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Theorizing Modernities article

The Vatican’s Foreign Policy: Avoiding Confrontation, Accommodating Interests


Children sitting in a classroom, in colonial Belgian Congo. Photo Credit: Yale Divinity School Library, ca. 1914.

Introduction

Giulia Chamedes’s A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe has helped me answer some lingering questions. I now understand not only the Church’s silence on some critical political issues, but also the culture within the Church that flattens its internal voice. Yet, interpreting the political history and the diplomacy of the Vatican through Chamedes’s contribution, it occurs to me that the Church’s prudence, which at times can border on pusillanimity, represents an attitude that allows, from the Church’s perspective—though that perspective is certainly open to scrutiny—“both [the good and the evil to] grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30). Arguably, a realist survival propensity has led the Church to avoid confrontation with fascist regimes that not only have capabilities to harm her self-interest but also are an expression of the human imperfection. Chamedes’s analysis allows me to confidently make this inference.

Prior to reading this book, for instance, I was surprised at the language used by Pope Leo XIII advising European missionaries going to evangelize Africa in the late 19th century. The pope refers to Africans as “savage peoples” who should “abandon the darkness of error for the brilliance of the light of the gospel” when encouraging European missionaries to help Africans “exchange their dullest customs with the politeness and the Christian civilization” (5).

Using the language of the day, and in spite of his good intention, the words of the man whose encyclical Rerum Novarum significantly shaped Catholic Social Teaching reinforced prevailing racist stereotypes against Africans and their cultures during the colonial period. In a correspondence with the Superior General of the Scheut Fathers in 1889, he argued, “You are without ignoring, dear Sons! Our ardent desire to see the savage peoples of Africa abandon the darkness of error for the brilliance of the light of the gospel and to exchange their dullest customs with the politeness and the Christian civilization.”[1] Whereas the Church institution is expected to be prophetic, bold, and ahead of its own time in facing certain worldly challenges, it sometimes simply speaks the dominant language of the day. Yet, I was even more appalled to see that the Belgian Catholic missionaries turned a blind eye to the generalized systematic violence and abuses in the Congo Free State under King Leopold II’s colonial rule, an attitude of indifference that seems incongruous with the ideals of the Gospel and the social concern of the pope.[2]

Initially, I believed that the nationalism of the Belgian missionaries could sufficiently account for their silence vis-à-vis the colonial evil. As Ruth Slade Reardon notes, “The Catholic mission pursued a policy of private representation rather than public criticism—since their situation vis-à-vis the State was considerably more delicate than that of the Protestants in view of the subsidies and State help which they were receiving. King Leopold II did all that he could to use them in combating the [Protestant] propagandists who were attacking the State regime” (87). Yet, unlike the Catholics, the Protestant missionaries initiated, organized, and got actively involved in international campaigns to denounce the colonial brutalities against the human rights of Africans.

A Persistent Suspicion of and Conflict with Modernity

Catholicism has regarded modernity with suspicion, if not rejection, until quite recently. The modern period has constituted the Vatican’s worst nightmare, not only because it saw the demise of the Church’s power monopoly, but also because the Church had to share power with the modern state. Isaiah Berlin contends, for instance, that Machiavelli’s unsettling originality was that he uncovered the insoluble dilemma about two equally ultimate and sacred ends that stand in contradiction with each other: on the one hand, the otherworldly ultimate end of the Christian faith and, on the other hand, the this-worldly ultimate end of the state (69). The French Revolution in 1789 also antagonized the clergy and mobilized popular angst against the Church’s privileged position and its support of the existing oppressive world order. Given its association with the spirit of Protestantism since the modern period, the Catholic Church has perceived the rise of a modern culture that promotes civil liberties as malevolently motivated. It has also perceived this modern culture as promoting the use of science to discredit faith in God and undermine the authority of the Catholic Magisterium. The Catholic Church has only started partnering with modernity as early as 1962 with the Second Vatican Council, as Bill McSweeney’s important book, Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance shows.

Using the longstanding antagonizing perception of modernity, A Twentieth-Century Crusade shows why the Vatican has always been reluctant to engage structural and systemic problems of power politics. Chamedes contends that what has really mattered for the Church’s agenda was “to achieve a Christian state, wherein the Church would retain and expand its institutional privileges” (292). The book uncovers a pattern of behavior born from a mutually reinforcing dialectical competition for power and influence between Church and state. If any variation can then be observed in the Vatican’s foreign relations across time, this can be explained by the Church’s realist calculations and its capacity to negotiate treaties with the aim of advancing not only the spiritual ideals of the Gospel but also the quest for its institutional self-interest and temporal power. To say it slightly differently, since modernity began, the Church has perhaps always hoped that by securing advantageous relations with the temporal powers, it would concomitantly create the conditions to advance its own spiritual ideals.

As Patrick A. Heelan explains, “modern science” emerged when in the 16th century Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) challenged the religious belief that the celestial heavens were the home of the divine powers who ruled life on Earth. Through their invention of the telescope, they saw instead the Medicean planets of Jupiter, concluding that the heavens were just an extension of our terrestrial neighborhood. The Church rejected this faith-to-science paradigm shift as dangerously paving the way for secularism and atheism. Its response was to imprison scientists such as Galileo and Kepler (whose scientific innovations challenged the established dogma). However, the kind of control that the Church enjoyed prior to the advent of modernity had been lost. Subsequent policies would launch the Catholic Counter-Reformation (which included the promulgation of a new catechism), label Protestants as heretics, and condemn the errors of modernism among which it included liberalism, secularism, relativism, and atheism.

Philosophers and political thinkers such as Nicolas Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were at the forefront of modern philosophical and political thought. The principles they offered replaced the Catholic truth with secular self-evident truths. Included in the latter were the fundamental equality among all humans, the rule of scientific reason, the universal endowment of inalienable rights to self-preservation, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. The Catholic Church lost its monopoly status as the mediator between humans and God to the Protestant Reformation, thus reducing papal authority when it came to secular matters.

The fear that modern ideals might lead to atheism shaped (and has survived in) the Vatican’s international politics to this day. This politics has consisted in signing concordats with states. As a diplomatic instrument, concordats are bilateral treaties that bind the Catholic Church to a nation-state so that they might work together under international law. Their fragility, however, is what lay behind the Church’s unwillingness to confront authoritarian and fascist regimes, such as the Third Reich, or the imperialism of colonial regimes in Africa.

The fear that modern ideals might lead to atheism shaped (and has survived in) the Vatican’s international politics to this day.

Quite unbelievably, it took until the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s to address the Church’s grievances and overcome its stubborn resistance to the spirit of modernity. Attempts were finally made to reconcile the Catholic faith with modern values. For instance, the Church finally stated in its closing message of the Second Vatican Council, addressed to the scientist community, that “we too are seekers after truth” and “your [scientific] truth is ours” (730–31; see also Patrick Heelan’s commentary on these lines).

The Vatican in the International System of States

The Catholic Church is among the few oldest institutions to have survived for more than two millennia. In the international anarchic system, the Church no longer holds the authority over truth it once did and thus finds itself having to negotiate with other powers. Yet, unlike nation-states, the Vatican has no military might to defend itself against threats. Popes, therefore, have had to rely on spiritual wisdom, political prudence, and accommodationist strategies to increase their moral influence.

European missionaries boarding or descending from passenger carriages on a steam train in Belgian Colonial Congo. Congo-Balolo Mission. Photo Credit: University of Edinburgh, UK, ca. 1900-1915. Public Domain.

Contrary to Pope Benedict XV after World War I, Pius XII showed little concern for the “Jewish Question” at the height of the Holocaust during World War II, and even in the subsequent years (Chamedes, 239). Instead of “speaking out against anti-Semitism and the murder of Jews in Eastern Europe, the pope refrained from public comment. He came the closest in an annual address to the College of Cardinals, when he spoke of victims who were ‘destined sometimes, even without guilt on their part, to exterminatory measures’” (Chamedes, 225). And when colonized African peoples requested his support in their fight for decolonization in the 1950s, he followed a similar strategy of non-commitment. The response was predictably lukewarm given the existing pattern of concordat diplomacy to collaborate with the state since collaborating with the sovereign authority of the state to get access to people is the most rational and strategic action that any political actor can take.

Until the Church’s aggiornamento, modern ideals, such as democracy, pluralism, diversity, equality, and freedom, remained marginal. And so were the colonial problems. Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s indictment that colonization cannot be Christian—and is incompatible with philanthropy, or civilization, understood as a project meant to combat ignorance and to liberate peoples from tyrannies of all kinds including slavery—now strikes a note. It took liberal activists and Black intellectuals to call out the Vatican to support the decolonization movement. After much damage done to Africans and their cultures, post-Vatican II African theologians began a phase of rehabilitation. Wrestling with the ideal of inculturation, African liberation theology did not bother with the kind of Marxist analysis and concerns for economic poverty and redistribution encountered in Latin America. Instead, African liberation theology wanted to speak of God with a voice of its own after years of “anthropological pauperization” (a term coined by Engelbert Mveng) that robbed Africans not only their identities but also their soul and humanity in the process of converting them to Christianity.

Conclusion

If I may claim that Chamedes’s argument is that the Vatican sought to ensure Christian states and to retain influence and privileges, then my initial surprise at the Catholic missionaries’ failure to denounce atrocities perpetrated by colonial agents has been addressed. That’s the Vatican’s form of cultural realism.[3] Meanwhile, the Vatican’s foreign policy has avoided tackling political questions that could upset states or trigger a collision of interests with powerful rivals that are best turned into allies. The Church’s self-interests include its survival, respect for its own sovereignty, and opportunities to secure an advantageous relative position for collaboration with other states. By choosing to strategically stand in the shadow of powerful states, does the Church waste a chance to make a different kind of impact on world politics? As a localized state with global membership, can the Vatican legitimately support the radical ideals of the Gospel instead of accommodating authoritarian regimes for the sake of self-preservation? Far from living the radical idealism of Jesus that led him to the Cross, the Church as a realist and discerning body politic accepts that both the good and the evil will always coexist side by side in this imperfect world until the coming of God’s kingdom at the end of time.

 

 

[1] Jules Chomé, Indépendance Congolaise: Pacifique Conquête. (Bruxelles: Editions de Remarques Congolaises, 1960), 5 (I freely translate from French. The emphasis is mine)

[2] See Catherine Ann Cline, “The Church and the Movement for Congo Reform,” 48. While the colonial war in Algeria claimed another 1.5 million deaths, King Leopold II’s business arguably claimed more that 10 million lives in colonial Congo. See Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa and Ruth Mayer, Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization, 173.

[3] This is an analogical use of cultural realism in Johnston’s analysis of ideational influences on strategic choice. See Johnston, Alastair Iain, “Cultural Realism and Strategy in Maoist China,” in Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, pp.216-268.

2 Comments on The Vatican’s Foreign Policy: Avoiding Confrontation, Accommodating Interests Array
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J., PhD
Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J., PhD, is a Jesuit priest, poet, theologian, social scientist, and certified Executive Coach. A native from the Democratic Republic of Congo, he studied international relations at Loyola University Chicago; ethics and social theories at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, in Berkeley, California; African Theology at Hekima University College in Nairobi (Kenya); and philosophy at the Facultés Saint Pierre Canisius, in Kinshasa (DRC). He is a member of several international associations and serves in leadership position as the Africa Region coordinator of the Catholic Theologians and Ethicists in World Church (CTEWC), Vice President of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA), member of the CIHA blog (Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa), and the Pan-African Theology and Pastoral network. He currently lives and teaches political science at the Université Loyola du Congo (ULC) in Kinshasa.
Theorizing Modernities article

The Enduring Appeal of Christian Europe


Achille Ratti, later Pope Pius XI, as apostolic nuncio to Poland in 1919. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

“The Church is Europe: and Europe is the Church” (310). Hilaire Belloc wrote these lines in 1920, at a moment when a new Europe united in Christian faith and guided spiritually and morally by the Roman Catholic Church seemed to him both possible and necessary. The Church’s leaders in Rome shared these hopes. As Chamedes argues in her splendid book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade, papal diplomats and Vatican theologians responded creatively to the political upheavals that erupted across Europe at the end of World War I by imagining the secular power of the universal church in a new way. No longer would the Holy See find natural political allies in imperial dynasties like the Habsburgs. Instead, the Vatican—a complex bureaucracy whose inner workings Chamedes dissects with care and precision—crafted a vision of Catholic internationalism so that the supranational Church could thrive in a world of nation-states. Concordats would check the spread of secular liberalism by guaranteeing the rights of the Church to educate youth and to proclaim its message and mission freely. Civil society organizations, like Catholic Action, would inoculate the masses against revolutionary heresies. And in time a full-throated anticommunist propaganda campaign would remind the faithful across Europe of the need to stand steadfast in the struggle against the greatest existential threat to Christian civilization—Communism.

