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 --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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