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The Strange Immortalities of Race

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.96.1.0012

2161-6302

John L. Jackson,

Race, History, and American Society

One of the ways in which some people talk about black Jewishness, especially some black people who aren't Jewish, is to disparage it––to frame it as yet another way that their race-mates try, vainly, to deny an undeniable blackness. (This is not unlike the joke about every African American claiming to have Cherokee ancestors somewhere in their family tree.) Leo Felton, the biracial neo-Nazi skinhead who had to pretend to be “southern Italian” so that his “materialist” white supremacist friends would let him conspire with them to blow up Jewish monuments in New England, is just one sensationalized example of such purported self-denials (Jackson 2008, 155–56). He is framed as a kind of poster child for self-hatred and internalized racism. However, Felton considered himself the sincere advocate for a brand of white identity that wasn't about blood or genes at all—that supposedly wasn't reducible to biology (even if his co-conspirators weren't as enlightened on the matter).Despite his efforts to deploy spiritualism in antiracist activism during the mid-nineteenth century, the black mesmerist, sex magician, and spirit medium Paschal Beverly Randolph would deny being African American throughout different phases of his life. He attempted to pass for any number of other things, including a mystic from the Near East. Even if this denial was mostly just a ploy to make his sex-magic business more marketable in a racist world, this explanation still doesn't comes close to accounting for his polygenesis arguments (marking blacks and Jews as outside the Adamic family), his profound hostility to—and dismissal of—any discussion about past/ancient African greatness, and his record of derogatively referring to blacks as “the thick-lipped Negro of the Stupid Tribe,” even if his use of quotations marks is meant to place some of that rhetoric in another's mouth (Deveney 1997, 150).The slippery links between blacks and Jews are not simply about variations on the theme of self-loathing. There are also many tales of covetous longing or just confusion and misrecognition. There are stories of W. E. B. Du Bois being mistaken for a Jew, and of other black nationalists—beyond Marcus Garvey—celebrating and even studying the political and social moves of Jews and political Zionists as a model for Africana nationalists. For the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ (ICGJC) in New York City, a group of African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans who consider themselves genealogical descendants of the ancient Hebrew Israelites, the investment in Hebrew Israelite identity demands a double denigration/denial. They don't want to be African, but they don't just want to be “Jewish,” either. Africans, they argue, are different peoples: Hamites, Cushites, Hagerens, and Ishmaelites. But not Israelites. And that difference, they argue, makes all the difference in the world.This belief might be glossed as yet another version of “postracial” thinking/longing—and one not as different from the standard American version of things as some might think. For the ICGJC, skin color and other phenotypical similarities do not shore up collective belonging. Africans constitute different peoples with their own discrete histories. In fact, the ICGJC claims, African Americans are not Africans at all (a relatively hard sell on the streets of Harlem, New York). But being an Israelite also means not being Jewish, and Ashkenazi Jews are dismissed as mere imposters, usurpers of the true Israelites' rightful identity. Ashkenazi Jews are deemed Edomites (“the children of Esau”—not Jacob), and they are said to be getting back at Jacob's descendants by supposedly stealing their identities (maybe as comeuppance for Jacob stealing Esau's birthright in the famous Hebrew Bible story). The ICGJC provides an interesting reinterpretation of many Old Testament tales, and those readings are no more outlandish, some might argue, than the one Freud once proffered (about two different historical figures named Moses and the odd connections between them). It is a story that Eliza Slavet elegantly unpacks in her book, Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. And maybe I'm the only strange reader who idiosyncratically thought about the ICGJC as I read her rendering of that story—and just about every other page of the book.Eliza Slavet revisits Sigmund Freud's complicated investments in Jewishness as a way to talk about two related questions: How is the notion of Jewishness variously biologized/genealogized/mnemonicized? (Again, this is quintessential ICGJC territory.) And why did Freud (ever so anxious about how his new psychoanalytic science would be challenged by detractors) have such a hard time negotiating “the Jew” as a variously inheritable subjectivity? This is a Freud who pivoted between an emphasis on the foundational importance of early childhood to the development of adult human subjectivity on the one hand, and the sneaking suspicion that psychological traumas get remembered and passed on in and through the body itself—across generations—on the other. The founding of Judaism (in his peculiar retelling of the Old Testament tale) is possible only if the sins of the fathers, passed on to their sons through an undeniably genetic link, are accompanied by the very memories of fathers' past actions, which are said to enter sons' minds in the exact same way. Judaism is transmitted genetically and mnemonically. Umbilically, as Slavet demonstrates. It is the stories they inherit (injected into offspring during their time in the womb) that explain the essence of a people, particularly the Jewish people. Freud struggles with this belief—and its various implications—in ways that Slavet unfurls with care and thoughtfulness.This discussion of what makes a Jew a Jew gets played with over and over again. Is it religion? Blood? Ancestry? Is the reckoning most legitimately done patrilineally (as the ICGJC does it)? Or matrilineally? All of these disputes animate the Hebrew Israelite project, even as the ICGJC chooses to define their rendering of Israelite selfhood in contradistinction to more conventional and recognizable versions of Jewry. But what makes a Jew a Jew, they maintain, isn't just genealogy. The 2000 decision by the ICGJC Hebrew Israelites to reject their previous claim that any authentic Hebrew Israelite had to