone whose ancestors had "always" been Christian,
seems e signal departure from everything
that PAUL stood for.

IT cannot
be solely located in a biblical milieu, either,
for in every variety of biblical or post-biblical Judaism that I know of, notwithstanding the enormous emphasis on ethnicity,
converts were of exactly the same status
as Jews "by blood."

As Shell remarks,
the biblical polity had, moreover,
a built-in "law of tolerance" for non-Israelites in their midst,
which served as a model for
European liberals.

IT took
the combination of two elements,
Shell argues, Pauline "universalism" and racism,
to produce unspeakable horror - including an important contribution
to the "pure blood" doctrines
of both Italian and German
fascism.

~!@!~

WHERE,
however, did the element of racism some from?
Shell locates it exclusively in the absence in Paul of any category between "brothers" and animals,
or any category of "others" whose sameness of kind is asserted
even while their difference as non-kin
is maintained.

ON the one hand,
I am in complete sympathy with Shell's denial
that racism is "the Jewish aspect
of Christianity."

ON the other,
I think that Shell seriously overplays his hand
when he totally denies any role at all to the Bible and "Jewish particularism" in the origins of Spanish racism,
and this denial takes on a particularly apologetic flavor at times
in his work.

WHILE
there is
no gainsaying
the enormous cultural significance
of biblical "toleration" of the stranger,
there is also no gainsaying the dark currents of violence
toward certain strangers in the Land - "the seven nations,"
which are to be exterminated - nor the presence in Ezra-Nehemiah,
for example, of a strong tendency toward some kind of
family [if not racialized]
limpieza.

A story like that
of Avraham refusing to bury his dead
among the dead of the Land and insisting on separate ground, understandable perhaps within a certain tribal cultural economy,
may certainly have played even an unconscious part
in the production of such a cultural theme
as limpieza de sangre.

~!@!~

ON the other hand,
critics of Zionism, both Arab and other,
as well as anti-Semites, both Jewish and non-Jewish,
have often sought to portray Jewish culture as racist to its very foundations,
as essentially racist.

THIS foundational racism
is traced to the Hebrew Bible and described as the transparent meaning
of that document.

CRITICS
who are otherwise
fully committed to constructionist and historicist accounts
of meaning and practice abandon this commitment when it comes to the Hebrew Bible - assuming that the Bible IS, in fact and in essence,
that which it has been read to be and that it authorizes univocally
that which it has been taken
to authorize.

IN
what is otherwise
an astonishingly sophisticated discussion,
we find written,
"FOR certain societies,
in certain eras of their development,
the scriptures have acted culturally and socially in the same way
the human genetic code operates
physiologically.
THAT IS,
this great code has, in some degree,
directly determined what people would believe
and what they would think and what they
would do."

NO
interpretation is necessary;
Scripture speaks with perfect
transparence.

ANOTHER writer holds:
"BUT the distinctions raised in the covenant between religion and idolatry
are like some visitation of the khamsin to wilderness peoples
as yet unsuspected, dark clouds over Africa, the Americas,
the Far East,
until finally even the remotest islands and jungle enclaves are struck
by fire and sword
and by the subtler weapon of
conversion-by-ridicule
[DEUTeronomy 2:34; 7:2; 20:16-18;
YOSHua 6:17-21]."

LOCAL
historically and materially defined practices
of a culture far away and long ago
are made here "naturally" responsible
[like the khamsin, the Middle Eastern Santa Ana or 'el Nino',
the Tsunami & "Katrina"]
for the colonial practices of cultures
entirely other to it,
simply because those later cultures used those practices
as their authorization.

~!@!~

EVEN the primitive command
to wipe out the People of Canaan was limited by the Bible itself
to those particular people in that particular place,
and thus declared no longer applicable
by the Rabbis of the Talmud.

THE very literalism
of rabbinic/midrashic hermeneutics
prevented a typological "application" of this command
to other groups.

DOES this mean
that rabbinic Judaism qua ideology is innocent of either ethnocentric
or supremacist tenets?

Certainly not!

WHAT it argues
is rather that Jewish racism,
like the racism of other peoples,
is a facultative and dispensable aspect of the cultural system,
not one that is necessary for its preservation
or essential to its nature.

PERHAPS
the primary function
for a critical construction of cultural
[or racial or gender or sexual] identity is to construct such identity
in ways that purge it of its elements of domination
and oppression.

SOME,
however,
would argue
that this is an impossible project,
not because of the nature of Jewishness but because ANY
group identity is oppressive,
unless it is oppressed.

~~
~~