The idea of a Catholic-Christian European civilization resonated especially strongly in Eastern Europe. A Twentieth-Century Crusade is remarkable for showing so clearly how central the new nation-states in Eastern Europe were to the Vatican’s vision of the post-World War I world. Intent on defending the region from the secular internationalisms personified by Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir Lenin, the Vatican dispatched papal diplomats to Poland and the Baltics even before the fighting there had stopped. On site, the Vatican’s emissaries began to negotiate the details of church-state relations with leaders of the new regimes. They redrew diocesan boundaries to conform with the borders of the new nation-states. And they expressed concerns—so welcome to Eastern European nationalists—that the Minority Treaties being written in Paris would disadvantage ethnic majorities that were overwhelmingly Catholic. Of course, the tangible results of this diplomatic campaign did not always match Vatican hopes. Nationalist state builders welcomed the Church’s symbolic support but crafted their political strategies without consulting papal representatives. And the ethnic complexities of some new states, such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, made concordats with the Holy See impossible. Even so, the Vatican’s emphasis on the importance of countries like Poland for the re-Christianization of Europe resounded across the region, helping to “advance the myth that Catholicism and nationalism went hand-in-glove” (44).

Chamedes’s original account of Vatican diplomacy in Eastern Europe after 1918 mirrors the contemporaneous emphasis that Catholics in the region also put on the place of their nations within a wider European civilization. From the Baltics to Croatia, Catholic nationalists declared their homelands to be bulwarks of European Christendom, charged with an historic mission to defend the Occident, above all against the ideological menace of Communism. Occasionally, the local and papal versions of this transnational vision worked at cross-purposes. Chamedes recounts one such episode: When Achille Ratti, papal nuncio in Warsaw and later Pope Pius XI, stayed in Warsaw in 1920 at the darkest hour of the Polish-Soviet War—and at a moment when the Red Army stood at the gates of the city—he did so not to stand with “most Catholic” Poland to the very last, but rather to negotiate on behalf of the Church’s interests in case the Bolsheviks won. (After the “miracle on the Vistula” that forced the Red Army to retreat, papal diplomats and Polish nationalists both agreed to believe otherwise.) The heightened ideological tensions of the 1930s aligned these parallel visions of Christian civilization more closely. As Vatican publicists made the fate of the Church in civil war-torn Spain into a centerpiece of their anticommunist propaganda, Eastern Europe’s churches tied their own battles against secularism to the ideological conflict playing out on the Iberian peninsula. The pages of Hungary’s Jesuit journals were filled in the mid-1930s with coverage of the Spanish Civil War. In 1937, the Polish episcopate sent a letter of solidarity to their brethren in Spain. All this reflected the general consensus, affirmed in a 1937 trio of encyclicals whose intellectual genesis Chamedes brilliantly reconstructs, that Communism was a far greater danger to the Church and to the civilization that it defended than Nazism, let alone fascism. Chamedes argues that the language of these papal declarations hobbled the courageous efforts of Catholic dissenters who worried that their Church had become too friendly with fascists and who feared Nazism and Communism equally. In Eastern Europe, the Vatican’s strong anticommunist line further cemented ties between the Church and the ethno-nationalist Right.

Within the walls of the Vatican, Church leaders imagined an all-encompassing Catholic socio-cultural world invested with the power to shape what we would today call subjectivity. Schools, youth groups, and Catholic Action organizations would mold new generations of Catholics politically and socially. And Catholic media, ranging from newspapers and radio broadcasts to traveling exhibitions and even literary contests, would ensure the circulation of ideologically and doctrinally sound ideas. The Vatican’s vision of Catholic culture was total. It also bore an uncanny resemblance to its Soviet rival. A Twentieth-Century Crusade reveals just how closely the civic components of Catholic internationalism imitated aspects of its Communist rival—or, more precisely, of Communism as it was imagined in Rome. Vatican officials were obsessed with the Comintern and were determined that the Vatican should be its antipode. One Vatican newspaper expressed this ambition candidly: “If Moscow’s Comintern is at the head of the Communist International, Rome is at the center of the Catholic International!” (121). Chamedes uncovers other ideological entanglements. We learn that the Vatican created a Secretariat on Atheism to counter Communist propaganda, choosing that name in direct response to the Secretariat of the Central Committee that led the Soviet Communist Party. The publications and exhibitions that it produced were filled with “simple and predictable binaries” (164) that presented Catholicism and Communism as polar opposites, echoing the very same Manichaean contrasts between light and dark that characterized Soviet propaganda. Indeed, Chamedes’s account of the (aesthetically challenged) search for a Catholic literature that would not simply reflect reality but instead transform it sounds like nothing so much as a Catholic version of socialist realism. There is by now a vast literature analyzing Communism as a political religion that imitated and secularized aspects of Christian religiosity. Chamedes suggests provocatively that the circuits of ideological exchange ran in the other direction as well: in order to fight Communism, some Catholics began to reimagine their faith as a political ideology just like it.

What remains of the Vatican’s twentieth-century crusade today? At the end of her book, Chamedes explains how the fabric of Catholic internationalism unraveled. Vatican II and a more pluralistic vision of what Catholic politics could be; decolonization and a shift in the Church’s center of gravity away from Europe; the cultural sea change of the 1960s and its impact on patterns of church-going—all these factors play a role in the denouement of her book. Communism is now history. And Pope Francis and his supporters advance a vision of global Catholicism very different from that of Pius XI and XII. Yet the vision of Christian European civilization that Hilaire Belloc invoked in 1920 endures, albeit divorced from the legal frameworks that Catholic diplomats worked so hard to erect after World War I. Today, the idea of a Europe of Christian nation-states once again challenges a liberal vision of world order. And again, Eastern Europe is at the center of thinking about Christian Europe, just as it was in 1918. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said that Europe’s nations must return to their Christian roots in order to survive. Poland’s prime minister declared in 2017 that his party “wants to transform Europe . . . to re-Christianize it.” Catholic internationalism may be dead, at least in the form that Chamedes has so lucidly reconstructed. But the vision of Europe that animated it—a Europe united in faith and shared struggle against existential ideological enemies—retains a powerful appeal.

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Paul Hanebrink
Paul Hanebrink is Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He is the author of two books: A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 2018) and In Defense of Christian Hungary: Religion, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, 1890-1944 (Ithaca, 2006).
Theorizing Modernities article

Twentieth-Century Crusades and Crusaders Reimagined


“Wilson the Crusader: A Notable Oration,” by Edwin Anderson Alderman. New York Times. Sunday, December 21, 1924 edition, xx 3. Public Domain.

There are moments when the entire world seems to shift. The very air around us sizzles and cracks with tension, or maybe anticipation of what is to come. This is the sense and sensibility I get from reading primary sources written at the end of the Great War. This time felt different. Gritty realities of war, widespread illness, and death—along with injustices brought to light through war, illness, and death—made many people see the world with new eyes and believe in the possibility of changing it in unprecedented ways. At the same time, however, hope in the dawning of a new day made way for a thoroughly disenchanted world when change did not materialize. In her book, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, Giuliana Chamedes holds the Vatican’s simultaneous disenchantments and hopes in productive tension.

Historicizing the Vatican’s response to a shifting world, Chamedes asserts “World War I was a moment of great awakening for the papacy” (2). Rather than a conversion of the heart or spirit, this awakening marked a shift in how the Roman Catholic Church understood its place in the world. Observing an increase in the presence and power of secular nation-states, Chamedes argues, the Vatican changed its strategy for global engagement in the short twentieth century. As a new, international world order developed, the Vatican sought to disrupt various modern, secular forces on the one hand (including, liberal internationalism, socialism, and, later, communism) and to “re-Christianize” Europe on the other (32). Such efforts, Chamedes demonstrates, occurred through the Vatican’s “embrace of national self-determination and international law” (3), a move made possible through concordats, which Chamedes defines as “bilateral treat[ies] that would bind the Church and the nation-state together under international law” (3, cf. 31). Forming the basis of “Catholic internationalism,” the Vatican’s use of “concordat diplomacy” allowed the Church to engage in the secular politics of international law even as concordats were positively medieval, a centuries-old tool rebranded as “modern.” This old-made-new diplomatic strategy transformed the Church into a nation-state for the purposes of making a legal agreement recognizable to secular nation-states, but the Church was certainly not born again. Even as the Church completed this legal ritual, it maintained exceptional status as a non-state, religious actor (in the eyes of itself, European nations, and in Chamedes’s text), translating itself in secular terms and acting according to secular norms when desired, yet never losing its religious essence. This allowed the Church to be relevant and powerful in a secular international political system, bolstering the legitimacy of the Church as a political agent and stakeholder in public, civil affairs across Europe, while never ceasing to be a religious institution.

Following the Church from World War I through the end of World War II, Chamedes is careful to recognize the important distinctions within the Vatican, or the “central government of the Roman Catholic Church”; between “the Vatican” and “Catholicism writ large”; and among lay Catholics around the world (9). This precision continues as A Twentieth Century Crusade explains and analyzes the development of Catholic internationalism across Europe, including examples from Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Belgium, Portugal, and Estonia. Along the way, Chamedes makes a significant contribution to the existing literature historicizing and theorizing religion, secularism, and international affairs. Although Chamedes’s work does not draw direct comparisons among religious communities or institutions, A Twentieth-Century Crusade belongs on scholars’ reading lists for comparative religion and history of religion, offering an important historical test case in how a global religious institution imagines and reproduces itself as modern through liberal, secular governance. Chamedes’s work should be of keen interest to scholars of religion and American foreign relations because it widens and deepens the existing literature by associating “religion” in studies of international relations with an ecclesiastical institution, its internal and external intellectual productions, and its engagement with multiple states rather than with an individual, their social community, and personal devotional commitments within the frame of a nation-state. What makes this work so thought-provoking is that it implicitly challenges the popular grammar of and implicit biases for describing and prescribing religion in international relations. The “religious” figure and body in A Twentieth-Century Crusade is not a “faith-based” “non-state actor” seeking to share gospel stories or convert others, but rather a state actor (made possible through the Church and its concordat diplomacy) focused on further developing its legal power and political authority, rather than expressing its religiosity or sharing its faith.

A Twentieth-Century Crusade belongs on scholars’ reading lists for comparative religion and history of religion, offering an important historical test case in how a global religious institution imagines and reproduces itself as modern through liberal, secular governance.

Observing a shift in the political and strategic axis on which the world turned, the Church embraced new terms of engagement. It submitted itself to, and organized itself around, international law, a body of legal texts, a distinct polity, and social reality purported to be the source of its demise. Chamedes replicates the Vatican’s assessment of international law as its “enemy” while demonstrating it was quite the opposite: international law proved to be its saving grace. The grammar and praxis of liberalism gave the Vatican an equal seat at the table of global politics while also reconstructing the way in which the Vatican understood itself. As Chamedes describes, the Church sought to “re-Christianize” Europe. But she shows instead how the Church recalibrated what it meant to be a “Christian” nation in Europe by acting as a sovereign nation-state in relation with other nation-states. Chamedes presents this shift as a means to an end: international law gave the Church greater power against its other enemies, liberal internationalism, socialism, and, later, communism. This twentieth-century “crusade” made the Church modern primarily because it used the law, rather than spiritual weapons, to fight its battles.[1] In this sense, Chamedes strikes an ironic tone with her Crusade: the Church all but solidified a certain notion of the nation-state (“one people, one land, one culture”) as the basic unit of business in the modern political world (7); however, even though Chamedes does not press this point, her work demonstrates how the Church’s efforts also reinforced its Catholic internationalism as the essential form of religion in the modern world. Through concordats, the Vatican taught European nations to hear its voice as the articulation of modern religion, one willing to speak the language of secular international law and self-determination even if its native tongue understood the world in terms that did not necessarily translate. In so doing, the Church legitimized its own “de-privitized” religious authority as more modern than other (presumably, “private”) religions and as a political equal to nation-states.

