File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0107, message 22


Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 13:46:43 -0500
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-ilstu.edu>
Subject: Modern Racism and Anti-Semitism, was Re: BHA: Religious sensibility??




Tobin Nellhaus wrote:
> 
>  Hannah Arendt makes a very
> interesting case that anti-semitism in the modern sense is different from
> the previous religious persecution and was a creation of the late nineteenth
> century -- coeval with and related to nationalism.
> 

"Scientific racism" of any sort was (mostly) a creation of the late 18th
and early 19th centuries. No rationale for oppression (including
slavery) was needed as long as basic assumptions about the universe and
humanity were hierarchical, but with the rise of egalitarian
philosophies (and especially the U.S. declaration of independence) it
became increasingly necessary to find a formal rationale for everyday
reality -- such as the oppression of the Irish in England, black slaves
in the U.S., etc. In Volume I of Black Athena Martin Bernal notes that
it was in the early 19th century that anti-semitism became racial. Note
that the punishment for Shylock in _Merchant of Venice_ is that he has
to allow his daughter to convert to xtianity and marry a xtian. That is
utterly incompatible with modern racist feelings. See also,

Thomas Laqueur, _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_
(Harvard UP, 1990).

Stephanie Coontz, _The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of
American Families 1600-1900_ (Verso, 1988).

Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America," NLR 181 (May/June 1990), pp.95-118.

Carrol


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