Siavush Marries Farangis, Manuscript of Shahnameh (Book of Kings). Love and marriage are two central themes in the Shahnameh that are used as tropes to explore ideas of valour and loyalty. Siavush, the son of Iranian King Kay Kavus, is celebrating his marriage to Farangis, the daughter of King Afrasiab, the Turanian enemy of Siavush’s father. The handsome prince sits with his bride on a raised platform while celebrations take place around a water feature in the palace courtyard. Photo Credit: Aga Khan Museum.
Americans disagree profoundly over our nation’s founding ideals. Some insist that its founding principles are sound and generally govern the polity well. Others laud the egalitarian norms set forth in foundational documents but acknowledge that such aspirational ideals have far outpaced the ability or will of powerful elites to uphold them. Still others note a fundamental contradiction between abstract proclamations of universal rights and the realities of territorial theft, genocide, and enslavement on which such grand notions have depended. Within this last group, some nonetheless hold that one might find, in the wreckage of idealized histories, the possible seeds of a more just order, the appeal of which will rest in part on a claim to foundational legitimacy.
A parallel thread weaves through Zahra Ayubi’s ambitious and innovative Gendered Morality, a study of the medieval Persianate tradition of philosophical ethics (akhlaq). Ayubi carefully excavates the work of Muslim thinkers Ghazali, Tusi, and Davani, showing how the refinement of elite men’s spiritual, intellectual, and moral selves is contingent upon the supportive labor—and the willingness to be governed—of women, children, and non-elite, often enslaved, men. Wives and children also served elite men by attesting, through appropriate comportment, to such men’s ethical success as pater familias. Despite some crucial differences in their sectarian and historical contexts, these thinkers broadly shared what Ayesha Chaudhry describes as an “idealized cosmology” that presumed a hierarchical and patriarchal social order (11–12, 40).
Few Muslims today champion the elite-dominated polity, widespread slaveholding, or even male-dominated household that medieval Muslim scholars took for granted. Ayubi notes the cognitive dissonance that can arise when lay readers of Ghazali encounter disconcerting presuppositions. A romanticized expectation of timeless spiritual wisdom sits uncomfortably with elements that offend modern sensibilities. How do those with investments in the Muslim intellectual tradition deal with such conflicts? Cry hypocrisy? Reject the work as irremediably patriarchal and elitist? Ayubi takes a different tack: insisting that it live up to its implicit promise of ethical self-cultivation for all.
People navigate their attachments to foundational texts in a variety of ways. Certainly, although people occasionally describe the Qur’an as Islam’s Constitution, the parallels between how American citizens regard our national charter and how believing Muslims regard our scripture pale in comparison to the differences. Yet Americans, Muslims, and those who are both can benefit from understanding what these texts offered to their original audiences, how they’ve been interpreted over the centuries, and how they can be drawn on today.
Ayubi thinks the akhlaq tradition is salvageable. She concludes her book with a constructive “Prolegomenon to a Feminist Philosophy of Islam” not entirely dissimilar to the concluding section of Aysha Hidayatullah’s Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. In her work, Hidayatullah shifts from a thoughtful and rigorous exposition of U.S.-based women’s feminist/egalitarian interpretation of the Qur’an to her own diagnosis of aporias within that interpretive tradition and in its proposals for how feminist engagement with the Qur’an might proceed. Like Hidayatullah, Ayubi proceeds to constructive suggestions only after careful and thorough explication and analysis of the extant tradition.
Ayubi lays out the assumptions about social and familial structures at the heart of the three medieval treatises she investigates. She compellingly critiques their models of socio-sexual organization. Yet, she argues, they contain a kernel of egalitarian possibility. That doesn’t mean today’s readers of Ghazali, for instance, should simply skim past or skip over anything that doesn’t fit their notions of just families and societies. Rather, it means holding the tradition accountable for the radical implications of its core belief about human potentiality. For these ethicists, every rational self has the capacity to develop. No human being can attain perfection—God alone is perfect—but all are capable of improvement. Given this belief, it isn’t reasonable to channel all resources toward the ethical development of a small, male elite. Instead, all human beings have a right to develop their selves. Therefore, women and non-elite men must be at liberty to direct resources toward their own self-improvement, not to have their labor appropriated for the benefit of elite men who, by relying on others’ services, can devote their time and attention to refining their own capacities.
Some of Ayubi’s discussion is abstract; she attends carefully to the specialized technical terminology of philosophical ethics. But copious references to the “concupiscent faculty” aside, Gendered Morality’s basic premise is, as the kids say, relatable: the social organization of domestic labor, or the domestic organization of social labor, is a matter of power, and such power shapes who has the leisure for self-cultivation. Social and domestic labor are, obviously, organized differently in the contemporary United States than they were a thousand years ago in the heartlands of Muslim civilization. To take a single example, presumptions about mothers’ greater responsibility (if not necessarily authority) for children’s welfare are radically changed. Yet the typically unarticulated premise that some people’s time is worth more than others’ time resonates in our current climate. One need only skim recent discussions of women’s mental load or “time confetti” to see the parallels. This is, of course, not just a matter of patriarchy; the racialized and classed division of “feminine” caring labor must be central to any discussion of the just allocation of social goods. What the ethicists offer us is, in part, the reminder that ethical self-cultivation is the bedrock of a moral society. What Ayubi offers us is the assurance that a democratization of that ethical project is possible and desirable.
Kecia Ali is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Religion Department at Boston University. Her research ranges from Islam’s formative period to the present and focuses on Islamic law; gender and sexuality; and religious biography. She is the author of several books including Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam,The Lives of Muhammad, and Sexual Ethics and Islam. Her current projects include a study of the gender politics of academic Islamic Studies. She also writes on ethics and popular fiction. You can find her on Twitter at @kecia_ali.
Zahra Ayubi’s Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society reads three important Persian texts in the Islamic ethical tradition—Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali’s Kimiya-i Sa‘adat(Alchemy of Happiness), Nasir-ad Din Tusi’s Akhlaq-i Nasiri (Nasirean Ethics), and Jalal al-Din Davani’s Lawami‘ al-Ishraq fi Makarim al-Akhlaq (Lusters of Illumination on the Noble Ethics), also known as Akhlaq-i Jalali (Jalalean Ethics)—with an eye towards the “gender constructions and dynamics” that shape these authors’ claims about what it means to lead an ethical life (13). What she finds is that there is a tension present in all three of these works, between a hierarchical vision of the world—one which treats women and nonelite men as means, rather than ends, for the achievement of the good life of elite men—and a universal account of the nafs (soul), which treats all physical matter and beings as having equal value as God’s creations. She shows that this tension has, unfortunately, too often been glossed over by scholars, leaving the “philosophical underpinnings” of patriarchy in the tradition unaddressed (5). Through an immanent critique of the classical texts, she shows the limitations of approaches that seek to rescue akhlaq writings—or works concerning ethics—from their patriarchal assumptions, and demonstrates what is required for the creation of a feminist Islamic ethics out of an engagement with them.
Ayubi’s book is an example of rich feminist-critical and philosophical ethics. It attends to the social contexts in which these thinkers write, but also seeks to move beyond those contexts in order to show, more broadly, how the shared assumptions of these authors have shaped Islamic ethics. Ayubi begins by unpacking the broad epistemological assumptions that characterize these works and their reception within the tradition before turning her focus to the themes of metaphysics, marriage, the domestic sphere, and homosocial masculinity and social life. Each chapter of the book weaves together the works of the three philosophers and theologians under one of these common themes. The book ends with some reflections on what a feminist philosophy of Islam might look like. She suggests that because the discriminatory nature of akhlaq literature was founded on inegalitarian metaphysics, any overcoming of such discrimination will require the construction of an egalitarian metaphysics (267), one that is attentive to the need for intersectional analysis, and does not succumb to the illusion that the patriarchal assumptions that have shaped akhlaq literature can simply be ignored.
In response to Ayubi’s book, the essays in this symposium read Ayubi with attention to the interventions she makes into Islamic ethics and beyond. Kecia Ali reflects on the approach Ayubi takes to reading the texts, comparing Ayubi’s approach to these ethical treatises with the interpretation some people make of the US Constitution. Such an approach seeks to recover from a text like the Constitution or an influential ethical treatise a universal ideal of equality that has nonetheless not yet been realized. On Ali’s reading, Ayubi successfully demonstrates the possibility of building from the akhlaq texts an egalitarian ethics. Kathryn Kueny reflects on whether that hope—to recover an egalitarian ethical impulse from an inegalitarian metaphysical system—is one that is actually realizable, and suggests looking to sources outside the akhlaq canon might prove more valuable. Saadia Yacoob compares Ayubi’s account of ethical refinement to her own work on Islamic law, and wonders if the interdependence of family members upon one another that Ayubi describes in her account of the domestic sphere could be reconfigured toward more egalitarian ends. Robert Tappan moves in a slightly different direction, discussing how Ayubi’s work might be expanded into the realm of animal ethics, so as to help us imagine a world beyond speciesism. Finally, Travis Zadeh reflects on how the thinkers whom Ayubi analyzes, along with others, adhered to a politics of perfection, much to the detriment of anyone who was not an elite male. Ayubi’s work, he contends, points us to the need for a politics of imperfection. In her response, Ayubi addresses the aforementioned essays by expanding upon the argument made in the conclusion of the book.
In thinking through how the politics of perfection laid the groundwork for the patriarchal element in some forms of Islamic ethics, Ayubi calls attention to the dynamic relationship between past and present in ethical and philosophical discourse. Because Contending Modernities is focused on how religious and secular forces interact in the modern world, it is pleased to host this symposium which thinks through what it means to imagine anew the possibilities and limits of canonical texts in the tradition of Islamic ethics.
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.
An Indigenous sovereignty protest in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2017. Photo Credit: Flickr user Mobilus In Mobili.
As religious studies scholars, it is critical for us to explore the racialized perceptions of non-western religious traditions and peoples as well as to trace how these peoples continue to be structurally dispossessed as a result of those perceptions. Decolonizing religious studies means making the hierarchies that exist materially among peoples and their knowledge systems legible. It also means reclaiming and re-centering Indigenous epistemologies, given their historically violent subjugation. While the field has acknowledged its complicity with primitivist and Orientalist discourses, it continues to ignore how structural racism may be operating within it, namely by dismissing the use of decolonial and Indigenous methodologies.
Native American and Indigenous religious traditions were, until fairly recently, perceived by anthropologists and scholars of religion as failed epistemologies, the “primitive” knowledge systems of less complex societies. Categorized as “animism,” their views were framed as childish, superstitious, and cited as clear evidence that they lacked the rationality to govern themselves or lay legitimate claims to their own lands. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were understood to be not only without reason, but also without true religion, making their full humanity suspect. Settler colonial projects relied upon these ideologies to justify Indigenous enslavement, genocide, and dispossession. These ideologies produced legal structures like the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls that declared lands not inhabited by Christians open to seizure by right of “discovery” (theft), becoming one of the most enduring tools of Indigenous dispossession. Indigenous peoples in the Americas continue to live with both the material and ontological legacies of this dispossession. The two are intimately tethered. Scholars of religion must take seriously the real material effects of their contributing to constructions of Indigenous peoples as anything less than fully cogent, agentive, and as having rights to their lands.
While liberation operates as a critical theme in religious studies, the field does not necessarily center projects of liberation—whether from social, spiritual, or even existential constraints. I entered the field of religious studies to research the links between social and religious/spiritual liberation among Native American and Tibetan peoples, given the violent inequities created by settler colonialism. Discourses of liberation in theory and praxis are often left to philosophy of religion or theology. Religious studies sought to differentiate itself from theology by taking historical, sociological, and even anthropological approaches to the study of religion. Liberation theologians recognized material inequities and sought to ameliorate them through a preferential treatment of the poor as an expression of faith. Liberation theology as a praxis is directed at both religious and material liberation and has since been taken up by Black, Indigenous, and other theologians of color to explore the roles of race, gender, and sexuality to these ends, for instance through the exploration of Black, Womanist, and Queer theology. Although resonant with these approaches, a decolonial framework articulates clear critiques of colonial power at the level of epistemology, visibilizing the need for Indigenous knowledge reclamations. As a Chicana scholar of Apache descent, a decolonial approach was ultimately more resonant with the aims of my project in general and Indigenous sovereignty in particular.