U.S President Woodrow Wilson and Cardinal Mercier in Mechlin, Belgium in 1919. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Ironically, US President Woodrow Wilson—a person Chamedes identifies as the Church’s enemy—engaged in a similar strategy as a “crusader for democracy” (while also perceiving the Church to be in opposition to him). He too promoted self-determination as an “intimately religious” concept because it was the product of Providence and, relatedly, necessary for what he imagined to be a proper democratic system of government (i.e. one reflective of Christianity as he understood it). As I and Markku Ruotsila have separately shown, he and his supporters sought to “Christianize” the United States through the liberal processes of secular institutions, especially the formation of the League of Nations as a liberal, secular international institution, a mission and policy agenda that would earn resistance from conservative evangelicals. As Europeans took to the streets in advance of the Paris Peace Conference, many demonstrated their support for “a Wilson peace” with parades, protests, and vigils, and with more than a little help from American propaganda campaigns. Christians around the world appealed to Wilson’s vision in order to insert “religion” into the world’s peace. At the same time, anti-colonial movements the world over seized what historian Erez Manela named the “Wilsonian moment” to adopt and adapt Wilson’s rhetoric to their own ends. Even though the idea of national “self-determination” or a league of nations did not originate with Wilson, he came to symbolize such ideas as a proponent of liberal internationalism and used such recognition as leverage against the Church’s efforts to participate in the Paris Peace Conference and the League of Nations. As I show in A Peaceful Conquest, and Michael G. Thompson also demonstrates, he would ultimately disappoint most of his supporters because he insisted the Paris Peace Conference remain a secular affair among equally powerful nation-states, even as he understood such a move to reinforce his sense of Christian internationalism.

In that sense, A Twentieth-Century Crusade suggests the crusading spirit of the Church was not merely about connecting a Catholic present to a Catholic past via concordats or quelling an external “enemy” found in liberal, nation-states as the Vatican claimed, but also perhaps constructing and asserting a certain and specific social reality among competing Christian powers and authorities. The Vatican was not the only religious or Christian actor intervening in the development of a modern, secular internationalizing world. That Wilson and the Church attempted to do so simultaneously, with diverging senses of “Christianizing,” perceiving themselves as in opposition to each other yet similarly embracing public, secular institutions and rituals is worth further reflection. Each side understood the other as symbolizing a step backward rather than progress for the(ir) “Church.” The “crusade” of Twentieth-Century Crusade, then, is not a “holy war” seeking to reconsecrate Europe after secularization reached a critical mass, as the Vatican claimed, nor to reconcile Christians the world over as historian Phillip Jenkins imagined the Great War. The crusade to “re-Christianize” seems to be aimed at achieving public legitimation of religious authority (that is, in this instance, Catholic authority) by whatever means had the most effective social, political, and religious impact. That the Church saw itself as offering a “religious” and Catholic alternative in the process of utilizing international law and the vocabulary of self-determination bears further consideration for understanding both the history of this era and scholars’ approach to religion in international affairs.

[1] T. Jeremy Gunn, Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion; Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War; William Inboden, Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment; Diane Kirby, Religion and the Cold War; Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy.

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Cara Burnidge
Cara Burnidge is associate professor of religion in the Department of Philosophy & World Religions at the University of Northern Iowa. She specializes in the history of religion and U.S. politics in a global context, with special attention to the intersection of religious liberalism, secularism, and U.S. empire. She explores these themes in her research essays, "Religious Influences on U.S. Foreign Policy” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American History, ed. Jon Butler) and “U.S. Foreign Relations and American Religious Liberalism” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American Religious History, ed. John Corrigan), and her book A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order (University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade


In A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe, Giuliana Chamedes presents the heretofore understudied history of Catholic international diplomacy in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Training her attention especially on the periods around the two world wars, Chamedes shows how the Vatican sought to shape the political and social life of Europe by signing concordats—“bilateral treat[ies] that would bind the Church and nation-state together under international law” (3)—with various European nations. These concordats lent legitimacy to both the status of the Vatican as the spiritual and political center of Europe and to the burgeoning nation states that came into being following the first world war and were eager for international recognition. The Vatican’s goal through the signing of these concordats was indeed to “remake Christian Europe” into something that mirrored a medieval past where the Vatican stood at the center of Europe. For these concordats often stipulated that the state would implement laws that reflected Catholic contemporary Catholic doctrine (concerning marriage and divorce, for example) and maintain Catholic educational systems.

During this time period, the Vatican perceived that communism was the primary threat to implementing this goal. During World War I, while the Vatican also expressed anxiety around the rise of political and economic liberalism, as well as socialism, communism was its primary concern. As Chamedes also demonstrates, quite often this anti-communism was imbued with older forms of antisemitism that had been given new life in the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” during this time period. In its bid to combat the rise of communism, Chamedes shows, the Vatican played an active role in shaping the nation-state, defining the boundaries between public and private religion, and demarcating the meanings of the religious and secular.

As the book demonstrates in careful detail, the Vatican’s obsession with communism was in fact what led it to sometimes aid, and at other times remain silent on, the rise of fascism in the lead up to World War II. Indeed, while there were internal debates surrounding how the Vatican should respond to Mussolini and Hitler’s rise, more often than not in its public facing documents the Vatican ignored the atrocities being committed by these leaders, and instead returned to communism as the primary evil that the Church should focus on eliminating. The Vatican’s complicity in the rise of these brutal regimes, and the Holocaust, remains a ghost that haunts the Church to this day.

As Chamedes notes, even if the center of institutional power of the Church did not address the rise of fascism, lay Catholics and theologians did at times speak out, condemning fascism and seeking points of dialogue with communists and socialists. There was indeed during these times “A War for the Soul of Catholicism” as the title of chapter 7 of the book reflects. It is the tension between how one might have wanted the Church to act, and how it did in fact act, that drives two of the responses to this symposium.

Scott Appleby, drawing on Atalia Omer’s concept of the critical caretaker, reflects on how the theologian or scholar of Catholicism might confront and indeed offer alternatives to the authoritarian vision of Catholicism that animated the views of the Vatican during the early- and mid-twentieth century. In his essay, Toussaint Kafahire, himself a priest and theologian, also grapples with these questions and confronts the fact that the Vatican’s political maneuvering led it to make alliances with fascist governments that betrayed what he sees as the true mission of the Church.

Approaching Chamedes’s book as a fellow historian, Paul Hanebrink reflects on the dynamic relationship between political and religious rhetoric. More specifically he contends that it is important to not only attend to the way political rhetoric is often influenced by religious convictions, but also the reverse, that is, how political convictions influence the way one understands religion. He also suggests that even though the official days of concordat diplomacy are now past, the idea of “remaking Christian Europe” survives to this day in figures like Viktor Orbán, the current Prime Minister of Hungary. Cara Burnidge likewise approaches the book as an historian, contending that Chamedes’s book can be of aid to religious studies scholars seeking to understand how religious institutions have changed in the modern world in light of novel political and social situations. Bringing her own research on Woodrow Wilson into conversation with Chamedes, she also suggests that different notions of “Christianizing” were contending with one another at this time.

Finally, in her response, Chamedes reflects on the notion of the critical caretaker, as well as Burnidge’s concern with competing notions of Christianity and Hanebrink’s attention to the dynamic ways that political and religious language have influenced one another.

In his first blog post for the Contending Modernities project, Scott Appleby wrote, “Neither Catholics, Muslims, or Seculars have been passive recipients of the developments and processes associated with modernity. Rather, each has shaped, resisted, accommodated and adapted to the growing explanatory powers of science; the encompassing reach of the modern nation-state; the differentiation between religion and state, public and private realms; the dynamics of global markets and mass media communication; and other constituent elements of ‘the modern world.’” By uncovering key dynamics of how powerful representatives of the Catholic tradition “shaped, resisted, and accommodated” the modern nation state, and indeed continues to do so, Chamedes’s work, and this symposium, continue the work of unpacking the forces of secularism, religion, and modernity.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Catholicism in Need of Critical Caretaking


Handover of the Saar territory, March 1, 1935. Catholic clergy and Nazi officials, including Joseph Goebbels (far right) and Wilhelm Frick (second from right) perform salute. Photo Credit: Heinrich Hoffmann, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.

The muffled applause you hear emanating from U.N. headquarters, and from the diminishing number of world capitals whose leaders still believe, is offered in quiet celebration of the centennial of the creation of the League of Nations, in 1920. Ah, what a time it was for the internationalists of every stripe!  A year earlier, in 1919, Lenin had founded the Comintern in Moscow; not to be outdone, his rivals for leadership of “world labor” established their own Labor and Socialist International four years later. Around the same time, fledgling non-communist democratic parties across Europe began finding one another, and decided to jump aboard the “crossing borders” bandwagon; in 1925, they grouped together under the non-pithy banner of The International Secretariat of Democratic Parties Inspired by Christianity.

Most of these contenders, save the Communist International, turned out to be pretenders. Bereft of a hardy universalist ideology to sustain their ambition and blunt fissiparous infighting, they sputtered after a season or so in the sun. Only one nations-based transnational organization, an experienced one at that, had the vision, the ideology, and the cadres of devout to give Moscow a run for its money as a would-be world hegemon—the Roman Catholic Church. When it took shape at the height of the First World War, Catholic Internationalism, writes Giuliana Chamedes, was “a set of practices (crossing borders, forging connections), a way of seeing the world, and a vision for the future. Its claims dovetailed well with the Church’s longtime espousal of universalism . . .[and] its purpose was to use new and technologically advanced means to centralize power and glue members to Rome, even as it provided an infrastructure for increased sociability within national bounds” (6).

In A Twentieth-Century Crusade, her new history of Vatican diplomacy and statecraft from 1914 to 1960, Chamedes details how all the Pope’s men sent about to reclaim Europe from the clutches of aggressively secular-liberal forces, first through a series of concordats (bilateral treaties recognized by international law) with sympathetic Catholic nation-states and early “marriages of convenience” with right wing ethnonationalists emerging in Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, and Spain; and, then, in the 1930s, through a transnational (eventually global) campaign to counter “atheistic Communism” —Catholic schoolchildren never knew it as mere “Communism”—via alliances with (anti-liberal, antisemitic) fascist regimes, support for anti-communist lay activist networks, and the suppression of anti-fascist Catholic leaders.

The strategy, Chamedes notes, was remarkably effective. While not quite endorsing the claims of Catholic partisans at the time that Rome had become “’the seat of the mightiest Internationale the world has ever seen,’” she concludes that the Vatican “did not lose the battle with modernity,” but rather militated effectively against the separation of private and public spheres in much of Europe and “successfully de-privatized religion” during the interwar years (6–7).

In A Twentieth-Century Crusade, her new history of Vatican diplomacy and statecraft from 1914 to 1960, Chamedes details how all the Pope’s men sent about to reclaim Europe from the clutches of aggressively secular-liberal forces, first through a series of concordats (bilateral treaties recognized by international law) with sympathetic Catholic nation-states and early “marriages of convenience” with right wing ethnonationalists.

Grounded in extensive archival sources, Chamedes’s history is particularly strong in demonstrating how the concordats and related socio-political negotiations, settlements, and strenuously cultivated relationships between Church and state officials were designed to weave a thick web of collusion across key dimensions of cultural, civic, and “private” life. The goal was to ensure not only ecclesiastical privilege in the partner states, but also enforcement of the Church’s teachings on marriage, divorce, education, religious observance, and the status of religious “outsiders” (i.e., Jews and Protestants) in return for the legitimacy afforded the regimes by the Church’s endorsement.

Fascist atrocities during the Spanish Civil War and World War II did not move the Church to recalibrate the basic strategy informing Catholic Internationalism; so intent was the Vatican on “protecting the Church” that even the horrors of the Holocaust, not lost on Pope Pius XII, failed to scandalize Catholic diplomats and other officials into reconsidering the rights of religious minorities and championing religious freedom.

Not all Catholics overlooked the tragic dimensions of the Vatican’s focus on ecclesiastical prerogatives, of course; as historian James Chappel has shown and Chamedes acknowledges, as early as the 1930s a generation of lay Catholic intellectuals, along with a number of pioneering priests and theologians working independently of the Vatican, took up pressing questions of labor, economics, and politics “from below,” thereby retrieving and updating an earlier Catholic approach to the social order and laying the groundwork for what Catholics of the period following the Second Vatican Council (1962-’65) would refer to as the Church’s “social justice” mission.

. . . So intent was the Vatican on “protecting the Church” that even the horrors of the Holocaust, not lost on Pope Pius XII, failed to scandalize Catholic diplomats and other officials into reconsidering the rights of religious minorities and championing religious freedom.

And, in one of the ironies that fascinates students of Catholicism—not least, because they are not quite ironies but, rather, the reconciliation of seeming paradoxes embedded in the Church’s spiritual DNA—Pius XII himself promulgated two encyclicals in 1943 which eventually served to undermine, or at least contest, the notion of the Church as a worldly hegemon rather than a (merely) spiritual kingdom. The encyclicals were Mystici Corporis Christi, which promoted the Biblical image of the Church as a mystical communion—not merely, or even primarily, as a hierarchical institution; and, Divino Afflante Spiritu, which authorized new translations of the Bible into vernacular languages, and cautiously opened the way for “critical,” historically informed biblical studies.

Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli, prior to his election to Pope, at a procession celebrating the 900 years of the city of Bamberg, July 1924. Photo Credit: Deutsches Bundesarchiv.

Owing in part to these emerging alternatives, and to the postwar rise of Christian Democratic parties across Western Europe, which established a measure of independence from Rome, the Catholic Internationale eventually lost steam and collapsed.

All of this raises trenchant questions for Catholics trying to make sense of—account for—the Church’s scandalous dalliance with fascism and antisemitism. How could “the Bride of Christ,” the “perfect, unblemished eternal society,” “the kingdom of God on Earth”—labels for the Church familiar to Catholic parochial school students during the period in question, and beyond—fail so egregiously to uphold the standards of basic human decency, not to mention fundamental principles and tenets of Christian ethics?

Catholic intellectuals seeking to address this puzzle might take a page from the writings of Atalia Omer, whose struggles with the mounting ethnoreligious nationalism and socio-political exclusivism of Zionism led her to call for the constructive reimagining of Jewish identity and the reframing of the Jewish ethical compass. Are Catholic scholars of religion, in particular, called to the role of “critical caretaker” of their own contested, internally plural, ethically ambiguous, and yet spiritually profound tradition? Their religious, cultural, and historical acumen seem poised to serve the goals of analysis, understanding, and “explanation,” yes, but also recovery and renewal.

How could “the Bride of Christ”. . . fail so egregiously to uphold the standards of basic human decency, not to mention fundamental principles and tenets of Christian ethics?

A big and complicated project, to be sure. But let us begin to sketch its outlines, modestly, by extrapolating beyond Chamedes’s crisp analysis, with its necessary focus on high-level diplomacy, national politics, Vatican intrigue, and the mobilization and social organization of Catholic anticommunist youth movements and related organizations. While Chamedes in her attention to these topics does not overlook the piece of the puzzle which millions of twentieth century Catholics would grasp intuitively as its centerpiece, she does not quite capture its explanatory significance. I refer to the priority of belief—in this case, the widespread, bred-in-the-bone belief in the supernatural as the controlling and ordering reality, a matter of faith held reflexively and, well, infallibly, by Roman Catholics of the era. Absent a feel for the metaphysical import of the Catholics v. Commies drama—this was a face-off of the highest consequence: Good v. Evil, God v. Satan—one cannot fully understand the extremes to which the Church was willing to go in order to prevail.

Absent a feel for the metaphysical import of the Catholics v. Commies drama—this was a face-off of the highest consequence: Good v. Evil, God v. Satan—one cannot fully understand the extremes to which the Church was willing to go in order to prevail.

Here is the hard core of the tradition with which the critical caretaker of “the Catholic thing” (in Rosemary Haughton’s memorable phrase) must grapple: we Catholics really believed in spirits and angels, virgin births and a crucified god, Heaven and Hell—and in the utter inconsequence of merely mundane politics and earthly travails when measured against the fate of the immortal soul. What is more, and perhaps more difficult for “merely” secular scholars (those not infected with the crazy-making virus of hard-core religious belief) to accept: even the popes and scheming prelates and professional diplomats and worldly bureaucrats were, first and foremost, true believers. This does not mean that their machinations were not also about power. But the calculus of power, this argument goes, was different than, say, Lenin’s or Stalin’s. And it was this overweening religious imaginary which sniffed out, correctly, that the ultimate threat was not mere mundane fascism, with its nominally theistic sympathies, but rather atheistic communism—“the earthly face of Satan himself,” as Chamedes rightly puts it (5).

The Catholic scholar who is critical caretaker would also employ her historical literacy to recognize and underscore the fact that the Vatican had been preparing for this cosmic struggle long before the Comintern threw down the internationalist, world-hegemon gauntlet. Decades before Chamedes begins her story, the Bishop of Rome had elected to sacralize and enforce the affinity between revealed Truth (encoded in creed, ritual, and dogma—the objects of “belief” for Catholics), on the one hand, and the institutional Church, in its rigidly hierarchical and ultramontane authority structure, on the other. As Ann Taves documents in her history of Roman Catholic devotional practices in mid-nineteenth century America, The Household of Faith, an earlier Pius (Pope Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878) had employed “modern technologies,” especially mass-produced printed devotional manuals, laced with prayers for the Supreme Pontiff alongside invocations of the saints, as part of his campaign to set the Church decisively against the forces of liberalism and secularism. Distributed across the Catholic world within and beyond Europe, the pamphlets helped to conflate, in the popular Catholic imagination, the prerogatives of the pope and the heart of the faith itself.

The Catholic scholar who is critical caretaker would also employ her historical literacy to recognize and underscore the fact that the Vatican had been preparing for this cosmic struggle long before the Comintern threw down the internationalist, world-hegemon gauntlet.

The next Pius who came along (Pope Pius X, 1903–1914 as pope) made abundantly clear that new respect in modern secular culture afforded to the individual subject and personal experience was an error no less pernicious than the wooly-headed notion that non-Catholics had a right to vote in a properly ordered democracy. On September 8, 1907 the Vatican published the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis: On the Doctrines of the Modernists, one in a series of official documents and rulings promulgated during his pontificate as part of a sustained crusade against “modernism,” which Pascendi called “the synthesis of all heresies” (para. 39). Subsequently, priests were required to swear an oath against modernism, and vigilance committees were established in dioceses around the world to root it out. At stake was no less than church-state union, the radical transcendence of the Divine, and the authority of the Church.

According to the pope, God’s absolute sovereignty over human affairs was being compromised by certain modern Biblical exegetes and critical historians whose writings downplayed, or even denied outright, external or “extrinsic” revelation from God, in favor of human “experience” as the source of sacred truth. Holy Scripture and Church dogma have emerged over time as the result of evolving human awareness under shifting circumstances. The sources of revelation, in short, were reduced to fallible historical artifacts subject to “development.” Were the modernists to prevail, Pascendi warned, the authority of the magisterium or (and, by extension, the infallibility of the pope) would be threatened; so, too, would the “properly ordered” political society.

These earlier chapters in the history of Catholicism’s turn to technologically enhanced, modern forms of authoritarianism provide a key to interpreting the alliance with fascism. The parallels between the wielding of power by authoritarian fascist leaders and by the nineteenth and early twentieth-century popes, who rejected what they saw as the “absolute madness” of religious freedom and religious pluralism, have not gone unnoticed by historians of many and no religious backgrounds.

Perhaps it falls to critical caretakers of the Catholic tradition, then, to recover and recuperate Catholic narratives, histories, and self-understandings which, while grounded in enduring marks of the tradition such as the priority of belief, resisted narrow and absolutist interpretations of how such affirmations might be understood and practiced.

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Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1985) is the Marilyn Keough Dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Appleby, a professor of history at Notre Dame, is a scholar of global religion who has been a member of Notre Dame’s faculty since 1994. He graduated from Notre Dame in 1978 and received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Chicago. From 2000-2014, he served as the Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Appleby co-directs, with Ebrahim Moosa and Atalia Omer, Contending Modernities, a major multi-year project to examine the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and secular forces in the modern world.
Theorizing Modernities article

Mitigating Punishment’s Overreach


Protest against solitary confinement and in favor of the Halt Bill which would place restrictions on the use of solitary confinement in prisons in New York state. June 23, 2016. Photo Credit: Flickr User Felton Davis.

Background

As an American citizen and a historian of Islamic legal traditions, I have been thinking a great deal about the nexus between punishment and mercy in both contemporary Anglo-American criminal jurisprudence (as part of a secularized liberal democracy) and classical Islamic criminal jurisprudence. Partly on the basis of this reflection, I want to discuss the extent to which the opinions of pre-modern Muslim legal authorities on the issue of the just relationship between punishment and mercy can contribute to discussions on criminal justice reform in the United States. To be clear, the moral justification of punishing human beings is a neuralgic topic, one that requires deeply reflective and serious attention. It is necessary regardless of whether one accounts for capital, corporeal, or non-corporeal (e.g., prison) forms of punishment. Moreover, criminal justice issues are not only a U.S. problem. Legal systems in various Muslim-majority countries have not fared more justly (see for example, Tahir Wasti’s The Application of Islamic Criminal Law in Pakistan). But returning to the U.S. case, the question I have been asking myself is: What happens when criminal laws and their associated punishments appear to violate the very standards of justice a legal system is theoretically designed to uphold? The Eighth Amendment here in the U.S. explicitly prohibits the use of “cruel and unusual punishment.” But as an example, a felony conviction in the U.S. criminal justice system often comes with what I refer to as overreaching harms—consequences that are overly severe and go above and beyond the punishment itself (e.g., imprisonment).

The excessive nature of punishment in U.S. criminal laws is important for several reasons, one being that they have been instrumentalized to perpetuate a brutal race-based social and economic caste system designed to oppress African Americans and other people of color (Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of our Discontent). As Michelle Alexander notes in The New Jim Crow, the socio-economic control is nothing more than a reconfigured extension of Jim Crow laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The clearest expression of this racist structure can be found in the mass incarceration of people of color. “No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities [as the United States]” (Alexander, 8). Since the murder of George Floyd, more Americans than ever before have begun to acutely examine the legacy of the U.S. criminal justice system. By taking this deeper look, we have the space to not only see the ways in which overreaching harms have been baked into U.S. jurisprudence (read: modern and secular jurisprudence) to perpetuate injustices such as racial segregation, we also have the opportunity to explore possible ways in which faith-based legal traditions—that are frequently neglected—could actually have something to teach us.

Islamic Criminal Law: A Case Study

I begin with reference to the primary source of law according to Islamic jurisprudence: the Qur’ān. A verse commands flogging as punishment for unlawful sexual intercourse (zinā): “As for the woman and man who commit unlawful sexual intercourse, flog each of them 100 times and do not take into account any mercy…” (Q. 24:2). Several Muslim exegetes believed that the second provision, which appears to stipulate that no mercy can be extended to the offenders, categorically prohibits any alteration. For example, al-Ḍaḥḥāk (d. 724 CE) interprets “do not take into account any mercy” to mean that the fixed punishment of flogging cannot be vacated.[1] Another exegete, Muqātil (d. 767 CE), writes that the clause is a reference to the entire category of the fixed punishments and that they cannot be suspended.[2] For these two commentators (among others), Q. 24:2 seemingly indicates that the punishment cannot be dropped under any circumstances.

By contrast, various Muslim jurists were prepared to reconsider the punishment in certain situations based on what appear to be normative standards of morality and justice. Their positions were based on deliberations about the unintended consequences that could emerge from attempting an unqualified implementation of the flogging directive. One hypothetical case analyzed drew upon circumstances in which flogging could lead to the offender’s death, such as when they suffered from a potential physical comorbidity. Muḥammad al-Shaybānī (d. 805 CE) opined that in such cases the offender should be imprisoned until they physically recuperate.[3] Ibn ‘Alī b. al-Haddād (d. 1397 CE) wrote that when a sick person is flogged, they may well be enduring more harm than they are obligated to receive[4]—the implication of his opinion (and of al-Shaybānī’s) being that the person cannot be punished in the manner prescribed by the Qur’ān. In sum, these legal authorities were willing to take into account an overreaching harm. Although flogging is a divinely prescribed sanction, they found reasons for its mitigation.

Some Muslim jurists used a report about the Prophet Muḥammad according to which he ordered modifications to the form and number of lashes. Reportedly, a physically weak man was convicted of illicit sexual intercourse. The Prophet, in accordance with Q. 24:2, ordered that the man be flogged 100 times. Those who knew the offender protested the instruction based on information the Prophet did not yet possess. They told the Prophet that were the offender to be flogged 100 lashes, the latter would likely die because his emaciated body could not withstand the punishment. Upon hearing this, the Prophet amended the Qur’ānic directive by stating that the offender be struck once with a raceme of a palm tree in which there were 100 fruit-stalks and then released. To account for overreaching harm(s), the Prophet’s modification of the 100-flog mandate appeals to the spirit of a law rather than to its letter. The jurist al-Shāfi‘ī (d. 820 CE) used the report to take the position that the form and number of lashes must be modified when an offender is too physically weak to withstand flogging and the punishment’s implementation could lead to death (i.e., excessive harm unintended by the prescribed punishment).[5] In short, if there is any possibility of punitive overreach, the punishment must be changed.