have an Israelite (that is, a black) father, replacing it with a more voluntaristic version of things (all that matters is that you can feel the spirit and obey, no matter what your ancestry), is one example of how these ideas change, and sometimes very rapidly. Of course, many people—and not just ultra-Orthodox Jews or ICGJCers—cast a quite specific net around the category “Jew.” Others take a more inclusive and even phenomenological approach. What people say and do counts above and beyond what they purportedly are before they say or do anything. (I think of the very differently pitched—even diametrically opposed—views of Walter Benn Michael and Rebecca Alpert as examples of the this contention.)A different group of Hebrew Israelites, the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (AHIJ) (a contingent of African Americans who left Chicago for Israel over the course of forty years) have also markedly changed their understandings of racial identity's importance to their transnational spiritual project. They readily admit that they were racial essentialists when they first got to Israel in 1969. They believed, back then, something close to what the ICGJC still believe today. But now they concede that they formerly placed far too much emphasis on race. That's how Sar Ahmadiel, one of the community's ministers of information and international spokespeople, recapped that history to believers still living in Philadelphia during a Shabbat service earlier this year. “We thought it was all about race,” he lectured. “And we didn't realize that race is a social construction.” (Academics hardly corner the market on the term “social construction” anymore.)In the 1970s and 80s, the AHIJ spent so much time talking about race, Ahmadiel says, that they didn't realize it was getting in the way of their planetary mission (which is, just as a tantalizing aside, to teach human beings how their bodily cells can reproduce themselves into perpetuity, based on the laws that God gave Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—to show that physical immortality is possible in these bodies and right here on earth, not in some ethereal realm far away). But it isn't even just about race, Ahmadiel argues. He told me afterward that he was offering people a version of an argument he that he was going to make at an international conference on African Jewry in South Africa later that summer. And he'd even publish an op-ed in the international edition of Haaretz, “The Dangers of Eurocentrism” (2012), which went after the same point in reverse: examining how Israelis' investments in race contort their notion of political and spiritual community.Many people use the term “postracial” to mark this anti-essentialist and hyper-constructionist moment of ours, a term that privileges the deconstruction of identities over anything else. Indeed, there are those who would consider the AHIJ's public recantations of earlier commitments to hyper-racialized versions of national belonging and chosen-ness and the ICGJC's rejection of genealogical testing as clear examples of deracialization. All roads lead to the dissolved racial subject, and even Gayatri Spivak has reconsidered her former articulation of “strategic” forms of essentialist praxis. But what the discussion of blacks and Jews and Israelites might help to highlight is something like the flipside to academia's current postracial fetishizations, an off-ramp carrying us to a place where racial deconstruction is less heuristic finish line than anxious starting block. It parses race as one of the modern world's fundamental constitutive elements, inextricably central to future understandings of how biopolitical, nanopolitical, and necropolitical strategies constrain the hopes and dreams of national citizenries. This is a biopolitics that flags phenotype as the final arbiter of hierarchical difference, categorizing and codifying bodies along a continuum of recognizable somatic privilege. It means a nanopolitics mining the human genome for invisible racial solidities and causal absolutes, for submolecular answers to visual social inequalities. Likewise, the necropolitical impulse to control and determine life's ultimate death, thereby consolidating claims on social control and sovereignty, might help us to better explain death row's dark-hued tint. In each of these instances, race becomes a powerful and necessary frame for thinking “the body in pain,” as Elaine Scarry (1985) unforgettably put it––both individual bodies and the collective body politic.If Du Bois proved all too easily prophetic about the twentieth century and its colored lines, the beginnings of this newest century have spawned divergent pronouncements about the potential tomorrows of race relations and racial discourse in American society. But what kind of racial theorizing helps us to understand the differences within similarity that cloud our analytical engagements with the everyday realities and surrealities of racial reasoning? More than ever, we need to create new ways of understanding the social facts that underpin race (as belief system, as common sense, as pseudopatriotism, as interpersonal shortcut, as biological mythmaking) and what those underpinnings forewarn about the possible futures of social difference in the United States and beyond.Watching Viggo Mortensen play Freud in David Cronenberg's 2011 film A Dangerous Method, about the relationships between and among Freud, Carl Jung, and Sabina Spielrein, one can't help but wonder what this interesting little film could have been had Slavet's engagement with Freud's inner demons and contradictions been allowed to frame this sexual thriller. And there is a lot of sex in the movie. As Slavet would probably argue, sex talk is always also race talk, and vice versa, a symbiosis given relatively short shrift in the film (beyond Freud voicing concern that his new science will be dismissed by colleagues as merely a Jewish science, the kiss of death). Hortense Spillers, for one, has devoted a good chunk of her career to pondering, among other things, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother.” She has spent her life theorizing the complicated, cathected, and contested links posited (and ignored) between psychoanalytics and racial analytics. It is the very dynamic that centers my own preoccupations with groups like the ICGJC and with the ostensible incommensurabilities of blackness and Jewishness. Slavet's fascinating offering is best read, I'd argue, with people like Ahmadiel Ben Yehuda and Hortense Spillers as her unstated but willing interlocutors.