While decolonial discourses have been present in activist circles since the nationalist movements of the middle 20th century, they have begun to enter mainstream academia in the last few years. Decolonial thought in the U.S. has overlapping but distinct genealogies. One, referred to as decolonial theory, is situated among Latin American theorists, represented in the work of Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo, and is in conversation with post-colonial, critical, and anti-colonial theorists like Frantz Fanon. The other, focused on decolonial praxis, emerged from the work of U.S.-based women of color feminists, such as Emma Perez and Chela Sandoval, in conversation with postmodern and post-colonial thinkers like Homi Bhaba.
Like settler colonial theory, decolonial theory makes the superstructures of colonial inequities in places like Latin America and the Caribbean visible. Decolonial theorists argue that western imperialism operates at the level of epistemology and that modernity could be better understood as coloniality, since modern social structures were determined and continue to operate through colonial projects and their mechanisms, such as racialization. Decolonial theory challenges coloniality’s hierarchies of power/knowledge by denaturalizing the white western world’s monopoly on legitimate knowledge production, who is considered an authoritative voice, and importantly for the field, the ways religious and racial discourses operated together to redefine personhood in the new world.
The latter work on decolonial praxis emerged from the intersectional discourses of women of color working in feminist and ethnic studies activist/scholar spaces. Like liberation theology, ethnic studies is an insurgent body of scholarship forged in the late 1960s that aimed to achieve philosophical and material liberation by enacting a “radical agency against empire, conquest, criminalization, and enslavement” (2) that operates on the global stage. Ethnic studies became the academic space where African-American, Asian-American, Pacific, Latinx, and Native American epistemologies and histories were researched, reclaimed, and re-centered. More recently critical ethnic studies has articulated overlapping links among the multiple intellectual traditions represented in ethnic studies to colonial logics such as heteronormativity, racial capitalism, and white supremacy. The aim of making such links is to distinguish itself from the domesticating discourse of liberal multiculturalism within academia. Like decolonial theory, critical ethnic studies discourses visiblize the structural legacies of colonialism but in settler colonial contexts. Settler colonial theory is mostly applied in white settler contexts, such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia; however, its application in other regions of the worlds, such as Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean is now being explored.
Native American studies co-emerged with ethnic studies and eventually joined with Indigenous studies in order to mobilize towards philosophical and material liberation, which meant explicitly advocating for Native American and Indigenous sovereignty. Here, decolonization is explored as both an end goal in the form of “land back”—the reallocation of Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples—and the radical praxis that supports this end. Native American and Indigenous studies (NAIS) challenged the colonial legacy of knowledge production on Indigenous peoples by developing Indigenous methodologies, which take an endogenous approach to Indigenous life, essentially deferring to Native peoples as the foremost experts of their own experience and knowledge systems. As a result, new ethical protocols for research have been articulated, given the ways Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies have been delegitimized, misappropriated, and pathologized in the service of white supremacy/racial capitalism. Critical Indigenous studies takes an internationalist approaches to Indigeneity as a global discipline that includes, for example, both Native and Māori studies. In addition, this critical intervention can be understood as an intersectional approach that privileges gender, sexuality, and feminist studies perspectives in its emancipatory project of Indigenous sovereignty, since gender and sexuality are “core constitutive elements of imperialist-colonialist state formations” (6). Theories of decolonial praxis rooted in Indigenous and critical Indigenous studies frameworks help us understand how we, Indigenous peoples and those of Indigenous descent, get free from coloniality—how we break the ontological spells we have internalized and become liberated, how we assert and step into our full humanity.
I take a critical ethnic/Indigenous studies approach to understanding Indigenous religious life by using critical readings from Native scholars or those that center the voices and views of Indigenous peoples. In essence, I center Indigenous epistemologies and assert them as epistemologies in their own right, as opposed to theologies. This not only challenges the assumption that theology is a universal category but also that Indigenous religious worlds are just “beliefs,” subservient to western knowledges. I do this to think beyond the normative assumptions embedded in religious studies, such as history of religion approaches, that may seek to universalize or reimagine these complex worlds through wholly western categories.The work of Charles Long, Tomoko Masuzawa and more recently, critiques by Mallory Nye, remind us that the field was built upon colonial misreadings of the Other. It has done so, as Nye points out, through its “text-focused orientalist scholarship associated with philology, the thematic (and speculative) approaches of Edward Tylor, the functionalism of sociology, the ethnographic and particularist approaches of anthropology, or the contemporary phenomenology that was popularized by Ninian Smart in the 1960s and 70s” (43). These theories are not only mired in primitivism (and Orientalism), but in a western Christian materialist framework that is generally perceived as neutral and even “objective.”
Theories of decolonial praxis rooted in Indigenous and critical Indigenous studies frameworks help us understand how we, Indigenous peoples and those of Indigenous descent, get free from coloniality—how we break the ontological spells we have internalized and become liberated, how we assert and step into our full humanity.
While on the job market, I received critiques that my work was “too theological,” which is a field-specific dog whistle suggesting that an endogenous approach is uncritical, biased, and illegitimate scholarship—”isn’t considering Indigenous perspectives and voices just sharing narratives from an insider’s perspective?” In addition, the normative claims I make in my work in support of Native sovereignty (liberation) may be perceived as taking an “insider’s” stance. Another critique was that my research is more representative of “ethnic studies than religious studies,” as if exploring the intersections of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and religious praxis as decolonial praxis are beyond the appropriate purview of the field. These critiques are directed at my own racialized body, the evaluation of my competence as a scholar of Native descent, and my work as an inherent critique of western-centered knowledge. They are additionally linked to the ways Indigenous knowledges have been framed as a foil to European superiority in the academy.
While there is a general awareness that the field contributed discursively to colonial projects, few scholars consider how their training colors their own perceptions of how research with non-western/non-Christian religious traditions should be done, much less with the non-white scholars that study them. In other words, they don’t recognize how structural racism is operating in the field or within themselves. There is a struggle around the role of “objectivity” in the field of religious studies, an assumption that one can and must teach and publish about religions from an objective and neutral perspective. Travis Warren Cooper argues that this struggle is rooted in the Protestant secular, or the ways in which Protestantism divides the world into two domains, the public (secular) and private (religious). These divisions remain and continue to structure the way that religious studies as a field operates, particularly disciplining non-Christian work that falls outside of what the Protestant secular defines as objective.
Given the field’s colonial history, we need to interrogate the colonialist assumptions that determine who can make truth claims about non-western/non-Christian religions and how, as well as who has the right to determine what constitutes legitimate scholarship. A critical step in this direction is to recognize that there is no neutral position. As scholars, we are always speaking from a particular place, laden with varying degrees of power and interest. One of the problems of labeling the endogenous study of non-Christian/western traditions as theological is that it assumes, a.) that a secular/religious binary is universal, b.) that an endogenous study is uncritical, emic, and ultimately subjective, and c.) that there is only one epistemological position from which one can properly pursue the study of religion. When we dehumanize Indigenous peoples at the level of epistemology, the endogenous study of Indigenous knowledge is rendered illegible. Even impossible. When we ignore the role of colonial/Christian theological logics still operating in the field, we marginalize and silence the work of the most vulnerable among us. Decolonizing the field means religious studies scholars can no longer make ahistorical assessments of nonwestern/non-Christian scholarship and ignore their political histories, as if those political histories do not directly correlate to how knowledge is produced, and power is waged.
Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose research and teaching focus on Native American and Indigenous religions in diaspora, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism and is currently working on her manuscript titled The Metaphysics of Decoloniality: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indian and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.
“A Man Tempted by a Veiled Woman,” folio from a manuscript of The Ethics Of Nasir (Akhlaq-i-Nasiri). Image credit: Aga Khan Museum. Nasir al-Din Tusi, held at the Aga Khan Museum. “As Nasir al-Din Tusi explains, temptation can take many forms. This painting illustrates the anecdote of a man who is overwhelmed by desire for a passing woman whom he imagines to be beautiful. On removing her veil, however, the woman is revealed to be hideous, and the man is mocked by the crowd that has gathered around.”
Zahra Ayubi’s Gendered Morality examines how medieval Islamic philosophical ethics, as articulated in the akhlaq (ethics) writings of Ghazali, Tusi, and Davani, are inherently gendered. Ayubi’s work shows how this gendered ethics privileges a particular form of masculinity that is reinforced and sustained by a hierarchical metaphysics and a virtue ethics that both generates, but is also reinforced by, a skewed patronage. This skewed patronage capitalizes on the biological, social, and economic differences and inequalities that exist between men and women as well as between elites and subordinates. Ayubi argues how an unjust system of metaphysics and virtue ethics ultimately undermines the very goals these scholars ostensibly promote in their akhlaq writings: A God-given human happiness and agency for all, and not just some (240). The author concludes the work on an intriguing and open-ended constructivist note, outlining in broad strokes what a “feminist philosophy” of Islam might look like, and asking if the true goals of akhlaq could somehow be recast so as to avoid social/gendered imbalances, patriarchal privilege, and the disparaging of others.
In the field of Islamic Studies, very little has been written on gender as it shapes and constructs philosophical discourse. In fact, many studies on gender and Islam, including my own, leave traditional, medieval works of philosophy out of the equation altogether. One of the reasons for this neglect, I think, has to do with the entrenched patriarchy inherent within these writings, which makes them troubling to feminist thought, and resistant to feminist interpretation. Elite men, after all, composed their arguments to make a case for what the good life is so that other elite men would know how to embody it. When scholars like Ghazali, Tusi, or Davani talk about women at all, they do not present them as agents in their own right, but rather present them as the insufficient instruments men must use, or, the rhetorical or embodied foils men must define themselves against, in their pursuit of the good life. It is hard to get around the fact that these men’s definitions of human flourishing, happiness, and the ability to do what is good are dependent upon the subordination of others. This point, perhaps, is reinforced in contemporary scholarship on Islamic philosophy, where a quick World Cat search reveals that most secondary works on Ghazali and his peers are taken up by male scholars. This fact suggests that even the discourse about the discourse in these examples promotes and secures a more limited purview of expertise and authority that is difficult for women to enter. I admire the fact that the author was willing to tackle this impermeable, unyielding philosophical material head-on—material that has been shunned, dismissed, or ignored by Muslim feminists and female scholars of Islam who focus on women—to deal with questions that are not so easily or comfortably resolved.
In order to expose the social or cultural assumptions at play behind a metaphysics that is inherently patriarchal, Ayubi carefully peels back the discursive layers that characterize the medieval Islamic akhlaq genre. Yet, she warns, it is not enough just to lay bare the biases against women, or to find ways for the akhlaq authors to move into more “women-friendly” territories. If the ideal, elite, ethical man is defined in terms of his ability to suppress others, a move which devalues all who are appropriated for these ends, then the redistribution of power, no matter who will now benefit from it, cannot be the solution. Certainly, attempts to ignore those parts of the akhlaq writings that seem demeaning to women in order to replace them with arguments that may be more palatable to women, or, to weave into the texts a more feminist-friendly system of values, at least offer a much-needed focus on the injustices at-hand. However, these feminist strategies do not go far enough to challenge the underlying metaphysics that by their very structure depend on, and in turn perpetuate, the exploitation of others in service of a few. As Ayubi suggests, determining what is good or just cannot be separated from questions of what constitutes knowledge, who has access to it, and how we define and construct human nature (244). Gendered Morality starts an important conversation about the philosophical underpinnings of a more balanced, fair, and just form of ethics that I know others will be eager to join.
“Shaykh Safi al-Din dances in ecstasy.” Painting in the illustrated copy of Safvat al-Safa (The Quintessence of Purity). Image credit: Isma’il bin Bazzaz, held at the Aga Khan Museum. “A distinctive detail of the illustration is the inclusion of women wearing white burqa (jilbab) watching the sama’ together with men in the mosque. Their presence demonstrates the place of women within religious practice in 16th-century Iran.”
Ayubi’s own unique contribution to this discussion is her deconstruction of the logical premises that support the argument that a good or just society is one that only some people can contribute to, or benefit from. This point also implies that a good society is one that necessarily promotes human degradation and suffering. While she poses no solid conclusions as to how to resolve the problem of the inherent inequality within akhlaq materials, she suggests that insights from contemporary feminist philosophy can add much-needed perspectives to the debate. I’m wondering though, about the extent to which hierarchical and embedded ethical systems can ever be dismantled fully. Is it really possible to resist the temptation to substitute the oppressed for the oppressor? Can we ever come to appreciate the full humanity of women without addressing the underlying social, economic, and cultural systems in place that privilege men? Regardless of these questions, I find Ayubi’s argument that there might be multiple ways in which the dynamic might be assuaged, at least, compelling. For example, the Islamic tradition itself provides resources by which certain philosophical terms might be recast, such as the definition of soul (nafs) or the divinely-created khalifa (authority) humans are called upon to enact in the world. Prophetic language might replace more inherited and embedded forms of classical logic. Islamic notions of care might also be brought to bear on philosophical arguments about human responsibility. Intersectionality is also key in breaking down essentialist portrayals of women and enslaved peoples, as well as of portrayals of elite men like Ghazali whose own integrity is surely compromised by his call for the demeaning treatment of others.
