Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Why racism and anti-Semitism are not the same

Skin color is only meaningful at the extremes of human settlement: Northern Europeans are easily described as white (mainly because they see little sun) as are sub-Saharan Africans who have a very different skin color. On the other hand, people who live close to the Mediterranean are hard to categorize: Southern Italians, Spaniards, Syrians or Algerians are likely to look the same and because the area is a  mixing pot of peoples from Africa, Europe and Asia you can usually find many different colors in a single country.  

People who live at the far East end of Asia look very different from Europeans but when you get into Iran or India the differences start to fray. Many Palestinian Arabs are descended from Crusaders - red heads are not that rare, while Jews belong to a hodgepodge of different "races".

I have always taken the view that race is not a meaningful way of categorizing people and has no scientific validity: You cannot judge "the strength of someone's character" (to paraphrase Martin Luther King) by the color of their skin. In my view, ethnicity is a far more flexible and useful definition.

 Of course many people in the West have experiences which are influenced by their skin color, including the experience of prejudice, but does that make it a valid way to judge people? Jews face prejudice based on a mixture of religion and the assumption of race, outsiders impose on us an assumption of racial categorization which, in my experience, is only very rarely shared by the Jews themselves. 

As Jews we regard ourselves as having a common ancestry - it is, in a sense, a requirement of the religion but any system which categorizes people on the basis of skin type is clearly irrelevant to Jews - as it is to almost anybody who lives in the Middle East.

When you fill out forms related to "ethnicity" or "race" in British job applications, "Jew" is not a recognized category and you are left to choose from a number of skin-color based categories, which may work for many Britons but just leaves Jews feeling that the form does not define them. There is often an "Other" field, but then to say you are Other - Jewish is to imply that you accept physical categories, and especially skin color, as a valid category to define yourself and also that you accept that Jews are a race.

Yes, the religion suggests a common ancestry - something which is common among ethnic groups - but it is just as much about a common culture, a common religion, a common history and a lack of a recent location-based origin. You will find few Jews where both parents are descended from people who have lived in the same region for more than 3 generations.

I don't think anti-Semitism should be defined as a form of racism. Firstly Jews are not a race and "racism" implies prejudice based on race. Secondly, the whole experience of prejudice is different: Jews can "hide", we/they are not physically visible to everyone in the same way as black people in Europe, unless the Jews are very Orthodox and wear distinctive clothes. 

By the way, a lot of what is defined as racism is really about clothing. Most people can avoid standing out by dressing the same as everyone else. Also there is an issue of names. When filling out forms, in some countries it is easier to identify who is Jewish then who is black. 

Did the Nazis kill Jews because they were "racist"? Its not that clear. In truth Nazi race theory was a bit muddled, the whole Aryan thing implied that Germans originated in Central Asia and in reality only black Africans, Jews and Gypsies were definitively defined as problematic, with Slavs added later. Arabs, despite being Semitic, the Nazis defined as acceptable people. Of course the Nazis always put the "native" Germans at the top of their imaginary (and inconsistent) tree. In the end, Jews were killed as much for their religion, as for their race and converts usually got killed too. So while racism played a role, I think anti-Semitism - hatred of Jews - was more important to Nazi policies then "race". While being blonde haired and blue-eyed might have helped one hide, it would not have protected you from the gas chambers.

Many countries collaborated with the Nazis in their policies: Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Italy, Vichy France all at some point rounded up their Jews and delivered them to the Nazis for extermination. In many of these countries, what the English always refer to as a "Swastika" was widely called the "Hooked Cross". According to Google: "the actual Nazi and Neo-Nazi symbol is correctly labeled as a 'hakenkreuz', the German word for 'hooked cross".

Locals in Austria, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine and Holland helped with the round-ups of Jews. Did they do so because of racism?   I think anti-Semitism was the driving force, and also in many cases anti-Communism: In some countries Jews were associated with communism and that played a role in the willingness to assist the Nazis. 

It took the Germans and their European allies about 4 years to wipe out a third of the world's Jews. Given another ten years and occupation of the USA and the Mediterranean basin, it could have been well over 90%. But at that rate, wiping out the entire population of Africa would have taken over a Century: They would still be at it, there simply are too many Africans.  That is a crucial difference. Exterminating the Jews was and still is an extremely unlikely and yet viable option. Especially if you could rope in the UN to assist you. The UN would not assist against Africans (too many nations) but against Jews it's not inconceivable.

In recent "Holocaust Day" memorials in the UK and Ireland, the Jewish Chronical has reported local Jewish communities complaining that they have been sidelined or pushed to side venues while the main event was managed by non-Jews and sometimes the word "Jew" wasn't even mentioned: 

https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/jewish-community-excluded-lowestoft-hmd-event-pkr72zbj

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14337643/Good-Morning-Britain-viewers-complain-Ofcom-failure-mention-Jews-Holocaust-coverage.html

https://www.thejc.com/opinion/this-was-the-year-the-jews-were-told-the-holocaust-is-not-about-you-fjtnb1q0

https://www.thejc.com/news/world/protestors-dragged-out-during-irish-presidents-politicised-holocaust-speech-l5jk413v

Of course, that is not the only story, the liberation of Auschwitz was widely celebrated: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14331601/london-eye-parliament-lit-purple-holocaust-memorial-day.html

The gas chambers were erected because of a range of ideas in which anti-Semitism clearly played an important role. The Hutu massacre of the Tutsi was clearly not about racism.  


 

 


2 comments:

  1. I think the real issue is people's inconsistent use of the word racism. Yes, semantically it refers to "race", but in practice it tends to be used to talk about discrimination based on ethnicity, nationality and generally a person's origin. If we apply the word literally to mean discrimination based on skin colour, then much of what gets called racism in the world today isn't actually racism.
    I am personally fine with using the word racism to refer to discrimination in general, although the semantic root of the word does make this imprecise, and then you get people arguing things like "xxx is not a race, so you can't be racist against them" when it's completely beside the point.
    As an aside, when I moved to Britain I was very surprised when I wanted to become a member of a public library, and I was given a form that included a question on my race, with a set of options I could choose like the ones you describe. In Italy there's no way a government form would ever ask you such a thing. In France and countries that built their state on the French model, like Italy, the idea is that every citizen is just a citizen, and the state has no right or business asking people their race. In fact, if they did it would remind people of the fascist era. I asked a librarian why the form included a question on race, and she said it was to provide the "diverse local community" with better services.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, I added some information at the end, to explain where I was coming from.

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