Excessive Harm in the U.S. Criminal Justice System

The criminal justice system in the U.S. purports to dispense punishment equally to all members of society. However, behind this veneer of “blind” objectivity coupled with a theoretical prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment,” lies a seemingly intentional disregard of any overreaching harm that results from the delivery of a punishment. For example, there is no shortage of studies documenting the severe psychological effects of solitary confinement. These effects include a heightened degree of anxiety, depression, anger, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, and obsessive thoughts (Metzner and Fellner, “Solitary Confinement”). Confinement in isolation produces cognitive impairment and affective disturbances in perpetuity (Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects”). Yet despite the overwhelming evidence about both the short-term and the long-term consequences of confinement in isolation, most states continue to use it. Solitary confinement is a form of extra-judicial punishment. It causes psychological and physical damage entirely unaccounted for in the prisoner’s adjudicated sentence and in excess of the prescribed baseline punishment of group confinement.

For the criminal legal system to claim it is just, it has no choice but to be governed by principles of fairness that must attend to the real possibility of excessive harm.

Collateral consequences resulting from criminal convictions also illustrate, as a general matter, the ways in which punishments borne in the U.S. criminal justice system result in overreaching harms and, indeed, are debilitating. On October 14th, 2020, the Sentencing Project issued a publication according to which approximately 5.2 million former incarcerates would not be allowed to vote in the 2020 national election. Felony disenfranchisement, the inability to secure employment because of conviction, the ineligibility to receive student loans and accrued government benefits, among other things, represent symptoms of what can legitimately be viewed as an institutionalized penal infrastructure designed to facilitate harm that goes beyond the parameters of an offender’s adjudicated sentence.

An Exchange of Ideas?

What ideas from Muslim jurists might we draw upon when discussing possible ways to reform the U.S. criminal justice system in light of its normalized overreach of harms ensuing from punishments? Muslim legal authorities were, when faced merely with the potential for a punishment’s overreach, fully prepared to alter or vacate the sanction they understood to be divinely commanded. They were willing to do this despite the fact that the plain sense of the verse evidently mandates the punishment regardless of circumstances. The principle that appears to undergird the opinions of these jurists is that no criminal law can be construed as anything close to justice if it contravenes normative standards of fair treatment. The implication is that such a violation would compromise the moral standing of the entire legal system itself. It calls into question the legitimacy of its raison d’être: the just regulation of human behavior. For the criminal legal system to claim it is just, it has no choice but to be governed by principles of fairness that must attend to the real possibility of excessive harm.

The current U.S. criminal justice system punishes unreasonably. To borrow from Erin Kelly (The Limits of Blame, p. 168), it should be morally unacceptable for us to allow a system to hold a person responsible for their actions when the system’s actors themselves are deserving of blame for doing unjust things. One approach towards a more just system would be to implement a core principle that when there is clear evidence of overreaching harms resulting from a particular punishment, then it must be altered or abandoned. While the genesis of U.S. jurisprudence and Islamic jurisprudence have varied beginnings and are not grounded in the same ethical or theological commitments or socio-historical contexts (e.g., Muslim jurists were not operating within a system that enslaved Black people through laws and policies), there are possible ways in which a meaningful exchange of ideas can take place that allows us to learn something from a tradition that is not our own.

[1] al-Ḍaḥḥāk b. Muzāḥim al-Hilālī, Tafsīr al-Ḍaḥḥāk, ed. Muḥammad Shurkī Aḥmad al-Zāwītī, 2 vols. (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 1999), 2:607, no. 1,716.

[2] Muqātil b. Sulaymān, Tafsīr Muqātil b. Sulaymān, ed. ‘Abd Allāh Maḥmūd Shihāta, 5 vols. (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Tārīkh al-‘Arabī, 2002), 3:182.

[3] Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī, al-Aṣl, ed. Mehmet Boynukalın, 13 vols. (Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm, 2012), 7:187.

[4] Ibn ‘Alī b. Muḥammad b. al-Haddād, al-Jawhar al-nayyira sharḥ mukhtaṣar al-Qudūrī fī furū‘a al-ḥanafiyya, ed. Ilyās Qablān, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya, 2006), 2:380.

[5] Muḥammad b. Idrīs al-Shāfi‘ī, al-Umm, ed. Rif‘at Fawzī ‘Abd al-Muṭṭalib, 11 vols. (Alexandria: Dār al-Wafā’, 2001), 7:344.

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Syed Atif Rizwan
Syed Atif Rizwan, PhD is Assistant Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies and Director of the Catholic-Muslim Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union. His research interests include history of Islamic law; hadith studies; medieval and post-modern theories of punishment; and interreligious dialogue and studies.
Global Currents article

Notes on the Coup in Myanmar: Karmic Kingship, Legitimacy, and Sovereignty


Protester holds signs featuring images of Aung San Suu Kyi and Min Aung Hlaing during February 14, 2021 protest in Myanmar. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo Credit: MgHla (aka) Htin Linn Aye.

For more than half a century, Myanmar’s military generals have based their political legitimacy on the claim that they were protectors of the realm, caretakers of Buddhism, and defenders of the people’s sovereignty in the evolution toward self-governance. In Burmese Buddhism, power is thought to be activated through moral acts and prior karmic inheritance that transforms the self and reality. Political authority is thus a sign of personal karmic election. Pre-colonial ideas of classical Buddhist kingship have endured throughout post-Independence political arrangements, as every ruler has sought to demonstrate their standing as a spiritually potent (hpoun) sovereign. From this principle emerges the notion of karmic kingship, a concept that can help us interpret current events in Myanmar.

An Unstable Diarchy

Myanmar’s fragile ten-year experiment with democracy appeared to draw to a shocking close in the pre-dawn hours of February 1, 2021. Following an electoral repudiation of the military’s (Tatmadaw’s) proxy Union Solidarity Development Party in the November 2020 elections, commander-in-chief, Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, on the back of the claim of a “stolen election,” invoked Article 417 of the Constitution and imposed martial law. Although Article 417 states that only the President can declare a state of emergency, the military appropriated this right for itself in the name of protecting the people’s sovereignty. Min Aung Hlaing contends that Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy party have been insufficiently committed to democracy. If necessary, he announced, the Constitution itself could be revoked.

Myanmar’s democratic Constitution was drafted by the military government in 2008 subsequent to the Saffron Revolution, in which the military violently suppressed monks’ protests. These events were followed soon after by the devastating Cyclone Nargis.

Cyclone Nargis resulted in more than 140,000 deaths. The event was made by interpreters to conform to folk beliefs that natural disasters are a consequence of the actions of evil kings who disrupt the moral order and law (Dhamma). Sovereign and state are held to be in alignment; karmic effects of a king’s actions are visited upon the people. The storm was interpreted as a cosmic repudiation of General Than Shwe in particular, who had earned the nickname “Monk-killer Than Shwe.” Rumor had it that at any moment he might be swallowed up by the ground and dragged down to the hell realms.

The General did not take these prophesies lightly. On the advice of his personal astrologer,[1] a constitutional referendum was rammed through with a hasty election before the “waxing of the next moon”—even while the dead remained unburied and hundreds of thousands more were displaced and starving. Rumor and gossip, which had become the media for vox populi during half a century of repression, averred that the karmic stores sustaining Than Shwe’s power had “dried up,” and with it his legitimacy to rule. Than Shwe countered these claims with merit-making activities, pagoda construction, and offertories to the Sangha (monks). He had these efforts reported upon ceaselessly in the national news media. Rumors also circulated that the General was resorting to black magic rites and “reversal of karma” rituals (yadaya) in the attempt to rejuvenate and sustain his power stores.

It is in the context of these events that the 2008 Constitution needs to be understood, i.e., as a desperate attempt by the military to stabilize its power at the very moment they had lost their mandate as legitimate representatives of the moral karmic order. The claim, in 2008 as today, that they alone can grant or revoke democratic civilian power-sharing is as much a statement about the de facto truth of ongoing military might as an assertion of the karmic legitimacy of its leaders.

The Constitution, which was to enshrine the people’s sovereignty, therefore unsurprisingly contained the caveat of mandatory power-sharing with the military. It gave the appearance of a transition away from military rule, while in reality it was a re-entrenchment of power by alternate means. In result, after 2008, rulership of the country could be described as an unstable diarchy: not one government, but two, each with its own portfolios, registers of authority, and claims to legitimacy.

Competing Sources of Legitimacy

Ostensibly, shared civilian-military rule after 2008 meant a stepwise lessening of authoritarian rule. Western observers tended to regard the post-2008 period as an almost inexorable transition to democracy. The country was now “open for business,” as President Obama declared; the long-frustrated hopes of a subjugated people would be realized at last. In practice, politics proceeded as usual in conformity with Burmese Buddhist principles concerning the sources of power and conditions for political legitimacy. Through these means, and by periodic threat of force, the military managed to maintain its grip on the leash of fledgling democracy. Today as well, the country’s political future remains subject to the politics of legitimacy defined by the attempt of those vying for power to demonstrate karmic election to worldly authority.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s political worldview has, because of this unobvious context, often been misinterpreted by outside observers. By now it should be more evident that she has been negotiating between two divergent models for political legitimacy and sovereignty. On the one hand are western principles of human rights and democracy, on the other is karmic kingship.

During her house arrest between 1989 and 2010, Aung San Suu Kyi was extolled as a symbol for human rights and democracy and as a witness to their ongoing violation under authoritarian rule. For the Burmese Buddhist majority, the desire for freedom from military rule has not always been identical to the desire for democracy, however, as western journalists have assumed. Generations had grown up isolated from the world under authoritarian rule; their imaginations of freedom drew more proximally from Buddhist sources than from western ones. Exposed as a student at Oxford to western democratic ideals, as a politician Aung San Suu Kyi sought to translate and align these to domestic Burmese Buddhist political culture. Attempting to thread that needle while remaining subject to the military’s de facto minority rule required skills of statecraft that apparently exceeded her capabilities.

Upon ascent to political power, Aung San Suu Kyi undertook a pragmatic approach to instituting a shared framework of the rule of law and establishing its procedures in Myanmar’s Constitution. Her aim to change the Tatmadaw-scripted Constitution, and indeed to “send the military back to the barracks,” put her in direct competition with the Tatmadaw’s design to retain power. Her efforts to solidify her personal power and that of her NLD Party proceeded on the one hand through the ballot box. On the other, she had to vie in the accustomed Burmese Buddhist pattern of elite rivalry among political contenders for the right to rule through demonstrations of their karmic accord with moral Buddhist order.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s effort to carve out more space for civilian representation in government with the eventual goal of reforming the 2008 Constitution and subordinating the military required broad public support from the majority Burmese Buddhist public whose devotion was not primarily to democratic ideals but to the universalistic ethic of Dhamma, the moral law. This split goal or orientation resulted in the compromise the world witnessed as Aung San Suu Kyi’s tacit endorsement of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state. Apparently, Aung San Suu Kyi compromised democratic principles of human rights in the belief that only once the Bamar majority became free of military power could ethnic minority freedoms be addressed.

Protestor holds up three-finger salute during a protest against the military coup in Myanmar. The three-finger salute originates in book and film series The Hunger Games as a signal of rebellion against tyrannical rule. It was also widely used during protests in Thailand in 2014 and has been a popular symbol throughout Southeast Asia. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo Credit: VOA Burmese.

The power struggle between the Tatmadaw (military) and NLD (civilian) governments evolved into an elite struggle with its own political dynamics that locked them in an arrangement of preserving the existential status of the other in order to preserve themselves. This is because it was the military that ultimately afforded civilian governance the space to operate, while the civilian government gave democratic and political legitimacy to the military in the international sphere. This would explain why Aung San Suu Kyi has been willing to speak in support of the military, even going so far as to shield them at the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide.

On the populist side, Aung San Suu Kyi abjured human rights in favor of espousing illiberal popular beliefs about the priority of protecting the religion against imagined enemies such as the Muslims and Rohingya—a classic obligation of a Burmese Buddhist king. (Although, it should be noted, that this particular nationalist and xenophobic version of Buddhist “caretaking” was not a necessary condition of Buddhist statecraft. Rather, it was a strain promoted and enflamed by the military who sought to present themselves as Buddhist defenders and to divide support for Aung San Suu Kyi either by exposing her as insufficiently Buddhist in her desire to promote Democracy or to expose her to the International community as insufficiently democratic in her desire to promote Buddhist nationalism.) To this extent, Aung San Suu Kyi participated in the logic and practice of karmic kingship. In order to maintain her political power, she prioritized protection of the Buddhist realm in order to sustain support of the majority she required to rule by democratic criteria of the sovereignty of the people.