Despite the author’s laudable efforts in unpacking many of these dense, gendered arguments in support of a morality that appears fixed, sanctioned, and universal, the question remains as to whether or not it is feasible, or even desirable, to penetrate a philosophical ethics that leaves no room, or provides any interpretive opening, for recovering the rights of women, lower class men, or slaves. And, it is important to ask whether engagement with these ethical arguments only promotes competition among the marginalized for what bits and scraps of the good life or happiness might be cast aside by those with all the power. Is it possible to salvage any part of a virtue ethics that is built on the premise that although women or enslaved peoples have souls, they lack in their ability to reason, and therefore are lesser humans who must be managed? Why should women, or others, who are demeaned by the discourse, even bother to try and participate in, or deconstruct, a centuries-old system of metaphysics that takes for granted the assumption that human nature itself is varied, unequal, and ripe for exploitation, given that their status is already suspect? And, given that medieval Muslim philosophical definitions of virtue, justice, and living the good life are built upon, and rationalized through such biased, gendered logic, do we believe that they can project the kind of moral authority needed to guide the faithful through the complexities of the world today? But, if we abandon these ethical foundations altogether, and the accumulated and sanctioned wisdom upon which they are based, what can we imagine or construct in their place? Rather than engage in the inequality assumed by a preset debate, many feminists and scholars of Islam who focus on women have given up on these texts altogether, and have looked to a plethora of sources and experiences, and more fragmented forms of logic, through which a more just set of ethics might contribute to the happiness and well-being of not just some, but all. These sources, experiences, and fragments of logic, which draw upon the opinions of female judges and scholars, mystical thought, the lives of everyday Muslim women, as well as feminist scholarship, work to counter male-centered systems of virtue ethics based on deductive logic, essentialism, or objectivity, and look to privilege more emotive forms of aesthetics, or an ethics of care that are more sensitive to political inequalities and humanitarian concerns.
Kathryn Kueny is Professor of Theology at Fordham University, where she is Director of the Middle East Studies and Religious Studies programs. She received her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago, and is the author of two books, The Rhetoric of Sobriety: Wine in Early Islam, and Conceiving Identities: Maternity in Medieval Muslim Discourse and Practice, both published by SUNY Press. Dr. Kueny is currently working on a new project, titled Ecologies of Health and Disease in Medieval Muslim Medicine, Law, Belief, and Practice. This work will explore more broadly how views about the body, God, moral conduct, and the natural world marked individuals as healthy or ill.
Title page of Bartolomé de las CasasRegionum, which depicts Spanish colonization in the Americas. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Since scholars will inevitably engage critical theoretical frames, it is advisable for them to take the time to become familiar with the historical circumstances, along with the social, political, and economic factors that shape those frames. It is also important to understand the critical vantage points and intellectual traditions from which those theoretical frames are articulated. As a religious ethicist, theologian, and cultural critic, I have become increasingly aware of the potential misuse of certain critical theoretical frames and categories. For instance, I have recently encountered articles in which the categories liberation, postcolonial, intersectional, and decolonial are used interchangeably and sometimes almost synonymously. These categories, among others, have become buzzwords used to superficially signify cutting edge critical research. Moreover, their use gives the impression that the scholars who use them are versatile in their ability to move from one theoretical school to another (e.g., critical cultural theory, Latin American studies, race theory, Chicana studies, and postcolonial and decolonial thought).
As such, the mere deployment of these categories and intellectual strands does not always signify an advancement of critical theoretical debates. In fact, I would argue that it is even more important to highlight their points of divergence. On the one hand, many of these intellectual schools share a common ground since they all challenge the epistemological apparatus of the Euro-North Atlantic intellectual tradition and seek to expose and unmask the hidden ideological dynamics that have resulted in the dehumanization and commodification of the rest of the world’s population. On the other hand, each of these schools of thought emerged from very different concrete historical contexts which continue to shape and inform their ideas and proposals.
Let’s consider three examples to illustrate the problem. First, Edward Said’s postcolonial notion of misrepresentation of the Middle and Near East via Orientalism does not operate in the same way as the orientalization of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, which has been theorized by Latin American studies scholars. Said critically analyzes the misrepresentation of the oriental that lies behind the literary and scholarly production of the orientalist. In orientalism we encounter the orientalist’s self-referential assumptions and prejudices. The orientalism identified by Latin American studies scholars, however, refers to the historical processes of dehumanization of the Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala (the Americas) as part of a European objectification which saw them as objects that could be used in the extraction and amassing of gold, silver, and precious stones. The objectification occurred even at the cost of the decimation of Indigenous lives and the destruction of Indigenous religious and cultural traditions. In broad strokes, the difference between the two is that the “mysterious” orientals had captured the curiosity of European orientalists who were interested in both taming and exoticizing the oriental “other,” whereas the Indigenous of Abya Yala were subject to sexual, cultural, economic exploitation, along with the exploitation of their natural resources.
Second, in the same way, Stuart’s Hall’s critical cultural theory framing of the “West and the Rest” is not interchangeable with Enrique Dussel’s transmodern notion of the “underside of modernity.” The former points to the ideological superstructure that emerged as the Western European colonial project took shape and the rest of the world became the object of European greed. The latter uncovers entire Indigenous and African worlds that became the object of the European fetishist self-perception of superiority. The difference between these two theoretical strands is both chronological and based on the object of analysis. The former focuses primarily on the British expression of European imperialism that gained consolidation in the eighteenth century and moved across different geographical locations (for example, the USA, Canada, and the Caribbean) and included the Atlantic slave trade. It was sustained by ideas of racialized exceptionalism and the superiority of white Europeans of which Great Britain, especially England, was the epitome. This sense of superiority was also embedded in Western European expressions of Christianity and was exported around the world through missionary endeavors. Meanwhile, transmodernism corresponds with the construction of the idea of “modernity” by Europeans. On this account, modernity did not begin in the Enlightenment but in 1492. It is considered to be a project which was actually subsidized and built on the unfettered killing and exploitation of the Indigenous peoples and lands of the world and the enslaving of African bodies that still occurs today.
Third, the proposal of hybridity in postcolonial studies does not correspond with the range of issues articulated in mestizaje (Latina/o/x and Chicana studies and Theology). As a critical cultural device, the postcolonial notion of hybridity uncovered the particular dynamics of resistance to empire by engaging in the complex processes of interweaving different elements. This resulted in the creation of a new cultural space. As postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha suggests, the colonized engage in the process of hybridization to disrupt Empire’s cultural and intellectual control with the goal of creating structures of resistance. The Latina/o/x and Latin American notion of mestizaje, on the other hand, dispels the romantic idea that the coming together of disparate human groups, cultures, or religions happens peacefully, or that it is even desirable. It unveils a historical moment that was significant for two reasons. First, it exposes the profound European violence exacted against Indigenous peoples and through which their mixed descendants—both culturally and ideologically colonized—entered into a protracted social process of de-Indigenization. Second, it puts on display the historical processes of ethnoracial intermixture, which in turn undermines claims to ethnoracial, cultural, and religious purity. In hybridity, the weaving together of different elements helps articulate a strategy of resistance and subversion, whereas mestizaje uncovers the insidious result of a physical, cultural, religious, and cultural imposition.
Two major interconnected issues emerge in these discussions. First, most postcolonial and decolonial theorists display an aversion to the study of religion that is characteristic of the social sciences. Quite often, these scholars develop their theories without examining the central role Christianity and theology played in the articulation and preservation of colonizing ideological and epistemological structures. The construction of Europe, the invention of America, and the racialization of peoples are all informed by religious and ethical-theological underpinnings as much as by any cultural and ideological construction. Christianity, as an ideologically driven force, has often sustained colonizing attitudes, established racialized hierarchical social structures, and upheld Eurocentric forms of knowledge. Hence, and this is the second issue, a critique of Christianity, in its Western European expressions, should be at the center of these debates. Yet, many postcolonial and decolonial scholars do not engage in a robust critique either from a social sciences perspective or within theological educational settings. Certainly, there are some critics, along with significant voices from the Global South, who articulate Christianities otherwise. But what is at stake is the very method as well as the sources of ethical-theological reflection and articulation.
In other words, the types of (traditional) Christian ethics and theologies that continue to claim objectivity disallow the possibility that theology can be done otherwise. Traditional approaches do not address the multivalent character of the Eurocentric epistemological apparatus which regulates our societies, including academia, and in so doing reproduces and reinscribes white supremacist attitudes and intellectual structures. Scholars claiming to be open to justice and equality, particularly those from dominant European cultures, might choose to address contemporary Eurocentric structures of knowledge from within European critical methods. Such scholars could adopt, for example, a poststructuralist/Foucaultian framing, whereby an analysis of power differentials help us identify the production of knowledge as a mechanism of control and for the disciplining of minds and bodies. From among these scholars some might attempt to show their capacity to identify how the rule of law fails to account for the existence of intersectional layers of discrimination and marginalization in our social structures, and/or how the law legislates different bodies unequally as a technology for the upholding and preservation of the structures of empire and colonization. Still others might go as far as adopting “liberationist” approaches in the hopes of disrupting inherited social structures designed to organize society around Euro-white, heteronormative, patriarchal, and Eurocentric notions of what it means to be human. Each of these theories would enrich our critical engagement. Their combination is welcome and necessary. But what is missing from those approaches is a critical engagement that is outside their intellectual structures and traditions, however progressive they may be.
Traditional approaches do not address the multivalent character of the Eurocentric epistemological apparatus which regulates our societies, including academia, and in so doing reproduces and reinscribes white supremacist attitudes and intellectual structures.
Among Christian theologians and scholars of Christianity from both the dominant European culture in the USA and Canada, as well as minoritized communities in those contexts, the difficulty in using these kind of theoretical frames is that they are not sufficient to address the issues and concerns of minoritized and racialized communities. Let us take poststructuralism and postmodernism as cases in point. They both lack a self-critical orientation because they fail to identify their own Eurocentric colonizing tendencies. For instance, on the one hand, poststructuralist analyses of discourses helpfully reveal the controlling and disciplining of bodies. On the other, those analyses often fail to address the reality of racialized discourses which justify the imprisonment and killing of racialized bodies and peoples. By the same token, a categorical rejection of meta-narratives by postmodernists seems oblivious to the fact that sometimes a metanarratival approach is necessary to counter the myths that the rest of world interprets reality in a fragmentary manner, while the Western European tradition provides a universally applicable epistemological framework. Despite postmodern claims to the contrary, a multi-metanarratival and pluriversal approach actually allows us to see the knowledge of peoples of the world as other epistemological universes that have until now been silenced by colonization.
To complicate matters, the recent popularization of decolonial debates and categories such as “decolonial” and “decolonizing” brings added challenges. Decolonial ideas have been understood by some scholars, even among those who are minoritized, as signaling a move forward in the long trajectory from liberation theologies, through postcolonial debates, to the decolonial impetus. It is not surprising, then, that some scholars deploy those categories interchangeably. I would go as far as to say few even see the need to distinguish between them.
The monument of Hatuey, Taino chief in Baracoa, Cuba. Via Wikimedia Commons.
A few things emerge for me from this analysis. First, though the emergence of Latin American decolonial thinking is something recent, it would be a mistake to conclude that decolonial debates are new. Certainly, the language of decolonization was already floating around in the works of Laura Donaldson and Leo Erskine in the early 1990s. Moreover, decolonial thinking can easily be interpreted as being in line with prior anticolonial and dependency theory debates. Anticolonial theories sought to identify and reject the negative impact of foreign racialized sociopolitical and economic structures in poorer countries, and dependency theories sought to retrace the uneven character of economic exchanges predicated on Eurocentric and Anglo North Atlantic ideologies of development and progress. But traces of what can be called decolonizing attitudes can be found in Hatuey’s (d. 1512) refusal to convert to Christianity, in Tupac Amaru’s (d. 1572) Indigenous-led uprising against the Spaniards, and in the early writing of Garcilaso Inca de la Vega (d. 1616) and Phelipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (d. 1615) at the end of the sixteenth century.
