Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture
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Globalizing Race The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) A complete list of titles begins on page 369. Globalizing Race Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture Dorian Bell northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Bell, Dorian, author. Title: Globalizing race : anti-Semitism and empire in French and European culture / Dorian Bell. Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Series: FlashPoints Identifiers: LCCN 2017022776 | ISBN 9780810136892 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136885 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810136908 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Antisemitism—France—History—19th century. | Antisemitism—France—History—20th century. | Antisemitism—Political aspects—France. | France—Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC DS146.F8 B35 2018 | DDC 305.8924044--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017022776 For my parents, David and Martine Contents Introduction: Between Relationality and Scalarity 3 1. The Labor of Superfluity: Hannah Arendt, Empire, and the Jews 36 2. Colonial Conspiracies: Racializing Jews in the Era of Empire 81 3. Men on Horseback (1): The Marquis de Morès, Nationalism, and Imperial Space- Time 132 4. Men on Horseback (2): Melchior de Vogüé, Imperial Regeneration, and the Dialectic of Determinism 179 5. Bigger Pictures: Anti- Antisemitism and the Politics of Scale 217 Acknowledgments 283 Notes 285 Bibliography 335 Index 353 vii Globalizing Race Introduction Between Relationality and Scalarity Over a tense week and a half in March 2012, three related gun attacks in the southern French cities of Toulouse and Montauban killed seven people. Among the dead were four Jews: a religious studies teacher, his two young sons, and an eight- year- old girl, all shot near the gates of the Jewish Ozar Hatorah day school in Toulouse. The three others were French paratroopers of North African descent; a fourth paratrooper who was injured but survived was Guadeloupian. As the world looked on in alarm, and with the mysterious killer or killers still at large, spec- ulation mounted that neo- Nazis were to blame. Reports circulated that the dead paratroopers belonged to a regiment from which three other soldiers had been dismissed in 2008 when a photograph surfaced of them giving a Nazi salute in front of a swastika- adorned flag.1 Here, it seemed, might be a disturbing eruption of an eternal European xeno- phobia stoked of late by social and economic unrest. The truth proved different. When French authorities caught up to the gunman, Mohammed Merah— a twenty- three- year- old French and Algerian citizen raised in Toulouse— it became clear that Merah had, in fact, singled out Jews for attack. But of course he was no neo- Nazi. In communications with the press and police before and during the extended stand- off at his apartment that resulted in his death, Merah claimed ties to Al- Qaeda and called the shootings a retaliation against the enemies of Islam. The paratroopers, he boasted, were shot for their participation in NATO’s war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. That 3 4 ❘ Introduction they were Muslims and soldiers of color seems to have been incidental. That the Ozar Hatorah school victims were Jewish, however, was very much the point. These Merah executed in reprisal for, as he put it to police, “all the children who are killed” by Israeli forces. By killing French Jews, he was killing “the same Jews who kill . my little broth- ers and sisters in Palestine.”2 Merah’s rampage raised a familiar tandem of specters. The first is the historical brand of antisemitism evoked by the photograph of three shaven- headed young men pledging allegiance to Hitler. Early eyewit- nesses described the gunman as tattooed, scarred, and heavyset, terms better suited to the jackbooted race warrior easily summoned up by the collective European consciousness than to the slight and unmarked Merah.3 This shared continental anxiety helps account for how, even before the killer had been apprehended and his motives ascertained, French president Nicolas Sarkozy could opine that the antisemitic nature of the crime was “obvious.”4 In post- Holocaust Europe, every murder of a Jew is understandably suspect. The Merah case, however, confirmed that the same is true of postco- lonial Europe. In his conflation of every Jew, everywhere with the state of Israel, and in his affinity for a militant Islam preoccupied with exis- tential Jewish evil, Merah incarnates what some have called the “new antisemitism”: namely, an antisemitism that takes Israel and Zion- ism as its bêtes noires and that substitutes the discredited nineteenth- century- era notion of the Jew as cosmic racial other with the more contemporarily palatable notion of the Jewish state as cosmic politi- cal foe.5 The oft- cited mainspring of the new antisemitism is an ongo- ing Israeli- Palestinian conflict responsible for engendering anti- Israeli passions and an attendant antisemitism among certain constituencies, like Muslims, sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. In France, whose population counts the most Muslims and Jews of any European coun- try, and where Muslim immigrants live alongside Sephardic Jews like- wise arrived from former African colonies, these tensions raised by the Israeli- Palestinian conflict are especially and uniquely permeated by the postcolonial fact. Vexed though such questions obviously remain, it would seem uncontroversial enough to conclude from current circumstances that the histories of antisemitism and empire are entwined. A premise of this book, however, is that to do so is at once justified and risky. Justi- fied, because French antisemitism and imperialism indeed co- evolved, I will argue, in important ways dating to the late nineteenth- century Introduction ❘ 5 era of racial classification, hierarchization, and domination from which they both emerged as modern ideologies. Risky, because the postwar, postcolonial context within which antisemitism and empire are so often considered in tandem has a tendency immediately to foreshorten our perspective on their longer shared history— one that, furthermore, produced reflexive assumptions framing European debates about race and difference now. Some of those same assumptions threaten to dis- tort our understanding of how antisemitism and empire shaped each other from the outset. So if this is primarily a book about the first few decades of the shared modern history in question, it is also a book about how antisemitic (and anti- antisemitic) narratives forged in the crucible of empire survive in contemporary approaches both to Europe’s post- war, postcolonial condition and to its imperial, antisemitic past. The analytical note I mean to sound remains no less urgent for being cau- tious. In May 2014 a French national of Algerian descent opened fire on and killed two Israelis, one Frenchwoman, and one Belgian at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. Some of the pro- Palestinian rallies in France over Israel’s July 2014 Gaza Strip offensive devolved into attacks on Jewish synagogues and shops. And the January 2015 shooting at the Parisian headquarters of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which riveted the world’s attention on yet another fun- damentalist Islamic attack in France, was followed two days later by the murder of four Jewish hostages at the Hypercacher kosher market on the outskirts of Paris. Such events, and the reactions to them, are defining what it means to be European in the twenty- first century. In what manner does the interaction between antisemitism and empire over a century ago still subtly inflect analyses of these and related phenomena? My answers roughly separate into two motifs that recur throughout the book and that I use now to organize this intro-