English anti-Semitism: a counter-narrative
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2011.546084
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement This article was first given as a lecture at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (April, 2010) and I am grateful to Charles Small and Lauren Clark for their kind hospitality during my ash-cloud delayed visit. Geoffrey Hartman, as always, was both incisive and generous in his response to the lecture. Peter Boxall, and the anonymous reader at Textual Practice, suggested important changes which has improved the lecture enormously. I am also grateful to David Brauner, David Cesarani, David Feldman, Robert Fine, Didi Herman, Brian Klug, Tony Kushner, Tony Lerman and Nadia Valman who have all helped me to collect my thoughts. Notes Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin (eds) A New Antisemitism? Debating Judeophobia in Twenty-First Century Britain (London: Profile Books, 2003), p. 1. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks first coined the phrase ‘tsunami of anti-Semitism’, now in more general usage, in an interview with Edward Stourton on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, January 1, 2006. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: OUP, 2010), chapter 4. Further references to this book will be in parentheses in the body of the text. Philip Roth, Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue (New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), pp. 550–551. Further references to this book will be in parentheses in the body of the text. Philip Roth, The Counterlife (New York, NY: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987), p. 324. Further references to this book will be in parentheses in the body of the text. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la Question Juive (1946), trans. George J. Becker, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1948), p. 69. Iganski and Kosmin, A New Antisemitism?, p. 70. Trials of the Diaspora, p. 352, is equally reductive: ‘The English Jew is what he is in part because of English anti-Semitism’. Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others (London: Penguin Books, 1985, expanded edition), p. 161. Further references to this book will be in parentheses in the body of the text. Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), p. 215. Further references to this book will be in parentheses in the body of the text. Cited in Tony Lerman, ‘Undefined’, The Nation, June 9, 2010. Salo W. Baron, The Contemporary Relevance of History (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986). Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), p. 274. Further references to this book will be in parentheses in the body of the text. David Brauner, Philip Roth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 91–92. Harold Bloom (ed.), Philip Roth: Modern Critical Views (Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003), p. 113. Brian Klug, ‘The Collective Jew: Israel and the New Anti-Semitism’ Patterns of Prejudice, 37.2 (2003), pp. 117–138. Philip Roth, Deception (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), p. 202. Roth confirmed the veracity of the incident in conversation with the novelist, Clive Sinclair. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 36. Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 257–259 and Colin Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, 1876–1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), chapter 3. See also Sander Gilman, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), for ‘Jewish male menstruation’ in the modern era. Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, chapter 7. Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes, p. 257. Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 9. Further references to this book will be in parentheses in the body of the text. W. D. Rubinstein and H. L. Rubinstein, Philosemitism: Admiration and Support for Jews in the English-Speaking World, 1840–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Allo-Semitism: Premodern, Modern and Postmodern’ in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds), Modernity, Culture and 'the Jew' (Oxford: Polity Press, 1998), chapter 8. Sandauer foregrounded the Greek word for otherness, ‘allus’, when referring to the practice of representing ‘the Jews’ as a radically different Other. For semitic discourse, see Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For this argument see David Feldman, ‘Equality, Race and the Jewish Problem’, Inaugural Lecture, which launched the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck College, London (10 November, 2010). See also Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). Harold Fisch, The Dual Image: A Study of the Jew in English Literature (New York, NY: Ktav Publishing House, 1971), p. 15. Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, p. lv, both acknowledges and rejects this position. For the acceptance of the use of ambivalence across widely differing historiographies, see the roundtable discussion between David Cesarani, David Feldman, Tony Kushner, Peter Mandler, Mark Mazower, and Bernard Wasserstein, ‘England, Liberalism and the Jews: An Anglo-Jewish Historikerstreit’, Jewish Quarterly, 44.3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 33–38. See also Two Nations: British and German Jews in Comparative Perspective, ed. by Michael Brenner, Rainer Liedtke, and David Rechter (London: Leo Baeck Institute; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), p. 66. Martin Amis, ‘An Arrow Fired Backwards Can Still Hit the Target’, Jewish Chronicle, October 4, 1991, p. 19. Saul Bellow, Letters (London: Penguin, 2010) provides ample evidence for Bellow as Martin Amis's surrogate father. Bill Williams, ‘The Anti-Semitism of Tolerance: Middle-Class Manchester and the Jews 1870–1900’, in A.J. Kidd and K.W. Roberts (eds) City, Class and Culture: Studies of Social Policy and Cultural Production in Victorian Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 74–102. Daphna Baram, Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel (London: Guardian Books, 2008). Edward Said, End of the Peace Process – Oslo and After (London: Granta Books, 2000), p. 208. For a critique of such ‘zero sum’ thinking, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Cited in Baram, Disenchantment, p. 194. Jeffrey Herf (ed.), Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence (London: Taylor and Francis, 2006), chapter 1. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, p. 1. See also Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) and Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society, pp. 2–3. James Shapiro ‘Trials of the Diaspora’, Financial Times (February 20, 2010). Lucy Davidowitz, The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945 (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1975). Michael Rothberg, ‘The Spectre of the Second Holocaust’, Open Democracy (October 31, 2008) traces the use of a ‘Second Holocaust’ discourse in the 2008 American election campaign. See also the conclusion to Trials of the Diaspora, p. 586: ‘Indeed, there is no “peace settlement” that will satisfy anti-Semites, other than the destruction of Israel, the Jew among the nations’. Didi Herman, An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness, and English Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 6. See also Sheila Spector (ed.), British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2002) and The Jews and British Romanticism: Politics, Religion, Culture (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2005). Herman, An Unfortunate Coincidence, chapter 2. Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn (eds), Traditions of Intolerance: Historical Perspectives on Fascism and Race Discourse in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), chapter 6. The American Trilogy which evokes these histories is made up of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). See Ross Posnock, Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) for a celebration of such appropriations. For a critique of this approach, see Bryan Cheyette, ‘The Later Life’, TLS (February 16, 2007). See also Cheyette, Diasporas of the Mind: Literature and ‘Race’ After the Holocaust (London: Yale University Press, 2012) which has a chapter on Philip Roth. I am not a member of ‘Independent Jewish Voices’ but look on aghast at the level of vitriol they attract. See Lerman, ‘Undefined’, for this aspect of Trials of the Diaspora and see also Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose, and Barbara Rosenbaum (eds), A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (London: Verso, 2008).
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