Second, it would also be misleading to conclude that recent theoretical developments are the latest advance in the trajectory from liberation currents to postcolonialism to decolonial thinking. These currents are not synonymous. They do intersect in multiple places, but they are responding to different concerns and each current is asking different questions. Moreover, there are tensions among these scholars. For example, one of the salient critiques by decolonial scholars against postcolonial studies was the latter’s failure to engage the context of Latin America; they argued that colonization in Asia, along with Orientalism, was directly connected chronologically, culturally, and epistemologically to the Spanish and Portuguese invasions of the Americas in the aftermath of 1492. Similarly, a critique levied against decolonial thinkers is their failure to recognize the importance of liberation theology, especially the fact that liberation debates do speak against empire and colonization.
Túpac Amaru, the last Inca of Vilcabamba. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Third, decolonial and decolonizing currents are not monolithic; different regions are engaging similar questions, but they differ in their methodology, range of concerns, and in their inheritance of Eurocentric epistemological structures. Decolonial thinking from Latin America and among Latinas/os have discursive points of connection even though their experiences are totally different from the Indigenous peoples in Canada and Native Americans in the USA. Decolonization also means something different in Australia and Africa, where fruitful debates are taking place. Identifying the limits of each theoretical frame can help prevent the facile coopting of our knowledge production and the sloppy use of concepts and scholarly genealogies as interchangeable. Moreover, jumping from one discourse to another without critically acknowledging internal theoretical tensions has the potential to undermine the critical edge of each stream of thinking along with the unique contributions each can make in academia and to the study of Christianity, and indeed religion more broadly.
The strategy I advocate is to not fall prey to the academic game of creating new abstract categories, but to remain connected with the communities of which we are a part. Those on the ground focus on surviving, making ends meet, and having a safe place to live without contamination, rather than on the abstract delineation of ideas or intellectual gymnastics. For people on the ground, the lived experience of religious faith is much more than an object of study; it provides the necessary map for traversing life.
Néstor Medina engages the field of theo-ethics from contextual, liberationist, intercultural, and post/decolonial perspectives. He explores the ethical implications of religious/theological debates, and how these shape concrete social structures and notions of ethnoracial and cultural identity. He also studies how lived religious experiences shape/transform people’s understandings of ethics on the ground, especially reflecting from Latina/o/x (Canadian and USA), Latin American, and Latina/o Pentecostal perspectives. For the last 10 years, he has been studying the ethical implications of interethnic and intercultural relations particularly in connection with indigenous communities in Canada and Latin America. He is the author of Mestizaje: (Re)Mapping ‘Race,’ Culture, and Faith in Latina/o Catholicism (Orbis, 2009), a booklet On the Doctrine of Discovery (CCC, 2017), and his recent Christianity, Empire and the Spirit (Brill 2018).
It is with deep sadness that I received the news of the passing of Swami Agnivesh, one of India’s foremost Hindu religious leaders dedicated to interfaith harmony and social justice activism. Swami Agnivesh died in a New Delhi hospital on September 11, 2020, 10 days away from his 81st birthday.
Swami Agnivesh was President Emeritus of the World Council of Arya Samaj, a Hindu Reform Movement. In 2004 he was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, Sweden’s “Alternative Nobel Peace Prize” as well as the Swiss “Freedom and Human Rights Award” for his social justice work. He also served as chairperson of the United Nations Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery from 1994–2004. At the time of his death he was serving on the boards of several global interreligious bodies.[1]
I first met Swami Agnivesh in 1999 on one of his visits to South Africa when he unexpectedly attended a Friday congregational (jumu`ah) service at the Claremont Main Road Masjid where I was preaching. Swami Agnivesh shared a special relationship with Swami Vedanand Saraswati, the spiritual head of the Arya Samaj South Africa, and was thus invited to visit South Africa several times. It was on one of these visits that he requested to be taken to a local mosque and ended up at our Friday congregational service. His presence at our mosque service was symbolic of Swami Agnivesh’s life-long dedication to interreligious solidarity.
In 2005 I had the privilege of interviewing him for my doctoral dissertation at his humble office situated in central Delhi, on Jantar Mantar Road, the site from where all social justice protests against the Indian parliament began. Jantar Mantar Road was the equivalent of London’s Hyde Park, all you needed was a cause, a placard, and a voice. Coincidently, on my way to his office to conduct my third interview with Swami Agnivesh I ran into one such demonstration of a large group of Christians who had gathered to march on the Indian parliament in protest against the alleged killing of two pastors and the carrying out of half a dozen attacks on church targets in recent weeks. During the past two decades I have also encountered Swamiji at several global interreligious events.
Swami Agnivesh was inspired by the teachings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati (d.1883) and his Hindu reform movement, the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875. Some of Swami Dayananda’s beliefs and ritual practices which inspired the Arya Samaj are as follows. He upheld the infallibility of the Vedas, the doctrines of karma (the accumulated effect of past deeds) and samsara (the process of death and rebirth), the sanctity of the cow, the importance of the samskaras (individual sacraments), the efficacy of Vedic oblations to the fire, and programs of social reform. He opposed worship of murtis (images), animal sacrifice, shraddha (rituals on behalf of ancestors), the caste system and the concept of untouchability, and child marriages. The Arya Samaj has worked to further female education and intercaste marriage; built missions, orphanages, and homes for widows; has established a network of schools and colleges; and has undertaken famine relief and medical work.[2] Swami Agnivesh found the rational and reformist approach of the Arya Samaj very attractive and saw it not so much as an institutionalized religious movement but rather “as a revolt against Hindu orthodoxy and the exclusive ideology of Brahmanism” (139). It would be true to say that while Swami Agnivesh was inspired by the religious teachings of the Arya Samaj Hindu reform movement he articulated these teachings in his own unique manner.
Swami Agnivesh also consciously molded his life on the image of the great Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi (d.1948). One of the foremost contemporary scholars of Hinduism, Anantanand Rambachan, contends that like Gandhi, Swami Agnivesh represents the tolerant and nonviolent (ahimsa) face of Hinduism which has coexisted uneasily with certain versions of Hinduism which sanction violence (himsa) under certain conditions. Swami Agnivesh was a committed nonviolent activist and consciously modeled the many peace marches he undertook throughout his life on the pacifist resistance campaigns of Gandhi. These marches were intended to highlight unjust practices and structural violence in India.
In 1981 Swami Agnivesh founded the Bandhua Mukti Morcha (The Bonded Labour Liberation Front), which worked to liberate millions of bonded laborers in India. In 1987, he led a march from Delhi to Rajasthan to protest against sati, also known as suttee (the immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres), and campaigned against female infanticide and in support of the entry of “untouchables” into Hindu temples. After the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, which occurred in retaliation for the setting alight of a train that caused the death of several passengers, he joined religious leaders in a march to denounce the violence in the affected areas.
Swami Agnivesh was an outspoken critic of the Hindu nationalist movement known as Hindutva (Hindu-ness). This movement is represented socially by the Sang Parivar (a family of Hindu socio-cultural associations) and politically by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Proponents of the movement define Indian nation and culture as a manifestation of Hindu religious values. They promote social, cultural, and philanthropic activities designed to strengthen Hindu belonging and eschew Indians who embrace what they regard as alien religions such as Islam and Christianity.[3] In a hard-hitting article entitled “Terrorists in Saffron,” originally published in The Indian Express, Agnivesh depicts Hindutva not only as pseudo-Hinduism, but as the internal enemy of Hinduism itself. According to him the Hindutva movement “ . . . drives its inspiration not from Ram, Shiva or Krishna, but from Hitler and Mussolini.”
Swami Agnivesh believed that secularism as a worldview would only be able to succeed in procuring social cohesion and development if it embraced a positive role for spirituality. While he firmly believed in the concept of a secular state, he was opposed to religion being relegated to the private sphere and warned against the inherent dangers in such a position. “The split between politics and religion,” he contended, “has exiled reforming and redemptive values from public life and turned politics into a domain of corruption.” According to Agnivesh, the role of religion in relationship to politics should be that of “infusing it with the core spiritual values which are contained in all religions.” As a result of the unchecked power of the modern secular state Agnivesh feared that the contemporary state had the potential to become an instrument of genocide and carnage. The reasons for this he claimed are twofold. “First, the real actor in state violence is faceless, and second, state sponsored genocide is legitimized and camouflaged by the fact that the government has come to power through democratic means and has the support of the constitution” (167). To counteract this pervasive and awesome power of the state Swami Agnivesh believed that religious activists, as well as other civil society activists, should be vigilant, constantly monitoring the state so as to counterbalance the tendency not to question the exercise of its awesome coercive powers. This is precisely how he conceived of his own role in relationship to politics and the state.
Swami Agnivesh championed what he called social spirituality and tirelessly preached that the biggest challenge facing India and the world was that of poverty and glaring socio-economic inequalities. He argued that the core values of social justice common to all religions were being neglected and thus the vacuum was being filled by communal politics. He disavowed communalism, which he defined as the abuse of narrow religious and/or ethnic identities to incite conflict and violence between people identified as part of different communities. He fought to the bitter end against the communalisation of the Indian state, which he deemed a crime against history.
With the coming to power of the Hindu nationalist party the BJP and its leader Narendra Modi in 2014, Swami Agnivesh redoubled his nonviolent activism against religious intolerance in India. He paid a heavy price for this stance. In July 2018, Swami Agnivesh was violently attacked by a mob allegedly aligned with the BJP youth wing. They claimed he was working hand-in-glove with Christian missionaries to instigate tribal communities in the State of Jharkhand. Swami Agnivesh had come to Pakur to address a tribal festival organized to commemorate a historic land allocation agreement called the Damin-i-Koh, which the state government was disputing. The pro-state protestors accused Agnivesh of “coming to mislead innocent tribals and misguide them against the state at the behest of Christian missionaries.” Agnivesh claimed that the attack was state-sponsored and warned that “fascist tendencies were getting stronger by the day in India.” In the last few years of his life he repeatedly called on progressive movements in India to work much harder in fighting fascist tendencies not only at the political but also at the social level.
A Financial Times journalist has usefully described the powerful impact of Swami Agnivesh’s courageous campaign against Hindu nationalism as follows: “[They] feel the gentle lash of Swami Agnivesh’s tongue much more keenly than criticism from any secular or minority opponent.” May the indomitable spirit and prophetic legacy of Swami Agnivesh live on and continue to contribute to making India and the world more just and humane.
[1]For a detailed account of the life journey of Swami Agnivesh visit his official website at: http://swamiagnivesh.com/.
A. Rashied Omar earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an M.A. in peace studies from the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he is now a core faculty member. Omar’s research and teaching focus on the roots of religious violence and the potential of religion for constructive social engagement and interreligious peacebuilding. He is co-author with David Chidester et al. of Religion in Public Education: Options for a New South Africa (UCT Press, 1994), a contributor to the Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding (Oxford University Press, 2015), and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World (Macmillan Reference USA, 2016). In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as Imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and an advisory board member for Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa.
Representation of network connecting different nodes. Photo Credit: Flickr User Jun.
The recent public discussion over the usefulness of analogizing between the white Jewish American experience of antisemitism and the oppression of Black Americans has prompted the exploration of the moral, epistemic, and strategic limits of using such analogies. This series of the Contending Modernities blog asks us, among other important things, to rethink and explore this “anti-analogy” perspective. Yet I find myself, based on my experience in Jewish anti-racist activist spaces, looking to highlight how analogies that are meant to create solidarities can unfold and shape movement spaces in ways that can perpetuate intra-movement inequalities and ignore differences between struggles.
My position regarding the use of analogies within social movements has been greatly shaped by my experience last year in a multi-day meeting for a newly formed Jewish activist network. This nascent organizing network seeks to create a space in which a multiracial Jewish coalition of activists can articulate a political framework, join resources, and work together on issues of racism, white supremacy, and antisemitism. Although I deeply value the work of the organizers and participants, the already predominant, hegemonic white Jewish perspective was centered, regardless of the intentions and the diverse ethnic and racial make-up of the participants. The programmatic structure of the meeting lent itself to making the fight against white nationalism (which the group understood as the movement that seeks to organize political life around white identity) in our current political moment the focus of the meeting, rather than the white supremacist structure that shapes our life, institutions, practices, and interactions—the structure which has the most impact on the lives of BIJOC (Black, Indigenous, Jews of Color).
