There is a lot of chatter today about what is meant by Zionism, whether our definitions of it are correct, and how we address its twinned histories – of 19th century nationalism and of state-building in the mid-20th century, of the history of Zionism as a social-democratic movement in Eastern Europe, of occupation, ethnic cleansing, history- and archaeology-production; and of its theological foundations, both in the Jewish prophetic traditions of Ezekial and Zechariah, of the sort of left-political Messianisms of the early 20th century, of the religious character of the state after its establishment and the doctrines of its rabbinate, and of the shift towards fundamentalism in the state’s religious character in the last decades – particularly in its occupation of the West Bank. Maybe even these have not been discussed so clearly, but certainly they are straining around some of the discussions. But what is not being discussed, and what ought to be the focus of our attention instead, is the history of the theorisation of anti-Semitism. It seems enormously significant to me that in all of the discussions I have seen in the last week, there has been no mention at all of the “the new anti-Semitism”. The fact is that theorisation of anti-Semitism has been extremely weak globally for a long time now. There is little that has built on the theoretical zenith of Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Elements of Anti-Semitism” written in the US during the war, and founded on an enormous research project. Meanwhile, the rich vein of of thinking that developed out of the theorisation of “The Jewish Question” (as it was formulated by theorists of the bourgeois state in the early mid-19th century) pretty much went cold after the war and the Holocaust. That’s not to say that historic statements and essays on these grounds were without problems (the other week I was reading the Julius Carlebach’s highly critical book on Marx, which really is a great thing that should be read more, if people are interested in this line.) But it is to say that the post-War and post-Auschwitz world suffered from a marked impoverishment in the theorisation of anti-Semitism as the world was absorbed in a cloud of guilt. This is particularly evident on the left.* What is important is that this ceded ground and this theoretical impoverishment laid the ground for a new theorisation (if one can really call it that, because more often than not it is mere demagoguery) of anti-Semitism from the right. This theorisation is a sort of hybrid of lots of things: guilt politics; political machinations of the Israeli state; the softening of boundaries between the state’s theological and political characters under an equally cloudy account of religion that stands for identity and for tradition, and indeed a more thoroughly identitarian and communitarian analysis of Judaism and Jewishness (in fact the two are combined) that ceased to ask questions of society as such, and in particular what it meant to live with a Jewish character within society, dealing with the strains and dialectics of assimilation, integration, particularity, history, and community proper. These arguments were also absorbed by elements of the left on their path rightward (for example Euston Manifesto, elements of the German anti-National movements etc.) This is all to say that the background of the shit-storm in the Labour Party in the last week is several decades of the theorisation of anti-Semitism being ceded to the right, and the history of the divorce of struggles against anti-Semitism from real anti-racist politics – a politics which is intent not just on addressing racism as oppression but of actually ending oppression, alongside the failure of a lot of the left to deal theoretically with anti-Semitism in post-war Europe. Of course there are histories and histories here, of the 1960s student movement who knew their parents as fascists and combined the slaying of their fathers with deep repressions; of places in which these theorisations simply couldn’t happen because they were still fascist in character. I can’t help but return to Adorno’s wonderful radio essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” to begin this woeful situation, but that was 60 years ago now, and even the history of these shifts has not been well charted. And so we must demand new, complex, subtle theorisations of anti-Semitism, that are truly emancipatory in scope, and which do not succumb to the bombast of the “new anti-Semitism” thesis. In fact the new anti-Semitism thesis needs to be taken apart entirely, discussed, and its history considered in the open, to show its theoretical weaknesses and the history of its brutal political usage. If you don’t know about it, now is the time to get reading and researching and thinking.
*a note on the use of the term “left”. The theorisation of Jews in bourgeois society is strangely a large part of the ground upon which certain divisions of the left and the right were grounded. This is why there is all this material about the Jewish Question that appears in the early-19th century, in the theorisations of left-Hegelians. These really are political philosophies that deal with the question of the state, freedom, and how we approach the state, live and die within it. There are histories to be written still about how these thoughts lead to different sorts of anti-Semitisms. But it is significant that the end of the consideration of the Jewish Question leads to a set of extremely murky new theses on anti-Semitism that refuse to ask questions of left and right, and of our relation(s) to the State. The long version of the argument I couldn’t put above is that this is what the “new Antisemitism” is really playing on.