The rivalry with military leader Min Aung Hlaing was also personal. Voters in the 2020 elections sought to shift the balance of power decisively toward civilian rule, and for a time Aung San Suu Kyi looked poised to succeed at shifting the balance of power to the favor of her ruling party. Min Aung Hlaing, who in July faces mandatory retirement from his position as head of the military, reportedly approached Aung San Suu Kyi requesting that she offer him the presidency in the new Parliament (a role decided upon by Parliamentarians and not by popular vote). She reportedly rejected his request, effectively blocking him from achieving any path to political power either within the military or the government. The move humiliated the General. Moreover, with his name specifically targeted in the ICJ Report as responsible for crimes against humanity, the status of his family’s vast (ill gotten) businesses was likewise threatened. He was politically, personally, and financially cornered. The only path forward was to revoke democracy and presume the path of a world conquering king.

Where Does Karmic Kingship Come from?

Pre-colonial political culture saw the rise and fall of kings as directly related to the store of their hpon, a karmic source of spiritual potency accumulated through meritorious deeds supporting the religion and the monkhood, sangha. The sovereign was mimetically equated with the Buddhist state such that Myanmar’s 800-year history of kingship was simultaneously a history of the preservation and expansion of the Buddha’s teachings and sacred realm, the sasana.[2]

Monk posing with a former Myanmar king and a wizard statue.

Following the rupture of Buddhist kingship under British colonialism, Burma’s (later Myanmar’s) governments all sought political legitimacy in Buddhist monarchical terms, continuing the moral order and causative criteria that had governed Burmese Buddhist ideas of power and authority for centuries prior. In modern times, too, the association of royal symbols with modern statecraft is not just a pairing in the metaphorical sense. Each of Myanmar’s post-Independence military rulers have laid claim to being reincarnations of previous Myanmar kings or bodhisattva kings prophesized to come; in other words, they have acted as pretenders to the throne.

The first post-Independence prime minister U Nu’s vision of a Buddhist welfare society, for instance, drew on ideas of bodhisattva kings whose future Buddhahood certified their worthiness to rule. Drawing on cultural myths and symbolism of the Ashokan Buddhist kingship model in which the state was expanded through conquest, pacification, and Buddhist conversion, U Nu’s military successors drew on a kingship model as well; the state saw its role in terms of unifying and protecting those seen as belonging to the greater Burmese Buddhist order. Dissemination of Buddhism is a virtuous, legitimate undertaking for a king, and the unification (and subordination) of peoples to a national idea of Burmese Buddhist identity was iterated in this model.

Conclusion

Myanmar has a long way to go before it can complete the unfinished business of nation-state building that will entail integrating the various ethnic minorities in a federal democracy, defining who is a citizen, establishing the conditions of authority, and affirming the rule of law. At stake in the current confrontation are the rules of the political game itself, about what kind of political system Myanmar is to have. What we are seeing is not just a contest between authoritarianism and democracy, which it also is, but a contest between two distinct ideas of sovereignty, one based on the will of the people and the other based on the idea of karmic kingship.

[1] See also Andrew Selth, Interpreting Myanmar: A Decade of Analysis.

[2] For more background information on this topic, see Aung- Michael Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma,  and Ingrid Jordt, Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power.

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Ingrid Jordt
Ingrid Jordt is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Program for Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her past and current research has concerned processes of political legitimation, lay/monastic relations in Buddhist Myanmar and Buddhist meditation movements in Mainland Southeast Asia. Her principal field site is Burma/Myanmar, where she has been working since 1988, but she has conducted research concerning the export of Burmese Vipassana meditation in Thailand, Malaysia and Laos. She is the author of Burma’s Mass Lay Meditation Movement: Buddhism and the Cultural Construction of Power (Ohio University Press, 2007).
 
In addition to her academic research, Ingrid has been engaged in humanitarian projects and has served in an advisory role to US government agencies. In 2007-2008, she formed Burma Rescue, an effort coordinated with civil society groups in Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta region to bring resources to victims of Cyclone Nargis when the military government was blocking aid from entering the country.  
Field Notes article

Madrasa Discourses Free and Online


 

In private conversations the Indian Fiqh Academy of India voiced deep worries that madrasa students were not being prepared to confidently navigate the modern world. In response, Primary Investigator Dr. Ebrahim Moosa, himself a madrasa graduate, developed the Madrasa Discourses project to equip young Islamic studies scholars with the theological and scientific literacies to engage contemporary challenges. After four years of intensive Islamic studies programming with a select group of young theology experts from India and Pakistan, the Madrasa Discourses project took its innovative curriculum global. On February 24th, 2021, the online version of the project was shared with the world. Theologians and religious studies experts from around the globe joined the web launch, including Dr. Kyai Ulil Abshar Abdalla, civil society actor and scholar from Indonesia; Dr. Masooda Bano, Professor at the University of Oxford and expert in Muslim youth perceptions of tradition and modernity; Dr. Usman Bugaje, public intellectual and religious education expert from Nigeria; and Dr. Haroon Sidat, Research Associate at Cardiff University with a focus on Darul Ulooms in the West and madrasa graduate himself.

The online curriculum at madrasadiscourses.nd.edu is free and open to all scholars and students and guides participants through four cumulative semesters on history and the theological tradition, modern science and its relationship to theology, and finally contemporary challenges to the Islamic tradition. Envisioned as a free-standing curriculum or as supplemental materials for existing courses, Madrasa Discourses Web complements and deepens the traditional madrasa education and prepares students to face present-day concerns. Core questions include:

  • If tradition is our guide, do changes in our reconstruction of history today change our relationship to tradition?
  • Does equality require equal human rights?
  • What kind of Islamic theology is possible in a natural universe defined by quantum mechanics and evolution?

Tradition and Modernity:

There is a fear, Dr. Bano noted at web launch, that the Islamic scholarly debate is at risk of losing to the secular modern world. Traditionally-trained scholars are often not able to respond to the needs of modern times, and as such their knowledge and the history they carry can be sidelined. Yet, as Kyai Ulil Abshar Abdalla stated, Islamic theology cannot be conducted without taking into account modern discoveries. It is in service to this balance, to the search for a wholly Islamic path rooted in the past but adaptive to the present, that the Madrasa Discourses program and web curriculum were conceived.

Dr. Bugaje, who joined from Nigeria, explained that it is necessary to reform traditional education to incorporate technology and science. Indeed, he noted, these studies were previously part of the Islamic education, but had been abandoned for some time. Many madrasa students are already paving the way, as Dr. Sidat relayed in his comments on students who pursue a traditional Dars-i Nizami syllabus alongside secular education in the UK. Dr. Sidat highlighted how budding scholars seek out and build upon the “creative potential” of cherished histories and texts, undermining the supposed religious/secular divide in their successful integration of faith learning and secular schooling.

Contending Epistemologies:

To achieve and weave through this “creative potential,” however, requires recognition of fundamentally different worldviews embedded in traditional and modern practices. “How do we navigate different approaches to knowledge?” Dr. Ebrahim Moosa mused. “Knowledge is about perception, the place of revelation and intuitions.” Dr. Bugaje noted that the epistemological divides between traditional religious and modern modes of knowing, with different sources and logics, posed perhaps the deepest challenge to bridging the gap between traditional and Western education.

This is precisely the opening theme of Madrasa Discourses Web: How do we know what we know? The program builds upon core classical Islamic texts to answer these and other questions, turning in this case to classical theologian Abū Manṣūr Māturīdī (d. 944 C.E.) and his treatise Kitāb al-Tawḥīd to explore the relationship between revelation and reason. Māturīdī proposes a method to evaluate competing truth claims and to pursue sources independent of revelation. In fact, as Dr. Ahmed Dallal details in his presentation, Islam, Science, and History: Beginnings, early Islamic jurists used mathematical astronomy to re-orient mosques to the qibla, overriding earlier religious authority.

The same epistemological questions arise again in the section on science, eschewing ahistorical descriptions of contemporary models in favor of an exploration of scientific ways of knowing and how they have changed over time. Only in getting to the heart of the contemporary scientific method and the metaphysical assumptions that underpin it can we step back from scientific triumphalism. From there we may critically assess the distinct or overlapping assumptions that historical and contemporary science makes, vis-à-vis Islamic theology, about the human person, creation, and the divine. It is only in recognizing these distinct logics, to echo Dr. Bugaje, that Islamic studies scholars can knowledgeably engage with modern scientific thought.

Next Steps:

Many questions remained at the end of the launch event. Notably, how can this material be shared with madrasa-educated audiences around the world? The curricular materials are currently in their original languages of Arabic and English; many more students could be reached with translated or endogenous materials in, for example, Bahasa Indonesia, Hausa, and Urdu. And while, as Kyai Ulil emphasized, young people have great energy and interest in ensuring Islam remains vibrant and dynamic, the road to ensuring madrasa-educated scholars have the preparation they need for the contemporary world has only just begun. We thank the John Templeton Foundation for their generous funding in supporting the project thus far!

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Dania Straughan
Dania is Program Manager at the Contending Modernities research initiative, where she oversees operations and contributes to program development. Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies. She is active in efforts to establish restorative justice pathways in her local community, and volunteers to advance grant making for community-led social cohesion programs globally. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, at the Catholic University of Chile.
Theorizing Modernities article

An Afro-Jewish Critique of Jews Against Liberation


Map of Moses’ and the Jews’ journey into exile recorded in Exodus. From John Speed’s The Genealogies Recorded in the Sacred Scriptures (1628). Via Wikimedia Commons.

For years, Marc Ellis has been arguing for the importance of a Jewish theology of liberation. His efforts fall for the most part on deaf ears, except, for example, Atalia Omer’s Days of Awe and Santiago Slabodsky’s Decolonial Judaism. Those interlocutors fall, for the most part, within a paradigm of Jews who are, as Judith Butler would say, “intelligible,” to those who dominate Jewish identity today—namely, Ashkenazi Jews, especially those living in countries such as Australia, Canada, France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Intelligibility in this context refers to forms of appearance, given the rules of legitimate performance, behavior, or embodiment, that makes sense to those perceiving them.

Despite the historical influence of Latin American Liberation Theology, Sephardic Jews, historically the most prominent in the Americas, seem to lack a voice and visibility. To make matters worse, the various rifts across the views of Jews worldwide—or at least Ashkenazi Jews—range not only from the ultra-orthodox to secular, but also from far right to radical left. This is despite earlier tendencies among critics from the right and the left to associate such Jews primarily with liberalism. What, however, if we were to consider other Jewish voices, Jews among Jews who are genuinely “others”?

Afro-Jews and White Jews Reflecting on Pesach

Consider Afro-Jews. What do such Jews reflect on at Seders during the evenings of Pesach (Passover)? The Seder is a ritual meal involving reflection on Shemoth (Names), popularly known through Christianity as the Exodus story of the Israelites’ liberation from enslavement in Kmt (the ancient indigenous people’s name for the country that eventually became, through Greek conquest, Egypt). It is among the binding narratives of Jews, when even secular Jews often take time for such reflection. During this time of the year, regardless of ideological perspectives, Jews today in and outside of the State of Israel simultaneously reflect on the value of liberation. That is, however, also where many Jews divide. It is much easier to reflect on liberation from enslavement in a story reputed to have taken place in Northeast Africa approximately 3,400 years ago, and one in which Moses—the greatest hero and prophet of the Jewish people—and his biological siblings rose to the occasion in actions reverberating over the ages.

Most white Jews (and many white Christians) overlook the story’s philosophical and political significance, however, in favor of the redemptive elements it offers. Moreover, the closing line at the conclusion of all Seders for Jews outside of Israel—“Next year, in Jerusalem . . .”—poses a challenge for Afro-Jews, Arab Jews, and Jews located among Dalits in South Asia. It makes them think of the plight of non-white Jews living in Israel. For some white Jews, the declaration poses challenges of ambivalence and for others it requires summoning the strongest resources of self-evasion or bad faith because they may support struggles for liberation for oppressed peoples in every country except Israel.

Why do I say this?

First, reflection on enslavement doesn’t require a huge leap for Afro-Jews. Though much of Jewish history has been whitewashed as Euromodernity offered European Jews possibilities of assimilation in the former colonies through promises of racial transformation, the fact of the matter is that the ancient, technically pre-Jewish people of the Exodus narrative (“Hebrews,” “Israelites,” and “Jews” are not identical), were clearly East African and West Asian. This is the case even accounting for, in today’s parlance, “racial mixture.” That combination makes these people unequivocally, in today’s understanding, people of color. Today’s hegemonic white Jewish populations connect with such ancient peoples, then, in the way Germanic peoples imagine themselves the descendants of ancient Mediterranean peoples from whom they claim to inherit a classical past. Some may be their biological descendants, but not all and probably not most.