The centering of white nationalism over structural racism was done through the use of crisis language that framed the current political moment as one marked by the resurgence of a “fringe” phenomenon (white nationalism) that is now being mainstreamed. This framing received push-back by some of the BIJOC participants who believed it erased their experience of structural racism and romanticized an imagined less-racist America of the past that never existed. Discussions of structural racism happened almost entirely in the spaces reserved exclusively to BIJOC participants, and when we (the BIJOC participants) tried to bring them back to the spaces that included white Jews we encountered mainly apathy and even some hostility. This example is not unique in the Jewish movement spaces I am part of, where the privilege of Jews socially recognized as white is not only very apparent to BIJOC activists but also an inescapable reality (for this reason I will be using in this essay the term white Jews as it reflects this reality).
I believe the centering of white nationalism over structural racism can be partly attributed to one of the guiding conceptual phrases discussed in the meeting, “skin in the game.” This expression was used as a form of analogy to create stronger solidarity between white Jews and BIJOC communities. It framed white Jewish solidarity as more than mere allyship, but as intrinsically connected to the danger white Jews face living in a white supremacist society. By analogizing the experiences of white Jews with BIJOC, the fight against white nationalism, which was presented as the most dangerous to white Jews out of all forms of white supremacist violence, becomes centered in the work and minds of white Jewish activists. When concepts like “skin in the game” are employed in anti-racist struggles in multi-racial Jewish activist spaces the perspective of white Jews becomes prioritized. This perspective is amplified by the structural inequalities and privileges that are afforded to white Jews and especially white upper-middle-class Jews.
Analogies between different forms of oppression that concepts like “skin in the game” recommend lead people to make comparisons between different epistemic locations. We can’t draw analogies in the ether. We can only articulate analogies beginning from our specific positionality within the power structures in which we live. Yet, ironically, analogies can also serve to hide the positionality of those making them. When white Jews draw analogies to the BIJOC experiences of racism, they disconnect themselves from their role in maintaining white supremacy, in what scholars have termed a “move to innocence” (see the work of Mary Louis Fellows and Sherene Razack, Janet Lee Mawhinney, and Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang). They also take up more space in discourses that are meant to empower BIJOC—discourses that put great value on body-politics, that is, on speaking from a place of experience of oppression as they are felt on the body of the speaker, the generator of knowledge. When white Jews use analogies, like those entailed in the concept of “skin in the game,” that position them outside of whiteness, they end up centering themselves and trespass into epistemic spaces that are intended to empower BIJOC. By doing so, white Jews do not cease to be white, as whiteness is not merely an identity or a set of cultural practices, but is also a location in a structure of power. The structures of power that privilege white people do not disappear when white Jews invoke the histories of their ancestors.
When concepts like “skin in the game” are employed in anti-racist struggles in multi-racial Jewish activist spaces the perspective of white Jews becomes prioritized. This perspective is amplified by the structural inequalities and privileges that are afforded to white Jews and especially white upper-middle-class Jews.
Analogies can indeed be great tools for understanding how mechanisms of oppression operate across contexts. For example, drawing analogies between the mechanisms of settler-colonial nations can help us understand with more clarity how those mechanisms operate, as Brenna Bhandar’s and Lorenzo Veracini’s works show. However, when it comes to creating solidarities, analogies like the one I discussed above are not always as useful and when used, should be employed with caution. Analogies are always created through a knowledge-making process embedded in structural power relations. As Kim Case, Paul Gorski and Noura Erakat, Michelle Jacobs and Tiffany Taylor, and Janet Lee Mawhinney have shown, activist spaces are not exempt from this. Nor is the Jewish community. Through this knowledge-making process analogies can shape the political direction and goals of movements for the benefit of those with the structural advantage who are making the analogies. This creates more avenues for white Jews in activist spaces to garner cultural and social capital, assume and maintain leadership roles, and create programmatic content that centers their experience. By leading workshops, teach-ins, trainings, etc. with that programmatic content their “expertise” is cemented in activist spaces.
Solidarities that are based on analogies—those that rely on drawing similarities between experiences of different groups to establish a sense of shared interest—can create a sense of uniformity that does not give room to explore the contradictions and complexities inherent in multi-racial and multi-ethnic movements, and this includes the assumption that all liberation struggles are commensurable. Tuck and Yang ask us to instead adopt an ethic of incommensurability, arguing that “opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across these efforts” (28).[1] For when one forms solidarity only around what is common and ignores differences, one invokes a weakened and transient strategic avenue for justice. This is because different struggles, as well as different communities in shared struggles, inevitably find themselves at odds with each other. This does not mean we should not work together towards liberations (as opposed to liberation), it only means that the differences, tensions, and contradictions are important, and we should be mindful of the structures of power in which movements exist.
One example of this dynamic can be seen between the struggle to decolonize Palestine, and the campaign of Mizrahi Israeli Jews who are demanding justice for the families of kidnapped Yemenite, Mizrahi, and Balkan children. The two struggles are incommensurable. Mizrahi Jews are seeking justice from the State of Israel and in doing so are potentially making it more legitimate. The families’ goals are to receive information about their children from the state as well as public institutional acknowledgment of the injustices done to them. If this campaign is successful, Israel will issue an apology, and work to make amends through public recognition and acknowledgement of the injustice done to the Mizrahi families. By doing so, Israel will have to admit the wrongdoing and culpability of its founding institutions and Ashkenazi elites. This might weaken some of the mythical narratives at the core of the state, but it will also carve out more symbolic room for its Mizrahi citizens and incorporate them more deeply into the settler story of Israel. This has the potential to make Israel stronger. Although both the injustice to Mizrahi families and to Palestinians are intrinsically connected to the creation of the settler-colonial state of Israel and its racist structures, it is detrimental to the campaign of the Mizrahi families to frame their struggle in a way that undermines the state, for the simple reason that it will not provide them with the outcomes they seek. Whatever the ultimate result is, if the question is whether the families can choose to frame the struggle as a decolonial struggle, the answer is: they cannot. Their demands are articulated through a discourse of citizenship (in a settler-state) and not one of decolonization. The incommensurability of the two efforts makes it complicated to attempt to draw analogies and frame Palestinian and Mizrahi struggles under one umbrella.
I argue that instead of relying on analogies, we should embrace the complexity, the contradiction, and the incommensurability of different liberation projects. When we put all liberations under one umbrella we erase nuances. We end up measuring what liberation looks like only from our perspectives and positionalities, and we end up shaping the direction of our movements in ways that replicate the systems of power we are trying to dismantle. I am not advocating for working toward liberation on only one axis, but exactly the opposite. We can recognize the interconnectedness of struggles and how oppressions interlock and shape each other without assuming identical goals and interests of different struggles, and without ignoring the power structures they inhabit. I urge us to embrace the plurality without applying a framework of “one-struggle” that flattens down dynamic movements. When we open ourselves to complexities we are less likely to force our notion of what liberation is onto others. This allows us to make room for a plurality of struggles working on different axes, and in different contexts. We can do this while being in solidarity with one other and always sharing a sense of empathy and understanding.
[I]nstead of relying on analogies, we should embrace the complexity, the contradiction, and the incommensurability of different liberation projects.
The public discussion over the “right” of white Jews to analogize is a consequence of the centering of white Jews in the Jewish community, as this discussion revolves around the importance of their epistemic position. I believe that if white Jews want to work towards decentering whiteness in the Jewish community and creating meaningful solidarity with communities of color, they should focus on empowering BIJOC. Doing so means giving voice to all the contradictions and complexities that exist in the multiplicity of voices and perspectives that reside in communities of color. Unlike white Jews, BIJOC need not resort to analogies to make meaningful connections with communities of color. They are already a part of these communities, and are inhabiting the complex intersections white Jews are attempting to speak from—with their own bodies.
[1] It is worth mentioning that while I find Tuck and Yang’s understanding of incommensurability useful, there are limits to their broader conceptual approach, including their positivist approach to land and their reduction of slavery to forced labor, both of which have been identified by Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino.
Shahar Zaken is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at UC Davis. Shahar is interested in questions of power/knowledge, coloniality, intersectionality, and how those shape identities and social movements. Shahar looks to inform his studies through his experience as an activist in Jewish anti-racist and Palestinian solidarity spaces.
Protest in Philadelphia on June 1st, 2020. Photo Credit: Rob Bulmahn. Flickr.
I saw something strange on June 1st, 2020. I saw the work of a generic theodicy take place on live television. I had come to the UK for a visit during my university’s spring break, only to find the majority of transatlantic flights cancelled and lockdowns imposed within the next few days. This meant that my stay had been extended indefinitely. So when the uprisings in protest against the continued police violence and murder of Black men and women began across cities in the United States, I could only watch my social media timelines anxiously as the police response in my home city of Philadelphia turned ever more violent. On June 1st I found a livestream of some mainstream local news covering one of the largest peaceful protest marches Philadelphia has ever seen. I was surprised to listen to the news anchors speak positively and compassionately about the protests. As the anchors were talking a large section of the protest did something other marches have tried to do in the past. They took I-676, a bit of the interstate that runs through Philadelphia’s Center City, stopping traffic and marching on the highway itself. The anchors seemed surprised but again remarked at how peaceful the protest had been and cut to a short story by a reporter on the ground about the peaceful events of the day so far. When they cut back to the live scene suddenly there was pandemonium as tear gas—a chemical that is banned in war by the Geneva Convention—enveloped I-676, wafting over the peaceful protesters and even the cars that had been caught in the protest march. Police in SWAT gear and with automatic rifles began to swarm the protesters. There is video of these police indiscriminately pepper spraying protesters who have their hands up and people rushing in panic to try get off the highway by climbing over concrete embankments and fences as police damage protester’s bikes and line up zip-tied protestors in stress positions on the hot and dirty highway.
The anchors immediately began to look for a reason why this was happening. They could not figure out why the police would be so violent in the face of non-violent protesters. The obvious answer is that the police are a violent force and should be abolished. To accept that would be to call into question the entire world that police violence supports, to see in the incoherence of the violence against non-violent protests the same incoherence of struggle and suffering that undoes the world, that undoes our very sense of selves. In searching for a justification for this unjustifiable violence of the police, the anchors were engaged in theodicy.
What is Theodicy?
Theodicy is both a concept and a discourse that comes to us today from the traditions of Christian theology and European philosophy. Traditionally the term refers to the justification of the existence of a benevolent God in the face of the problem of evil or suffering and broken into its Greek roots theos (God) and dike (justice) it literally means the justification of God. However, what we will see in this short essay, working with Sylvia Wynter’s treatment of theodicy as a technology, is a much more generic form of theodicy. In that generic form, theodicy is a matter of asserting coherence when confronted with the incoherence of struggle and suffering. This generic understanding of theodicy becomes apparent when we start to examine it as a particular technology connected to the project of European colonialism, with that project’s twinned history of settler-colonialism throughout the Americas and enslavement of Black Africans. Subjecting theodicy to this kind of examination is what Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to as “provincializing.” By provincializing theodicy, a central concept within philosophy of religion, we can begin to open up our thinking to the incoherence of suffering and struggle and begin to construct a thought worthy of what cannot be justified.
White Thought, Annotated and Exposed
One of the gifts that comes from engaging with decolonial theory is this provincialization of philosophy as white thought. Reactionary intellectuals often accuse decolonial theorists of being smugly satisfied in pronouncing some moral judgment over this or that particular philosopher. While we may find moral judgments like “Kant’s a racist!” or “Hegel’s a misogynist!” being thrown around a seminar table or turned into a meme to be scrolled past on social media, any such moral judgment is already superfluous for decolonial engagements with European philosophy. The risible and horrific statements of the pantheon of European philosophers regarding women, Africans, Jews, Muslims, and others outside a narrowly constructed identity of European whiteness are already well documented and in fact can be “revealed” simply by reading their most famous texts. There is no need for some hermetic method; it is shamelessly right there on the page. The task of reading the history of European philosophy from a decolonial perspective does not need to be one concerned with the place of the individual philosopher or theorists within history, but can concern itself directly with a kind of cartography of the world as constructed and reflected in that thought. This method says, here is the world as made by White Europeans, here are the paths you are told to follow, here are the divisions between this and that, the “civilized” and the colonized, “free” and slave. This is the world you have to navigate and such a map may be useful when it marks out the positions where philosophy is policed and where philosophers are the police. With such a map you may be able to avoid or evade them.
While we may find moral judgments like “Kant’s a racist!” or “Hegel’s a misogynist!” being thrown around a seminar table or turned into a meme to be scrolled past on social media, any such moral judgment is already superfluous for decolonial engagements with European philosophy.
