Jews As Jews” and the Critique of the Critique

City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Seymour, D. ORCID: 0000-0001-6736-937X (2019). Conversations with Robert: “Jews as Jews” and the Critique of the Critique. Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, doi: 10.26613/jca/2.1.24 This is the published version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/23703/ Link to published version: 10.26613/jca/2.1.24 Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] JCA 2019 DOI: 10.26613/jca/2.1.24 Conversations with Robert: “Jews as Jews” and the Critique of the Critique1 David Seymour I first met Robert some twenty-five years ago. sadly passed a few months before Robert, his I had just begun my PhD. As time passed, it “uncle Harry” whose Yiddish-inspired humor was evident that things were not working would have me in tears, Glynn, and Shoshana. out between me and my then supervisor, and And, always our conversations continued. We Robert, whom I had met earlier, stepped in would share ideas and criticisms of our work and offered to take over. After a little hesitation and others as well. Yet, other than on a few rare (and for the very reasons Robert had identi- occasions, Robert was never as dismissive as I fied), I agreed. I think it would not be an over- was at that time. He would see something of statement to say that without that intervention, relevance and of interest in most works. I would have simply given up. It was as a result of this generosity and open- Robert had an uncanny way of building up ness, that I learnt something important. That what was, by then, my shattered confidence. It the shortcomings of any work was not so much was only after I had finished that I realized how the initial idea or part of an idea but that the Robert put me back together both emotionally initial insight became the whole thing, that, to and academically. Robert would respond to my use the language of his last work, it was pushed work, first, by saying how good it was, how from an interesting particular into an oppres- insightful, and then spend the rest of the time sive universal; or, what we would now say, “was gently taking it (but not me) to pieces while made to do too much work.”2 at the same time moving me in directions and In what follows, I would like to draw on making connections I did not see myself. that insight as well as one the very first things Robert seemed to know me well—all our Robert told me: “If you want to know anything supervisions took place over meals! We would about Jews, don’t look to the antisemites!” He chat about everything: from football to art, also had a habit, which I am not sure I fully from sociology to philosophy (spiced with understand today, of highlighting the conjunc- some gossip) and then we would turn to my tion “as if.” Again, that is something I want to thesis. I would come home from Leamington work through today, albeit briefly. with reams of paper serviettes covered in notes, As I write these words, I am in constant con- arrows, and underlinings which I would later lay versation with Robert as I have been in the past. out on my desk and try to piece together! Most By now, I would have spoken to him several times importantly, they felt less like supervisions and from when I had the first germ of the idea through more like conversations. It is an approach that to its finished (or, what I thought was finished) I now try to adopt with my own post-grads. article. My conversation today has been a culmi- Needless to say, we maintained this relation- nation of all our past conversations and all those ship—which was now a full-blown friendship— parts of my work that he knew so intimately. for the following years. I got to know—and The subject of my PhD was “Critical like—Robert’s family, his brother Tony, who Theories of Antisemitism.”3 It focused on the David Seymour ways in which critical theory (understood in a “Jew” towards whom the antisemite feels hostile broad sense) had tried to make sense of antisemi- is not the real Jew at all: the figure of the “Jew” tism and the Holocaust. It ranged from Marx to, is a frozen image protected into the screen of at that time, Lyotard and Agamben, but, since a living person. The fact that the image might that time, has also included the work of Alain on occasion fit the reality does not change its Badiou. In the time that is left, I would like to status: it remains an image. And there’s the revisit that work—and the critiques it made— rub: thinking that Jews are really “Jews” is pre- through reference to a slogan (for that is what cisely the core of antisemitism. (p. 5) it is) that has become popular over the last few To put the matter in other terms, at the days and weeks—that, “antisemitism is hostility heart of the slogan, “Antisemitism is hostility to Jews as Jews.”4 As, I hope will become clear, toward Jews as Jews” is the idea that the latter Robert’s insights about antisemites and their (unmarked on, undifferentiated) antisemitic inability to speak the truth about Jews (assum- concept of “the Jews” speaks to a truth about ing there is “a Truth”), about how a particular “real” or “flesh and blood Jews.” becomes the entirety, and how the “as if” plays Two points emerge from this alleged sym- out in this subject are the prism through which metry between “flesh and blood” and the I will be revisiting mine—and Robert’s work. antisemitic image of “the Jews.” First, and most obvious, is the legitimation of the claim made ANTISEMITISM AS HOSTILITY TOWARD “JEWS by antisemites that antisemitism is but a “logi- AS JEWS” cal” or “rational” response to real Jews’ malevo- lence; that they are merely “responding” to the The slogan “Antisemitism is hostility toward wrongdoings of Jews. Jews as Jews” is a simplification of Brian Klug’s Secondly, and pointing in the completely somewhat positivist attempt at a definition of opposite direction, is that, as the definition “antisemitism.”5 stands, there never is, now or in the past, This slogan, for Klug, is used, as he says, as a antisemitism. As Klug illustrates, and as all of “starting point,” but, despite what Klug sees as us here know, antisemites have never attacked its utility, is quickly dismissed. To cut a longer Jews as Jews. Rather, they have attacked Jews argument short, Klug argues, rightly, that there as Christ-killers, usurers, communists, capital- is a dissonance between “Jews” as it appears as ists, anti-national, cosmopolitans, nationalist the subject of the sentence and “Jews” as the (Zionists), the anti-race, and so on and so forth. object or predicate. As it stands, however, the Remember here Klug’s comment that, “[t]he slogan marks no difference, there is no distinc- fact that the image might on occasion fit the tion between, what Klug calls “real” Jews (what reality does not change its status: it remains an Robert called, “flesh and blood Jews”) and the image” (p. 5). concept of “the Jews” as it appears in the antise- Yet, the problem Klug identifies here, the mitic imagination. Klug is correct when he lack of critical distance between “real” Jews and notes that, the antisemitic concept of “the Jews” (and the Spelling it out, it comes to this: antisemitism is definitive article is central to this distinction) is a form of hostility to Jews as Jews, where Jews not confined to populist slogans and apologists are perceived as something other than what of (a now impossible) antisemitism. Rather, it they are. Or more succinctly: hostility to Jews as is present in many critical accounts of antisemi- not Jews. (We appear to have turned our work- tism. However, this problem of its conflation is ing definition [“starting point”] on its head). not only one of theoretical error—although it is For, even if some real Jews fit the stereotype, the that as well—but also runs the risk of becoming 74 Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism Conversations with Robert: “Jews as Jews” and the Critique of the Critique a resource in the canon of antisemitism itself. antisemitism’s (genocidal or otherwise) “hos- And, as will shall see, it is as much a case of tility toward” Jews is premised on an actually “intended consequences” as “unintended.” existing characteristic of real Jews. We see this Underpinning this part of my presentation common thread within “critical thinking” as is two further maxims that Robert often states. early as Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of The first, which appears overtly in Political Enlightenment.9 For Adorno and Horkheimer, Investigations,6 but acted as a guide to almost all modern (genocidal) antisemitism arises as his writings, was what he termed a critique of the by-product of the rise and dictates of monopoly critique—that is, a critique of the critique made capitalism that emerged from market or bour- in the name of human emancipation, or what geois capitalism.

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