White Jewish connection with ancient Israelites is mostly symbolic, and when they attempt to make it otherwise, they do so by eliding history and basic facts. This is made easier by simply rewriting the past as white. This whitening emerges from a failure to learn not only the ancient history of East Africa and West Asia, but also crucial moments in Jewish history, such as the events of the first few hundred years after the fall of the Second Temple of Jerusalem and the unfortunate prohibitions against exogamy enacted in the 4th century CE by the Roman Emperor Constantine. The Judeans who became citizens of the Ancient Roman Empire were a proselytizing people, initially ranging from 150,000 (some critics say 4 million), whose efforts produced about 8,000,000 Jews among the Romans in little more than a century.

Such a large influx of people across the Roman Empire pushed to the wayside the earlier Afro-Asiatic peoples and inaugurated a story of hegemony among members who during different periods were at the center of whichever empire displaced others. A line stretching from Rome to Mecca to Andalusia to Spain to Portugal to the Netherlands to Britain to the United States in “the west” reveals one of shifting representations of who “authentically” exemplifies Jewish people. Different lines pushed into Asia, and others through Africa and South America. In all, closeness to enslavement shifted here and there, but for the Afro-Jew from the fifteenth century onward, it is more near than far. In the words of the famed reggae artist Bob Marley, who was also of Jewish ancestry, “Every time I hear the crack of a whip / My blood runs cold” (1973).

If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote. Bear in mind that white Jews aren’t the only Jews for whom identification with enslavement is remote. The history of Arab racism and enslavement of non-Muslim African peoples raises questions for Mizrahi or Arab Jews as well. I’m not focusing on that group here because, frankly, they are not hegemonic.

If “the slave” is symbolic and to be liberated, then the relationship of the white Jew to the story of liberation is remote.

Identification with whiteness leaves no recourse from being identified with the enslaver and master. White Jewish evocation of Exodus thus reeks of hypocrisy so long as such a Jew insists on being white. A different basis of connection must supervene, and for such Jews, nothing affords such a connection more than antisemitism and the historical significance of Shoah (the Holocaust). Thus, “long ago” tends to be the Exodus where liberation is less significant, while “near” becomes hatred of Jews, Jewphobia, the importance of twentieth-century atrocity, and the achievement of the State of Israel. Looking at non-Jewish blacks reflecting on slavery, such Jews quickly speak of antisemitism. When confronting Afro-Jews, however, white Jews prioritizing antisemitism face several problems. Where such Jews relate to Afro-Jews as among Jews, there shouldn’t be an issue, that is except for Afro-Jews bringing along both the realities of recent enslavement and antisemitism. That the overwhelming population of Jews massacred in Shoah were Ashkenazi creates a peculiar Jewish problem. White Jews may question Afro-Jews’ identification of shared loss, but for many white Jews who did not lose family members in that effort at genocide, the question is: Why do they have a more legitimate connection to those victims of antisemitism than their counterparts of color?

Black Dream, White Dread

The situation of such ambivalence and dispute has added difficulty. The “nearness” or “closeness” of injustice and oppression for Afro-Jews is not only about enslavement, racism, and antisemitism. It is also about colonialism.

Why does colonialism pose a problem? A clue rests in the distancing of antisemitism from racism. Jews were, after all, not historically white. It was the need to create distance from the colonized populations in the Euromodern world that raised the demand for growing populations of whites in the colonies. The result was that many groups who were not white in Europe were offered a ticket to become white in its outposts. Difficulty emerged from Christianity being the dominant religion of European colonies because of the transformation of Christendom into a European identity. New identities were born through the protection of religious freedoms, where a group’s religion could be separated from its “race,” a term that emerged from Andalusia in the Middle Ages through a transformation of the word “raza,” which, ironically, referred to Jews and Moors. If Jewishness could be made exclusively religious, then the bearer of the religion could be racially otherwise. Thus, those light-skinned enough to be accepted as white received membership into whiteness by appealing to their religious identity as separate. This was not a good development for Jews who could not “pass” as white, however, and its impact on Jewish history is palatable as a once majority population of color quickly disappeared in proverbial plain sight.

“Travesia del Judio’ street sign in Spain. Via Wikimedia Commons.

There are many negative consequences of Jewish whiteness. The first is that it led to a rewriting of Jewish history to match the expectations of Euromodernity. I define “modernity” here as the value of belonging to the future. As such, it legitimates a people’s present and rewrites their past. Thus, if the future of Jewishness is whiteness, then authentic Jews of the present become white, which makes the Jewish story a retroactively affected one of whiteness as a condition of appearance. This was catastrophic for other Jews, because since they supposedly did not legitimately belong to the future, their present was delegitimated and their past erased. This led to an additional false thesis—namely, that non-white Jews must have somehow come to Judaism. Since whiteness afforded Euromodern Judaism’s legitimacy, this meant that those other people could only enter Euromodernity and then become Jews by other means. The standard position is Christianity. If Africans enter Euromodernity through colonization and enslavement, the presumption is that happens through their having first become Christian. Thus, to stand as an Afro-Jew is, by many white Jews, presumed erroneously to do so as a prior Christian. The Afro-Jew thus faces delegitimation of her or his Jewish history since even when embodying a line of Jewish ancestry older than many white Jews, they are presumed to be “converts” in the presence of a population whose presumed original authenticity is not premised on conversion. Actual Jewish history disputes that.

“Antisemitism” is thus, for many white Jews, an attractive formulation of hatred of Jews since it disassociates Jews from the dreaded designation of being a race, because, as nearly anyone who has experienced racism would admit—like “gender” with regard to “feminine”—“race” is a term that for the most part signifies being of color. As this discussion is short, I won’t get into the details of why “antisemitism” is a concept saturated with bad faith. I will just state this: Most people who hate Jews are not thinking about religion. They see Jews, even if white, as never white enough. They ascribe, in what existentialists call the spirit of seriousness—the materialization of values—that Jewishness is in the flesh and soul of Jews. There is thus the error of avowedly white Jews rallying for religious freedom in the face of a foe that sees them as a racial threat. They want to defend “us Jews” in the practice of our religion while imagining “us whites” in their daily social lives.

If we concede antisemitism as a form of racism, the story is different. As mixed-race people could be hated for both sides of their mixture (think of an Afro-Asian receiving anti-black racism and anti-Asian racism, or Arabs who could be hated as an ethnicity or “race” despite their morphological diversity), the Afro-Jew may ask if both are at work if she or he focuses on racial oppression.

These reflections become complicated when we reflect on the passage into whiteness of many Euro-Jews. The story is, after all, a colonial one, and that precious whiteness is indebted to colonialism, enslavement, and racism. Thus, Euro-Jewish investment in whiteness ensnares them in a defense of colonialism, enslavement, and racism. As liberation discourses are patently anti-colonial, anti-enslavement, and anti-racist, this places Jewish whiteness in a logical collision with liberation and struggles for freedom.

The Afro-Jew thus faces delegitimation of her or his Jewish history since even when embodying a line of Jewish ancestry older than many white Jews, they are presumed to be ‘converts’ in the presence of a population whose presumed original authenticity is not premised on conversion. Actual Jewish history disputes that.

This reactionary position is not, of course, the only historical Jewish story. On the one hand, Jews were so associated with the formation of liberalism that even Karl Marx, a grandson of a Rabbi, saw it fitting to address European Jewish values as ideologically linked to Euromodern liberal capitalism in “On the Jewish Question.” In recent times, the lure of whiteness produced politically neoconservative Jews who moved to the right of liberalism in a desperate embrace of whiteness to the point of, unfortunately, allying in recent times with White supremacist Christians and even, as we see in the United States, politicians supported by neo-Nazi and other fascist groups.

Rejecting Idols, Embracing Ethical Life

To the left of all this are many secular Jews, and among Jews who practice Judaism, the complicated matter of religion offers a unique convergence of their Jewish political identity among those in and out of the white umbrella. I cannot here, because of limited space, spell out the many kinds of Jews who live their faith, ethnic, and racial identities outside of whiteness. As I do that elsewhere, I would here simply like to state this: Many Jews of color who are also Jews of faith do not live their lives worried about what white Jews think of them. They are simply people of faith practicing the varieties of Judaism they know. There is, however, a common question posed to all Jews that come to the fore on the question of liberation, and that is its relation, specifically, to Jewish ethics.

To illustrate my point, consider the famed early Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists. They are often misunderstood today because of how they are studied by Christian theorists who presume the grammar of a secularized Christian framework. The idea of a critical philosophy, originally formulated by Immanuel Kant as transcendental idealism, was a formal, secularized Protestantism. The transcendental movement through Arthur Schopenhauer and G. W. F. Hegel kept the Protestant eschatological elements. In Marx, however, the problem of idolatry was posed as a problem of ideological critique and a rejection of fetishism. Sigmund Freud took these concerns to the inner reaches of consciousness and even the unconscious elements of mind. Adding Edmund Husserl’s effort to explore the critical conditions of consciousness without ontological reductionism, we have three Jewish thinkers (although the first was from a family who converted to Christianity and the third did so on his own) posing what to some seemed the irreconcilable objectives of the material world, unconscious forces, and the social world in which reality becomes meaningfully conscious. Yet the early group of Frankfurt School thinkers—for example, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, all Jewish and committed secularists—took on the task of not only bringing these thinkers together (especially Marx and Freud), but also to do so without collapsing into idolatry, that is, making their intellectual heroes, societal norms, and economic systems into gods. (I regard the post-WWII Frankfurt School, whose main exemplar is Jürgen Habermas, to be a reclamation of secularized Protestant Christian thought.) Adorno expressed this Jewish anti-idolatry position well in the concept of negative dialectics and negative theology.

This rejection of idolatry is also the basis of a uniquely Jewish position on theodicy. Christian theology poses a deity who must be cleansed of contradictions. Judaism, alternatively, poses a deity who must not be named, constrained, reduced—in short, offered as an image. This is a crucial element for Jewish ethics, since it in effect explains “election” (in Hebrew, bhira) and the significance of striving for kashrut (kosher living) according to Halakhah (“the way,” or Jewish law). Many Christians are surprised, even shocked, when they learn that Jews do not need to embrace G-d as an ontological being or entity. An activist philosopher and social worker friend of mine once put it this way: “I don’t go to shul [synagogue] because I believe in G-d.”

This mysterious explanation makes sense for Jews who understand that election or to be chosen does not mean to be better than others. It means to face the fear and trembling of radical ethical responsibility. I add “radical” because the responsibility is for more than specific commandments (mitzvoth). Its radicality rests on taking responsibility for responsibility. In Judaism, this means responsibility for the image of G-d on earth, which, as the argument goes, is not an “image” proper, since that would be idolatrous. It is a responsibility, and it is so often in the form of a terrible, burdensome calling. Through the act of carrying the Torah (direction, instruction, teachings) when becoming a Bat Mitzvah or Bar Mitzvah (daughter or son of the commandments), the honored is also taking on the weight or burden in one reading of ethical life. The seeming conundrum of non-ontological Jewishness is resolved thus. There are Jews who regard G-d as a just being. No Jew, however, should accept the idea of G-d solely as a being. Justice, broadly conceived (because the Hebrew word Tzedek includes but is not reduced exclusively to justice), is the crucial element. Thus, since neither the religious nor the secular Jew would reject the importance of taking responsibility for the ethical face of the universe, my friend’s remark on believing in G-d makes sense. She refuses to be idolatrous, and she insists on the importance of ethical life marked also by righteous action. That friend’s remark was to offer a critique of synagogues that have subordinated Jewish ethical responsibility for responsibility through subordinating it to the fetish of such things as a Jewish state.

Fetishizing antisemitism at the expense of fighting against oppression endangers Jewish ethical life. This leads to a form of idolatrous relationship to Jewish people read through Judaism and, as a consequence, places Jews in an antagonistic relationship to liberation struggles against colonization, enslavement, and racism. Where Jewish people become the enemy of liberation, Judaism, from this point of view, is lost.

Though I have posed these reflections in terms of white Jews versus Afro-Jews and other Jews of color, there is the reality of ideological critique where beneath white Jews is the paradoxical darkness offering ethical life. There are designated white Jews who make decisions to shed the unethical garbs of white investments in anti-liberation. This reflection from an Ashkenazi mother on her son from her union with an Afro-Sephardic-Mizrahi father concludes these reflections:

… there is a general lesson that more fully entering a black world through marriage and parenting has taught me: one must live as if values and virtues and excelling and being a person of integrity matter, for that is what it is to live a human life.