Christina Sharpe builds a theoretical architecture of “Black life, annotated and redacted” for Black scholars engaged in Black studies for Black people. White scholars can place themselves under the demands of Black study without appropriating or profiting from this Black life by following the example of Sharpe’s method, but now directed at this newly provincialized white thought. Let us consider this cartographical method of study to be “white thought, annotated and exposed.” Annotating white thought in this way can be a strategy to be used against it, to evade it, to describe it ruthlessly and rigorously, and add to efforts to abolish it in its actualities and possibilities. Most assuredly this is not to critique it, which is how white thought continues as white thought, but it is rather to move away from it or to break it down into parts which might be useful when disempowered from the whole of the machinery. Daniel Colucciello Barber provides an example of this kind of annotated white thought that takes aim at the role of critique in continuing the world. When used in this way, annotations are a form of negation even as they are additions to the text. The annotations are made to mark out and better avoidphilosophy’s checkpoints, the places where one is harassed and where demands for one’s papers are made. It is to mark the places where philosophy is part of an apparatus that decides one’s status, both as a political being and as a being. In other words, it shows how philosophy is part of the apparatus that determines what side of the border one is placed, whether that border be internal or external.
Sylvia Wynter on Theodicy
Theodicy should be subject to this annotation and requires such a cartography, for it manifests a general form of European thought—inclusive of the violent colonizing brothers, philosophy and theology—that plays a particular role within the construction of the colonial world. Sylvia Wynter has begun to trace such a category in her work. She has demonstrated that the appeal to theodical forms of thought is present throughout attempts to think about the history of racial-colonial capitalism. Wynter directs our attention here when she emphasizes the words of an apologist for colonialism, Gregory Cerio, who attempts to “deconstruct” the “black legend” of Spanish atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the so-called “New World.” Cerio provides a culturally relativistic defense of the Spanish saying that, by their standards, they acted with moderation and even “accepted” the indigenous into Spanish society. Wynter emphasizes the theodical nature of his claim by italicizing his assertion that the Spanish “sought to provide a philosophical and moral foundation for their actions in the New World” (6).
Theodicy, as a general form of philosophical thought, is the theoretical justification of any system or relationship generative of meaning that places the violence and suffering necessary for that system’s operation within a narrative of redemption.
To provide a foundation is to provide a justification. This task of justification is not foreign to forms of philosophy taken to be central to the history of European thought. Hegel, for example, famously remarked in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History that his philosophy of history was a theodicy, an attempt to reconcile all the suffering and evils of the world with the accomplished aims of reason. He writes, “That world history is governed by an ultimate design, that it is a rational process—whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason—this is a proposition whose truth we must assume; its proof lies in the study of world history itself, which is the image and enactment of reason” (28). Stated with less theodical disavowal, all the “bad things” about the world, like the horrific violence and suffering of colonization and slavery, are justified by the goodness of the world’s ultimate reason.
The Unknown Maroon statue. Photo Credit: Flickr User: Steve Bennet, Haiti.
Wynter’s patient elaboration and re-elaboration of the racial-colonial and capitalist development of what it means to be human emerges necessarily in relation to these theodical philosophical and moral justifications, not simply as an intellectual problem but a social one. Denise Ferreira da Silva tells us that Wynter’s work is faithful to the early tenants of historical materialism. Wynter’s examination of the concept of race does not reduce it to some ideological excuse for colonialism, but the concept is itself made possible and emerges only on the basis of the social relation of “colonizer/colonized” (92). In other words, theodicy is called forth not by pure reason, but through our living as social beings and by a particular way of organizing that living together. With regard to the racial classification of people, theodicy is called forth by the need to justify why this person should suffer in absolute terms so that this person may live a good life. The incoherence of the forced living together of the colonizer and the colonized, and the even more extreme and incoherent violence of the relationship between slaver and enslaved, must be made sense of. Theodicy, as a general form of philosophical thought, is the theoretical justification of any system or relationship generative of meaning that places the violence and suffering necessary for that system’s operation within a narrative of redemption.
We can see this more clearly in Wynter where theodicy is especially related to the colonial episteme. In this colonial episteme, the creation of coherent sense or meaning is required to support the dominant genre of the human. The existence of any genre of the human, be it Christian, Man1, or Man2 (these being the three genres examined in Wynter’s work), must be justified in the face of suffering and evil that threatens the coherence and meaning of the human. For it is the genre of the human that, Wynter says, “aprioristically underlies all our present disciplines” (117). What it means to be human, the question of who “we” are, is produced through these genres of being “in whose,” Wynter says, “always auto-instituted and origin-narratively inscribed terms we can alone experience ourselves as human” (117). Theodicy arises out of the desire that we have the rules of order, the theoretical grammar, to experience ourselves, in so far as we are constituted relationally as social beings.
Following Wynter, provincializing theodicy allows us to name theodicy as a concept or technology and not a problem. Here Wynter follows Lewis Gordon who identifies a secular form of theodicy in biological frameworks for understanding the human. He names this a “biodicy” that serves to justify the pain and suffering experienced within the here and now by appealing to a source of legitimacy. Wynter says that one can generalize from Gordon’s concept of a secular theodicy to all “supernaturally legitimated and guaranteed human societal orders” (137). This leads to a general statement of the form of theodicy:
“Doing this by extending the traditional meaning of theodicy—that is, as an order that functions to justify the ways of God to mankind—to one in which all supernaturally guaranteed orders must function in a cognitively closed manner, in order to justify the order and its everyday function, to its subjects, as the realization of a true, because ostensibly supernaturally mandated, order” (135).
The need for some form of theodicy arises from one genre of the human being taken as the absolute identity—meaning absolute self-sameness—of the human as such. Wynter demonstrates that as the genre shifts so must the underlying source of legitimacy. Theodicy does not disappear but is replaced by whatever is taken to be the supreme Being or supreme source of legitimacy. Theodicy then lies at the level of meaning itself.
After Theodicy
Earlier, I noted that Wynter treats theodicy as a technology and not a problem. This is distinctive and incisive because inside of the history of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology theodicy was understood as an intellectual problem relating to the external and objective reality of God. When philosophers of religion accept this story they are only able to see arguments for God’s benevolence in the face of the problem of evil and suffering. What they miss and Wynter sees is that the name of God hides a more generic problem of coherence and meaning that is implied in the function of God for those historical systems of thought and practice. As Wynter has shown, the project of theodicy does not historically or abstractly require the theistic figure of God as given shape by certain theoretical interpretations and communal beliefs found within Christianity or any other particular monotheistic tradition. The form of this thinking persists even in seemingly secular times.
Perhaps the most egregious element of theodicy is the central practice of analogizing between times and peoples, between their sufferings and the specific role their relations plays in the creation of the world. Only by obscuring the particularity of suffering through what Frank B. Wilderson III identifies as the universalizing ruse of analogy does theodicy redeem the world. In the longer project this post is abstracted from, the centering of anti-Black violence of world-making and theodicy is examined in more detail. Any further discussion of the themes raised in this short post also requires a discussion of the importance of understanding the Black radical tradition as part of the decolonial tradition and one that calls for the abolition of the world. That world to be abolished is given ultimately as mythic past and the world as it could be or as possible is given as hoped for or awaited future. What the world is now is occluded through the analogizing of past and future. To think the world now, as it is, requires that we give attention to what François Laruelle calls the “worst necessary” instead of theodicy’s “best possible” (50). In “On Violence” Fanon argues that violence is the means by which knowledge of social reality is gained by the masses. Violence is then not primarily a means of politics so much as a means of mass or generic contemplation. To attend to violence, where such attention is now understood as “thinking about thinking,” is to attend to the world formed and forming of our grammars of coherence that exist to cover the violence that this world says is necessary for its existence. Returning to the scene that played out on Philadelphia’s I-676 on June 1st and the violence of the police on that day, the knowledge gained on that day by those protestors was a contemplation of the world as it is. Not the world as it is should or the world as it has been, but the way the world is now, propped up and sustained by police violence. What remains after the diagnosis of theodicy as philosophical form is an analysis of violence as knowledge of the world. What might our philosophies and our theories look like if we began there?
Anthony Paul Smith is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religion & Theology at La Salle University in Philadelphia, USA. His research focuses in on the philosophy of religion and environmental humanities. He is also the translator of a number of books by the French philosopher François Laruelle and is currently completing a translation of philosopher Malcom Ferdinand’s A Decolonial Ecology: A Caribbean Perspective. Smith’s current research project is an investigation of theodicy as philosophical form and the possibility of a anti-theodical form of thinking. He often writes at the collective blog An und für sich and copies of his essays, recordings of talks, and other miscellany are available at his website.
Eduard Bendemann, Die trauernden Juden im Exil. Wikimedia Commons.
Can There Be a Prophetic Voice Today without Diaspora?
The paradox of Jewish exile is that it never happened. There was no edict of exile from the land of Israel after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE; Jews continued to live in Palestine, even composing the Palestinian Talmud and various Midrashim. Most Jews lived in diaspora, at least since the sixth century BCE, flourishing and transforming Israelite religion into Judaism.
Although Jews were never exiled from the land of Israel, the Jewish belief that Jews live in exile shaped Jewish self-understanding as a major theme in religious literature and liturgy. The reality is that Jews settled in diaspora in lands around the globe, assimilating various cultures, languages, and religious ideas. Although diaspora constituted the political and cultural state of Jews, exile became internalized as an existential state, with Jews alienated from society while awaiting redemption. Liturgical fantasies that Jews lived in exile fostered not an alienation from the surrounding society, but an absence of responsibility for it. Zionism arose to address a political exile that had not happened, but its timing was fortuitous: a moment of rising antisemitism that made Jewish assimilation in diaspora unviable, destructive, and ultimately murderous. The existential exilic state supposedly ended with Zionism, which promised to restore normality and masculinity while offering no such restoration to women. Yet, life in the State of Israel continues for some Jews as a state of alienation, living at a distance from meaningful Jewish identity, increasingly distanced from the politics and societal problems in the country in which they live, especially as they affect Arab Israelis, Bedouin, Druze, Christians, and other minorities. Neither exile nor the promised end of exile achieve the prophetic stance of justice. The diasporic position, by contrast, is the condition for the prophetic: standing at the boundaries between society and the reins of governance, the prophet demands justice from the governing, while giving voice to the unheard who suffer at the hands of the regime. Can there be a prophetic voice today without diaspora? The prophet is an iconoclast, refusing to align with king or Temple, warning against the seductions of power: “Behold you trust in deceptive words to no avail” (Jeremiah 7:8). The prophet speaks in the name of God, retaining independence from worldly power; it is a position of diaspora from seats of power, whether king or priest. Isaiah’s vision proclaims “Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth” (19:24), co-existence rather than triumph over enemies, with all of equal merit: “the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage” (9:25). There is no claim of superiority, chosenness, nor distancing from former enemies.
Exile Is a Paradox
The destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE by the Assyrians, who deported the entire population (who then disappeared from history) is simply forgotten in Jewish history. The more important event was the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, along with the transport of Israelites to Babylonian exile. These events formed the basis for how exilic experience is remembered by Jews. Yet the Babylonian exile of Judah was also paradoxical: a few decades later, Cyrus the Great offered the Israelites safe passage back to Jerusalem, but relatively few returned and the majority remained in Babylonia for over 2500 years, composing the Babylonian Talmud, medieval Jewish philosophy, and turning Israelite religion into Judaism. All the while, rabbis in the land of Israel composed the Palestinian Talmud, various Midrashic texts, and, in the sixteenth century, a Code of Jewish Law along with Lurianic mysticism. Exile became diaspora, and even the prophet Jeremiah, who lived through the Babylonian conquest, advised turning exile into diaspora: “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce…. Work for the good for the city to which I have exiled you, since on its welfare yours depends” (Jeremiah 9:4–7).
Was any of this an “exile”?
Exile as Affect
Exile became a theological doctrine defining Judaism not in response to a political decree banning Jews from living in Israel, but rather, as the historian Israel Yuval argues, in response to the rise of Christianity and its supersessionist claims in the fifth century CE. Religious polemics faded but exile remained as a Jewish mentality: being a Jew is to be exilic. Jews not only live in exile (galut), exile lives in them. Indeed, exile has come to define the condition of the collective Jewish people and the self-understanding of the individual Jew. Exile is not only a theo-political doctrine, it is also a regime of affect, defining the subjective, emotional experience of individual Jews. Doctrine and affect have reinforced one another and been fortified by rituals, such as breaking a glass at a wedding, fast days of mourning, such as Tisha B’Av (which commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem), numerous references to exile in Jewish prayers, and various customs, such as leaving a tear in a wall covering or table cloth to indicate that nothing can be perfect while Jews remain in exile.