 

*This revised, English version of the author’s “Pourquoi les juifs ne doivent pas redouter la libération,” Tumultes numéro 50 (2018): 97–108, appears here with the permission of Tumultes.

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Lewis R. Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs, where he is also a member of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life. He is the author of many books, including Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization. He co-edits, with Jane Anna Gordon, the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs. He is Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and a former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, for which he now serves as its chairperson of awards and global collaborations.
Global Currents article

The IHRA’s Careless Conflations on Antisemitism (and Few Alternatives)


An Arabic version of this piece is available here.

I am a non-white Mizrahi Jewish academic who has been studying Israel/Palestine and the history of Jews in the Middle East for two decades. My family hails from Ottoman Palestine, Egypt, Tunisia, and the Greek islands of Zakynthos and Corfu. All too many of us were murdered by Nazi Génocidaires (and rest assured that we will not forget or forgive). Precisely because of this scholarly and biographic background I was embarrassed to read the letter sent by England’s Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, to all university vice chancellors. Utilizing an authoritarian tone devoid of understatement, Williamson demanded that all universities in England adopt formally what is called “the working definition of antisemitism” drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Photo from the Synagogue in Kerkyra/Corfu. Fingers pointing out to families associated with Behar’s maternal lineage, Mother’s maiden name included.

Born in 1976, Williamson has been a Tory politician for 25 years. He and his party have not been noteworthy for their passionate activism against racism, antisemitism included. Nor did Williamson find it problematic to serve under Boris Johnson, author of Seventy-Two Virgins (HarperCollins, 2004), a novel that disappointingly recycled antisemitic tropes and stereotypical portrayals of Jews and other British minority ethnic groups.

The letter Williamson authored is littered with antisemitic tropes. A non-Jew himself, Williamson first chooses to single out Jews from non-Jews and, in so doing, officially mark Jews as “other.” Embracing the “divide and conquer” colonial approach, he proceeds to divorce antisemitic racism from similar manifestations of racism with which he is less concerned, including Islamophobia, Afrophobia/anti-Black racism, misogyny, anti-Roma/Gypsy racism, homophobia, and xenophobia vis-à-vis Asians and Arabs.

Most disturbingly, Williamson’s letter upgrades the quintessential stereotype of money and Jews to a new level by linking Jews to monetary penalties and potential state sanctions on universities if their managements exercise what is otherwise a simple academic and democratic right to adopt a view and definition of antisemitism that differ from his. The irony of setting Christmas as the deadline for his pseudo-philosemitic mobilization has apparently escaped Williamson altogether.

The IHRA definition that Williamson labors to impose unilaterally defines antisemitism as “a perception that may be expressed as hatred.” This reading is vague, restrictive, minimalist, and—in the main—emotionalist. It bypasses manifestations of antisemitism that are equally, and possibly even more, important than “perception,” including oppression, discrimination, exclusion, prejudice, bigotry or other tangible actions. Moreover, a wall-to-wall agreement prevails among the rainbow of scholars of antisemitism that one singular definition of the abhorrent phenomenon does not exist. That is the case precisely as there is no one and only definition for racism, feminism, islamophobia, Judaism, Zionism, Islamism, English nationalism, communitarianism, and forms of bigotry.

There are at least four additional definitions of antisemitism that can guide the work of scholars or activists and that are analytically superior to that of the IHRA: the definition of the Canadian Independent Jewish Voices; that of the British Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust; and that of the British Jewish Voice for Labour. However, the most scholarly rigorous definition is “The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism” (JDA) that was made public today (disclosure: some serious reservations notwithstanding, I’m one of its 200 academic signatories). To be sure, Williamson’s top-down state decree of a single definition upon academia—let alone one deemed deficient by hundreds of scholars—runs the risk of echoing Soviet Stalinism and American McCarthyism.

And Then There Is Israel

As many as seven of the eleven illustrations that the IHRA definition marshals to exemplify antisemitism relate to post-1948 Israel (of which I happen to be a citizen). The Zionist/Arab matrix dominates the definition and as a result it often comes across as concerned more with the protection of Israel than the protection of Jews, let alone non-Israeli Jews. As early as 2016 the British Government’s own “Home Affairs Committee” found the IHRA’s definition wanting; cross-party committee members insisted on formally affixing two stipulations:

(1) “It is not anti-Semitic to criticise the Government of Israel, without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent” and (2) “It is not anti-Semitic to hold the Israeli Government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, or to take a particular interest in the Israeli Government’s policies or actions, without additional evidence to suggest anti-Semitic intent” (italics added).

While it is unclear how precisely such “intent” is to be established or proven—let alone by what body or individual/s—it is clear that Williamson opted consciously to exclude these two surgical qualifications. That seems an additional testament to his instrumentalization of antisemitism for sectarian conservative ends. The Governing Bodies and Presidents/Vice Chancellors of at least 48 universities were unable to withstand the ongoing governmental pressure and effectively all endorsed the IHRA definition top-down without staff consultation. For example, my university’s management endorsed the definition with the Home Affairs Committee’s stipulations; Cambridge and Oxford did the same. While this too remains unsatisfactory, it is somewhat less misguided than adopting the IHRA definition as is.

The definition Williamson insists on imposing carelessly conflates “Jews” with “the state of Israel” and “Judaism” with “modern political Zionism.” The original conflation between these identities and phenomena was—and remains—an inherent organizing pillar of Zionist ideology. Self-proclaimed pro-Israel bodies and individuals exercise this conflation regularly in texts, actions, and advocacy. It comes as no surprise that this conflation has often been reproduced by Israel’s anti-Zionist critics, at times consciously and at other times as a consequence of inexcusable ignorance.

Recent example of irresponsible conflation between British Jews, Zionism, and Israel’s belligerent occupation.

The symbiosis between these opposing, yet mutually-empowering, Zionist/anti-Zionist tides yields the most toxic ground for unambiguous manifestations of antisemitism. This is in contrast to cases where straightforward criticisms of Israel—including by such organizations as Amnesty International, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and the Open Society Institute (established in 1993 by George Soros)—have been fancifully labelled as “antisemitic” to delegitimize pro-democratic activism on behalf of Palestinian human and political rights. Three facts that the IHRA definition fails to acknowledge should neither be forgotten nor blurred conceptually: that many Jews are not Zionist; that the majority of Zionists worldwide are not Jewish (including Christian fundamentalists); and that over 20% of Israeli citizens are not Jewish.

Beneficiary of a Double Standard

The IHRA definition which Williamson aims to institutionalize claims that it is antisemitic to apply “double standards to Israel by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” Viewed dispassionately through a scholarly lens, this formulation echoes what logicians term “the straw man fallacy.”

First, the overwhelming majority of Israel’s critics worldwide focus on its post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and the actions it is continuing to implement there to date. No democracy in the twenty first century holds a disenfranchised civilian population under such brutal occupation while deepening ceaselessly its colonization, implantation of armed civilian settlers, and illegal settlement construction, all based on religious affiliation and differentiation.

Branding as “antisemitic” criticism of Israeli actions pertaining to its occupation—on the ground that this applies a double standard—is Orwellian. The majority of Israel’s critics demand that Israel cease being the beneficiary of a double standard that has exempted it, for over 50 years now, from democratic requirements otherwise applied to, and expected of, all other democracies. The thrust driving this critique is that Israel will act, and be adjudged, in the same way as standard democracies. If that were to happen, this would remove Israeli exceptionalism, not create it.

Yet a transition of this sort remains absent. This partially explains why leading (Israeli) social scientists define Israel as a diminished form of ethnic democracy, that is, a state that does not meet the minimal requirements that would permit students of Comparative Politics to define it as a “liberal democracy.” For another (Israeli) school of scholars, the label “democracy” should be avoided altogether for the simple reason that the glove does not fit; they thus define Israel as an ethnocracy. For yet a third school of thought, Israel lamentably meets the definition of an apartheid state. Two months ago, the single most prestigious and scholarly of all Israel’s Human Rights Organizations, B’Tselem, published a report titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”

The above constitutes a standard scholarly debate that lacks any inherent link to antisemitism. It therefore should not be interfered with by career politicians for the purpose of policing speech, as already seems to happen. In fact, the principal author of the IHRA definition, Professor Kenneth Stern, explained on many occasions that the definition “was not drafted, and was never intended, as a tool to target or chill speech on a college campus” and that he himself “highlighted this misuse, and the damage it could do.” It is clear that Williamson did not bother to consult Stern or his writings upon issuing his letter. 

Israel vs Civic-Liberal Democracies

The IHRA definition Williamson enforces provides assistance to no one when it resolves that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is a form of antisemitism. While such denial can surely assume an antisemitic form, in the majority of cases it assumes instead a straightforward democratic critique. For starters, scholars and non-scholars alike must have the democratic right to question Israel’s democratic credentials and self-defined national configuration, as well as those of any other state.

Israel rests legally upon the notion that all British Jews, for example—including those who have never set foot outside Britain—enjoy more individual and collective rights between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea than non-Jewish Palestinians who live in this territory, including those who have never set foot outside of it. That is the case not only vis-à-vis stateless Palestinians in the West Bank (annexed de facto but not de jure by Israel) but also with regards to Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise 21% of its population. Demands to correct this state of Israeli legal-political affairs are calls to democratize Israel; they are by no means a form of antisemitism.

Another problem with the IHRA’s uncritical adoption of Israel’s self-indulged “democratic nation” credentials can be illustrated by the fact that both Israeli Jews and non-Jews enjoy equal legal recourse to migrate to Britain and the US and acquire their citizenship. Yet the same democratic feature is nowhere to be found reciprocally in the case of Israel.

An Israeli Jew who marries a non-Israeli Jew from, say, Alaska, enjoys automatically a legal right to naturalize their spouse in Israel; conversely, a non-Jewish citizen of Israel who marries a non-Jew from Ramallah (or Alaska) does not enjoy the same equal right to bring their spouse and naturalize her or him. That also means that British or American non-Jews—including Palestinian American Christians, Muslims, seculars, and others—have no viable legal pathway to emigrate to Israel, nor to reunite with their indigenous families there, nor to become citizens in Israel. Yet British or American Jews automatically have this right whether they like it or not.

Israel is thus neither a democracy in the ways that Britain or other liberal democracies are, nor does it embody a national configuration that can, or should, remain above interrogation. Non-Jews in general, and Palestinians in particular, who seek to have rights in Israel equal to those bestowed upon Jews would first need to undergo a successful religious conversion to Judaism.

As is the case in other democracies, British immigration laws do not restrict apriori possible migration to Britain on the basis of religious affiliation alone. It is not too hard to imagine what the response of British democrats (Jews among them) would be if the right to migrate to Britain was reserved to non-Jews alone. Another example is that the combined state of legal, national, and political affairs in Israel easily enables non-Israeli Jews to purchase land in Israel even if they are not citizens. For Israeli citizens who are not Jewish this is effectively impossible to do. The Israeli notion of ascribing different rights to different religious groups—of both nationals and non-nationals—is absent in liberal democracies because it fatally corrodes the defining notions of civic democracy.

It therefore should come as no surprise that for its non-Jewish citizens, Israel is experienced as a Jewish and undemocratic state. Many Jews with democratic convictions subscribe to this view with ease. The attempt by many—chief among them Israeli Jewish and non-Jewish citizens for whom democracy is sacrosanct—to remove such discriminatory and unequal conditions and legislation, and, in doing so, to democratize Israel by bringing it nearer the model of a state that is for all its citizens (as Britain and the US are for example) does not constitute antisemitism.

The IHRA’s stipulation that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is a form of antisemitism is thus deceptive. It is on standard democratic grounds—not on antisemitic grounds—that many oppose the sweeping extra-territorial privilege of non-Israeli Jews to exercise a “national right to self-determination” inside Israel/Palestine that is bestowed upon them at the direct and inevitable expense of the individual and collective rights of non-Jews living in Israel/Palestine.

Let us lastly think of a European or non-European individual who denies “the right to self-determination” to the people of Catalonia, the Basque country, Scotland, Québec, Corsica (or others worldwide). Does this make them by definition racists vis-à-vis the Scots, Catalans, Québécois?

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Moshe Behar
Moshe Behar holds a PhD in Comparative Politics from Columbia University and is Associate Professor and Programme Director, Arabic & Middle Eastern Studies, University of Manchester, UK. His work includes the anthology Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought: Writings on Identity, Politics and Culture, 1893-1958 (Brandeis University Press) and can be further explored here.