The destruction of the Temple marked the end of animal worship and its replacement by verbal worship; the Temple, the home of God and priests, the dwelling place of God and the symbol of Judaism around the world, supplanted by the word, by Talmud and Midrash. Metaphor became law, and exile became a state of being, not a physical location.
In diaspora, exilic trauma was imagined and expressed in Psalm 137:
1 By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. 2 On the willows there we hung up our lyres. 3 For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4 How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? 5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! 6 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!
7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Raze it, raze it! Down to its foundations!” 8 O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall he be who requites you
with what you have done to us! 9 Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
The Spread of Exilic Existence
What is remarkable is the widespread adoption of Jewish exilic trauma. In his famous poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Langston Hughes writes of African exile, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The Bible itself renders exile a universal experience, with the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The Exodus from Egyptian slavery is an exile into the wilderness that is necessary before the conquest of a land that was never home can be attempted. Hellenistic writers presented the Exodus as the banishment of the Israelites from Egypt by the Pharaoh during a plague and mocked Jews for claiming a heritage as slaves, the most exiled state of existence. As an internalized experience, exile came to define the inner life of the Jew. Lech l’cha: go inward, writes Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, find yourself, the authentic inner being because your Judaism will only be meaningful if it is an expression of your authentic self. Just as Abraham left his home in Ur and went into exile to find his home in the Promised Land, there is a sense of home in exile.
“Who am I without exile,” asks Mahmoud Darwish in the title of a poem, echoing the Hasidic understanding. “Stranger on the river bank, like the river, water binds me to your name. . . . What shall will we do without exile?” (113–14). The poem is remarkable because it speaks of the exile of Palestinians that resulted from policies of the State of Israel and yet the poem could have just as easily been written by a Jew to express the traditional Jewish sensibility of exile. The irony is well-known: just when Zionism overcomes the exile of the Jews, it creates the exile of the Palestinians.
Overcoming Exile?
Or has Jewish exile been overcome by Zionism? Can it be overcome if it simultaneously creates a new exile for another people? Moreover, if twenty-first century Jews have finally (supposedly!) escaped the theology of exile and the existential burden of being exilic, what is the purpose of being a Jew? In recent years, the Argentinian Jewish thinker Santiago Slabodsky has proposed a path: to articulate a decolonial Judaism. During the course of diaspora, he argues, Judaism was colonized by the hegemonic Christian West in which some Jews lived; now it is time for Jews to forge alliances with those displaced and dispossessed by European colonialism, those labeled as “barbarians,” that is, as Sidra Ezrahi describes them, those standing outside the framework of “the speech community, the community of selves” (18).
The Prophetic
Christian supersessionism is a form of theological colonialism and Slabodsky asks us to imagine recovering a Judaism unsullied by Christian colonization, not a postcolonial Judaism but a decolonial Judaism. For too long, Jews have striven to integrate and assimilate into a fictional Judeo-Christian tradition that has equated itself with a supposedly superior Western European civilization and has been used to justify imperialist and colonialist ambitions that have had horrific consequences. In part, Zionism challenged that goal, demanding that Jews renounce assimilation and escape the incurable antisemitism of Europe and instead constitute themselves as an independent nation-state that would take its place alongside the other nation-states of the world. Yet, Zionism ultimately adopted the political strategy of Europe, becoming an extension of the European Christian West and assuming “the hegemonic position of the agent of civilization,” as Gil Hochberg writes (187). Arriving in Israel has removed Jews from the alterity that defined them in diaspora and initially turned Israel into an ally of the hegemonic Christian West, and has now made it into an ally of the global neo-liberal and authoritarian order. Rejected by Europe, Jews arrived in Palestine to create an outpost of Europe that both negated and appropriated the Arab Orient and now seeks an alliance with its dictators, most recently with the UAE, presumably soon with the Saudis. Rather than focusing on a critique of Zionism and the State of Israel as reproductions of the colonial project, however, Slabodsky argues that Jews should “privilege the knowledge of the colonized to subvert normative thinking in the midst of the colonial divide” (167).
For too long, Jews have striven to integrate and assimilate into a fictional Judeo-Christian tradition that has equated itself with a supposedly superior Western European civilization and has been used to justify imperialist and colonialist ambitions that have had horrific consequences.
Slabodsky’s argument is that Jews need to divorce themselves from the self-proclaimed Christian universalism of Europe that conceals its colonizing goals and instead should realign themselves with the so-called “barbarians” of the Global South. This will allow them to become ethical figures who are disruptive of identitarian, exclusionary politics. Exile would then become a state to be embraced by those rejecting the Eurocentric universal, turning the Jew from a figure of melancholy into, as Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg put it, a “herald of disruptive politics, a politics that challenges the rigidity and dichotomy of identity politics and favors empathy, partnership, joint dwelling, and integration instead of separation, segregation, ghettoization, and oppressive assimilation” (298).To live as a Jew in diaspora is to live as a figure of disruption, rejecting the universal that masks the hegemony of the Christian European West and to think with others who have also been rendered “barbaric.” Instead of isolated identitarian politics, Slabodsky urges an “identity in politics” in solidarity with others in the struggle for epistemic and social justice that would unite the diasporic ethical stance of the Jews with new political alliances.
Slabodsky’s proposal suggests to me a call to Jews to revive the prophetic tradition. By this he does not mean the ethical monotheism touted by German Jewish theologians who identified the prophetic message of justice with Kant’s religion of reason. Rather, what is needed is prophetic passion. Religion is not a series of propositions, nor a social order that creates community through ritual performance. Religion demands affect, emotional commitment, and stirs the basic human need for engagement with other human beings.
Prophetic Passion is Needed
It is only when prophetic justice is read with the lens of Hasidic passion and compassion that the meaning of the prophets becomes clear: not as a messenger of God, but as Abraham Heschel notes in quoting Jeremiah 15:19, “a person who stands in the presence of God” (21). That marks the difference, according to Heschel, between the Christian West and its proofs for the existence of God, and the crucial Jewish distinction: to be a witness to God.
Transcendence, too, is about passion: divine pathos that demands strong emotions. Heschel writes that “The prophet’s ear perceives the silent sigh” of human suffering (9). “The prophet’s word is a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven” (16). For some, the prophetic critique of society might be called hysterical, but then “what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?” (5).
When Jews arrived in the United States from Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, they felt they had arrived in the promised land. Dedicating a new synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina in 1841, a slave trading city, Gustav Poznanski proclaimed, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple” (467). A few years later, in 1857, Reform rabbi Samuel Adler, shortly after arriving in New York, then a city with slaves and supporters of slavery, declared, “Behind us lies Egypt, the Middle Ages, before us the sea of Talmudic legalism. . . . The spirit indwelling here in the West, the spirit of freedom, is the newly-born Messiah” (483). Viewing Europe as Egypt might be understandable in the nineteenth century, although many Jews were flourishing. But viewing the antebellum United States, where slavery was legal, as the Promised Land?
White American Zion
Portrait of David Einhorn. Wikimedia Commons.
Not all rabbis were spiritually and politically unaware. The goal, David Einhorn declared in his inaugural sermon in Baltimore in 1855, was “the liberation of Judaism for ourselves and for our children, so as to prevent the estrangement from Judaism” (481). Within a few years Einhorn was preaching against slavery—and was run out of town by his pro-slavery congregants.
Jewish religious life in America has often been less about faith in God and more about politics. German Jews who arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century identified as white, with whites, and flourished like other whites as bystanders and beneficiaries of the economy and social stratification produced by slavery. Whether or not they believed in God, they strongly believed that “America is our Zion,” as the leaders of Reform Judaism in America stated in an 1898 statement.
Prophetic justice, as Atalia Omer conceives it, is a revival of religion. To stop injustice and to address and transform violence requires religion. She describes the internal Jewish critique that uses key religious symbols, holidays, and liturgy to criticize Jewish political positions: for example, building a sukkah in front of the Israeli embassy to protest the Israeli government’s treatment of Bedouins. Indeed, Heschel writes that to pray and ignore the injustices of society is blasphemy.
The identification of America as a messianic Zion made the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in October 2018 come to Jews as a huge shock: How could this happen in America? And that shock is precisely the problem. For too long, Jews in America not only identified themselves as white, they identified America with the white experience. Innumerable Black churches have been burned by arsonists and Black worshippers murdered by shooters—think of the 2015 murder of nine worshippers at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. That, too, is America and it is not part of the messianic vision.
Even before white Jews can begin to question their own identity as white people and recognize Jews of color, they have to develop the epistemic ability to recognize the white supremacy of America. When the psalmist writes (Psalm 135:16), “they have eyes but do not see,” idolaters are implicated. But perhaps by turning America into a messianic Zion Jews have made themselves idolaters, or, perhaps, arrivistes: tourists, immigrants, bad observers who have come to sojourn for a time, but not live in America.
Epistemic Resistance
If Judaism is to be decolonized, what must be removed are not only the distortions caused by Euro-Christian hegemony, but also the patterns of Jewish thought and political practices that have arisen in response. These might include Hasidism’s association of piety with particular sexual repressions, Zionism’s assumption that statehood will overcome exile, and German-Jewish thought’s repudiation of both movements, along with its imitation of Lutheran Protestantism. As the racist American rabbi and eventual politician in Israel Meir Kahane correctly noted, removing Jews from exile is easier than removing exile from Jews; the existential sense of being in exile has functioned for too long to justify Jewish indifference to the wider society, downplaying racism while being profoundly attentive to antisemitism. The observation points to the additional question of how Euro-Christian hegemony’s shaping of Judaism can be excised from the minds and emotions of Jews and Judaism.
If Judaism is to be decolonized, what must be removed are not only the distortions caused by Euro-Christian hegemony, but also the patterns of Jewish thought and political practices that have arisen in response.
Perhaps a contrarian embrace of the colonial might be effective in subverting its power. In a similarly suggestive way, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes that “the Jew must be part of the dominant culture but maintain a critical relationship to this dominant culture . . . basing Jewish existence in Israel on the concept of exile means removing the land ‘as place’ and turning it instead into a spiritual concept, thus separating the concrete land from the idea of redemption.” Turning the place of Israel into a spiritual concept would mean re-entering an exilic consciousness that cannot be eradicated by a nation-state, army, or even political sovereignty. But a deeply ingrained exile may also offer the possibility of an ethics of transcultural encounter that links Raz-Krakotzkin with Slabodsky into a political project. Insisting on the state of exile has placed Jews in alliance with conservative evangelical Christians in the belief that Jews stand outside the course of history, living in a theological realm of Heilsgeschichte, governed by an unknowable divine plan. While ostensibly differing from Zionism’s claim to bring Jews back into the course of history, there are surprising links between the exilic and the Zionist claims: both are responses to Euro-Christian hegemony.
The decolonial Judaism that Slabodsky proposes would no longer need to respond to Christian supersessionism with a theology of exile, and a shift to identifying as Jews with the “barbarians” of the Global South would also mark a leap away from the Euro-Christian imperial domain. Indeed, the political decolonization of the twentieth century is no doubt an additional reason for Christian questioning or even withdrawal from its supersessionist theology. Can the existential sense of exile that has pervaded Jewish identity over the centuries be transformed into an active voice for social justice in diaspora?
CLOSE THE CAMPS – Day 26 of a month of actions outside ICE San Francisco. Photo Credit: Flickr User Peg Hunter.
In diaspora the souls of Jews, too, can grow deep as rivers. In Babylon, “we lay down and wept,” but today there is no time for weeping. Authoritarian regimes abound, massive corruption prospers, racism is now recognized as a public health crisis, antisemitism is growing yet is cynically manipulated by some Jews for political gain, the gap between the wealthy few and the impoverished many is turning the world into a giant slave plantation. And yet even in our anger, the prophet Habakkuk reminds us, we must remember mercy (3:2).
We Cannot Walk Away from the Prophetic
What the prophets accomplish is a transformation of exilic mentality into a position of marginality within diaspora: the lonely but very loud voice of justice, compassion, and hope that constitute the promised redemption. Jeremiah’s voice is clear: “They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things, says the Lord, and shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?” (5:28-29) According to the prophets, the ultimate expression of God is not wisdom, magnificence, land, glory, nor even love, but rather justice. Zion, Isaiah declares, shall be redeemed by justice, and those who repent, by righteousness. Justice is the tool of God, the manifestation of God, the means of our redemption and the redemption of God from human mendacity. Isaiah asks, “Can we abandon despair and find the inner resources to respond when God asks? Who will speak for me? Who will remember the covenant of peace and compassion?
As prophetic, the diasporic Jew is never entirely at home, never content or complacent in a world of injustice. Diaspora transforms exile into Jewish creativity, as has happened for over two millennia. The prophet is a diasporic exemplar, leaving home and journeying to the urban seat of the political, military, and economic power to demand an end to corruption, exploitation, cruelty, and indifference. The prophetic position cannot exist by trying to end exile with statehood or by embracing exile as the essential mentality of Jewishness. To abandon diaspora in favor of exile is to walk away from the prophetic; to reject exile while embracing diaspora is to retain the prophetic passion for justice.
American Jewish Congress member holding sign at Montgomery March, 1965. Photo Credit: Center for Jewish History. Via Flickr.
In the Civil Rights era, Jews were disproportionately involved in fighting for the rights of African Americans, or so the story goes. While this is true to a large extent, what is often overlooked is that many Jews, particularly in the south, were far more ambivalent about civil rights than we think. Many southern Jews were quite critical of “northern” Jews coming south to instigate what John Lewis famously called “good trouble,” and then returning home. What bothered many southern Jews was that the presence of Jews from the north would destabilize a very fragile balance Jews had with white southerners. They understandably feared that when the northern Jews went back home, they would be the recipients of white southern wrath. And in many cases, they were right (see P. Allen Krause, “Rabbis and Civil Rights in the South). There were notable exceptions, for example, Rabbi Seymour Atlas whose civil rights sermons in his synagogue in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1950s almost cost him his pulpit. His synagogue board demanded that they vet his sermons before they were delivered.
The complex position of southern Jews during the civil rights movement is an apt frame to revisit the question of Jewish whiteness in these days when renewed race consciousness in Black Lives Matter (BLM) meets an upsurge in antisemitic incidents and the troubling new definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The latter claims critique of Israel may be included as an antisemitic act. Internal Jewish debate about whether or not to support BLM can be seen as representing a broader unspoken anxiety about Jewish whiteness in a world where critical race theory about both Blackness and whiteness is far more developed than it was in the 1960s.
As Eric Goldstein has shown in his book The Price of Whiteness, in America Jews worked hard to achieve the status of whiteness. Doing so allowed them to climb the economic ladder to success in ways that non-white minorities such as African Americans could not. This is in part the thesis of James Baldwin’s 1967 essay “Blacks are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White,” which argued that it is precisely the social positioning that enabled Jews to succeed in what Baldwin called a “white supremacist” nation that served as at least in part the basis for the animus against them among African Americans. Whether Baldwin’s thesis was correct then, or still holds now, namely that it is largely the “becoming white” of the Jew that African Americans find so distasteful, the success of Jews in America cannot be viewed apart from their “whiteness” in the American Jewish imaginary. When the Tri-Faith America project in the 1930s was underway— this project viewed America as a country of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—the assumption was that all three religions were white. As Tisa Wenger shows in her book Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal, Black Christians were not part of that movement. An important caveat to all this is that there also exists the non-white Jew, a category that often suffers from double exclusion within the American imaginary. This imaginary views Jews as white which, by definition, has no room for Jews of color. The complex status of Jews of color is a topic for another analysis.
Whether Baldwin’s thesis was correct then, or still holds now, namely that it is largely the “becoming white” of the Jew that African Americans find so distasteful, the success of Jews in America cannot be viewed apart from their “whiteness” in the American Jewish imaginary.
What made the Jewish whiteness project so successful in America was that Jews were able to enter whiteness and absorb all its privileges without erasing their Jewishness, thus succeeding as Jews in part because of their whiteness. Aptly labeled successful integration, this also had a darker side as David Schraub shows in his recent essay, “White Jews: An Intersectional Approach.” Schraub makes an incisive argument about the intersectionality of Jewish whiteness and antisemitism. In fact, Schraub argues, the coming together of Jews and whiteness feeds too easily into existing antisemitic tropes rather than diminishing them.
In America, whiteness is largely viewed as a neutral, or unmarked, category. Schraub puts it this way, “Whiteness is a facilitator of social power and status, yet it is typically rendered unmarked. Consequently, the privileges and opportunities afforded to persons racialized as White are often not recognized as such—they are woven into the basic operating assumptions of society, such that their beneficiaries do not even perceive of their existence” (384).
Jews have a different social valence. The classic antisemitism we find, for example, in Houston Stuart Chamberlin’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century first published in 1899, or the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” claim that Jews are dangerous because they are a “superior race.” It is Jews’ power that makes Jews a threat to any society in which they live. Chamberlin claims this is in part due to their low exogamy rates throughout history that have produced a pure race that can easily dominate mixed races. The problem arises when these latent notions are then evoked in response to Jews achieving power in society. Thus modern antisemitism arguably emerges, as David Engel argues, in response to the excesses of power Jews achieved after emancipation in nineteenth-century Germany. Emancipation confirmed what Christians feared about Jews all along. In America, Schraub argues, this results in claims like “I always thought that Jews had all this power and privilege—and see how right I was.” Schraub puts it this way: “The Whiteness frame looks at its subjects and asks that we see their power, their privilege, their enhanced societal standing. So far so good. But stereotypes of Jewishness sound many of the same notes: they look at Jews and point out their putative power, privilege, and domination of social space” (401).
The irony in all this is that Jews in America were able to achieve their power in part because of their whiteness and yet such power is viewed, by whites and non-whites alike, as a result of their Jewishness. George Soros and Sheldon Adelson are two examples from opposite sides of the political spectrum. Soros’s Jewishness is “marked” critically by those on the right, and Adelson’s Jewishness is equally “marked” critically by those of the left. Yet each one attained their wealth in large part because both were beneficiaries of whiteness. Jews, by choosing to retain their Jewishness as they enter whiteness, are not unmarked as “whites” but marked as “Jews” who also have the privilege of whites. And this is arguably what Jews want; they want to take advantage of the opportunities whiteness offers while retaining a sense of difference as Jews. But it may be precisely this dual-identity that is a source of negativity against them. This is not to say that Jews have not been marked simply as Jews and become victims of antisemitic acts. Rather, it is to say that the social tolerance for Jews in America is quite high. In today’s America, a Jew will not likely be shot by a police officer because he is a Jew (although a Jew of color may be shot because h/she is Black). That was not true of Jews in other historical periods, and that is not true today of Blacks in America.
The irony in all this is that Jews in America were able to achieve their power in part because of their whiteness and yet such power is viewed, by whites and non-whites alike, as a result of their Jewishness.
An additional component that speaks to the contemporary situation has to do with the complex relationship of Jewish identity to religion and race/ethnicity. As can be seen through the Tri-Faith American project, Jewishness was defined by religion. For example, Father John Elliot Ross, part of the “Tolerance Trio” that toured America in the 1930s (also including Everett Clinchy and Rabbi Morris Lazaron) as part of the Tri Faith America project made a speech that read, “In all things religious we Protestants, Catholics, and Jews can be as separate as the fingers of a man’s outstretched hand; in all things civic and American we can be as united as a man’s clenched fist” (39). This attitude morphs into the concept of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “Judeo” being a Latinized form of Judaism and not Jews. Jews become part of white America in large part because they are viewed as carrying a tradition that is integral to Christianity.
But as this “Judeo” was being concretized, serving as an entry point for Jews into whiteness, something else was happening to Jews in America: the rise of Zionism. One of the early interventions of Zionism in the American Jewish landscape was to question the religious identification of Jews by arguing that Jewishness was rooted in one’s membership in an ethnic nation or “racial” group. Thus the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, the premier statement of Reform Judaism at the time, expressed that Jews were not a “nation” but a “religious community.” To provide one example within Zionism: Louis Brandeis, one of the early proponents of Zionism in America, made the case in a famous 1915 speech that Zionism and Americanism were compatible because they shared with one another the same values of democracy and humanism. Other American Zionists were highly critical of Brandeis’s unwillingness to shift the focus of Jewish identity from religion (Brandeis was raised in the Reform tradition of “ethnical monotheism”) to nationalism, which was in part a “re-racialization” of Jews. Louis Lipsky (1876-1963), president of the Zionist Organization of America, editor of The American Hebrew and The Maccabean, and later secretary of the Federation of American Zionists, spoke out strongly against Brandeis’s Zionism/Americanism symbiosis. In Lipsky’s words, the old Zionists (referring to Brandeis) refused “to become part of the race and associate themselves with our problems” (71).
The move to re-racialize the Jews, making them primarily an ethnic group as opposed to carriers of a religious tradition, continued through the twentieth century. This complicated the religious dimension of Jewish inclusion in white America (the Judeo of Judeo-Christian), thereby attenuating Jewish whiteness but not erasing it. In fact, in some white Christian circles, Israel actually strengthened the resolve for Jewish inclusion, albeit in a way that also comes with the price of Israel being a part of Christian dispensationalist theology that does not, in the end, affirm Jewish difference but subsumes it into Christianity. For Jews, Zionism is an exercise in political sovereignty. For many Christian supporters of Israel, it makes Jews a part of the Second Coming when they will have one more chance to accept Christ.
Boston-area Jews gather in Coolidge Corner to protest police brutality and systemic racism. Photo Credit: Flickr User JaccobWakeUp.
In any event, all this reaches our day in a complex way. Jews are still white in America in the sense that they still have access to opportunities open to whites and closed to people of color. Yet Jews are not neutral, and thus not fully white or “unmarked white.” Rather, they carry with them their Jewishness, which has adapted through everything from the Tri Faith Movement to Christian Zionism. Many Jews are also devoted to the fight against anti-Blackness through BLM and to other movements. They have also emerged as critics of Israel’s policies. Yet their participation in BLM and opposition to systemic racism also poses a problem for some within the Black community because Jews participate in them as products of white privilege and all the protections that entails. “Blacks are antisemitic because they are anti-white” may not apply now as it did in 1967, but the whiteness of the Jew has not diminished since that time. How much can Jews as recipients of white privilege truly be a part of a movement against the systemic racism that in part has enabled them to rise to power in white America? Are American Jews willing to forfeit some of that privilege, whatever that might mean, as a gesture to those whose who cannot “pass” into the space of whiteness?
Understandably, Jews want to have both; they want to have the privilege that whiteness offers, and they want to retain the difference that Jewishness requires. Yet it may precisely be this mix that, as Schraub argues, evokes negative reactions against them, both from whites and from Blacks. Their power emerges in part because of their whiteness, yet is invariably “marked” because of their Jewishness. So when Jews support an Israeli regime that is oppressing Palestinians, for many blacks they are simply exercising uber-whiteness as an expression of their Jewishness, showing that they have become so white that they are exporting it as a justification of Jewish power in another country. And when Jews are critical of the Israeli state but still maintain an allegiance to Zionism, some progressives view that as tacit acquiescence to a political structure that systematizes inequality.
Today the fight is not about civil rights, or about equal access to the law. Today the fight is against the white supremacist character of America, it is not about inequality, it is about what Afropessimists call a political-ontology of anti-Blackness. For Jews, as whites, and as Jews, to fully be a part of that fight means to attenuate their whiteness, something we saw was a vexed compromise for southern Jews during civil rights. Jews can certainly fight anti-Blackness as Jews, but that may come at a price; both in terms of their whiteness and in terms of their Jewishness (as many Jews are still aligned with Zionism).
One of the big differences between the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and BLM today is that the former was, as Stokley Carmichael said in his famous Black Power speech in Greenwood, Mississippi in June, 1966 “By Blacks, for Blacks,” while BLM is a multi-racial progressive movement intent on dismantling systemic white supremacy in America. Those who carry whiteness, including Jews, thus have a role in that project. Jews cannot erase their whiteness (they too easily “pass” as white) nor do they want to erase their Jewishness. But Jews can enter this multi-racial movement acknowledging both the benefits of their whiteness and the complexity of their Jewishness that often, although not always, aligns them with a political ideology, Zionism, that today openly engages in racial/ethnic discrimination. Some may disavow Zionism altogether and others may not. But in my view, those who do not must at least recognize the complexity of such an allegiance, and the exceptionalism implied therein, in light of their commitment to fight against the systemic racism on American shores. Jewishness and whiteness in America have always been precarious, and remain so today. Fully acknowledging the knottiness of that equation and closely examining its consequences may be a first step toward more open and honest alliances and partnerships.
Shaul Magid is Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard, and the Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest books are Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical(Princeton University Press, 2021), and The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (New York: Ayin Press). He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research and the American Society for the Study of Religion.
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