| |
|
I've heard Muslims claiming that "anti-Semitism" should refer to hatred of Muslims as well as Jews because they're semitic too. I wish Haus had been there during that discussion. They were, I feel, voicing a resentment that hatred against Jews was being named and abhorred in a way that hatred against Muslims was not, and in some cases it looked suspiciously like the protest was in fact a cover for resentment of Jews full stop. My response was that they should stop focusing on the word "semitic", it's not the real issue, and that language develops in odd ways and can't be held to a standard of consistency that's not actually there. "Islamophobia" is a bit clunky (though not as clunky as "anti-Islamism" or "anti-Muslimism" would have been; "anti-Muslim" works OK as an adjective at least), and the -phobia root which shifts blame to the victims by implying that they are causing people to fear them is as irritating as it is in words such as "homophobia", but overall it's fairly neutral and will do. Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia aren't the same (although people who subscribe to one view are more likely to subscribe to the other), there's no point in conflating them, and it's more important to have both recognised and fought.
Judaism is, I think, fairly unique in being so widely considered a race as well as a religion (this does not mean that race is considered synonymous with religion), and the idea's been around for a long time. I'd guess that this is because historically it has mostly been a diaspora religion forming tight-knit, separate communities with a tendency to move about. Religious beliefs lead to religious practices which turn into cultural practices and differences, which may persist even when the religious belief is absent, or exist as entities in their own right. Have a look at some of the Jewish cookbooks around, for example. Jews set themselves apart quite markedly by the practices resulting from purity laws, particularly the dietary ones but also those of sexual behaviour, dress, hygiene and so on, and generally resided in closed communities, sometimes separated to the point of living in ghettoes. A few thousand years of this, with much moving about from country to country while keeping a high level of internal cultural consistency, will turn a community into a discrete ethnic group, yes, just as the current high level of assimilation for diaspora Jews reduces the cultural markers. I knew someone who said his grandfather, who was from Poland, had "Race: Jewish. Religion: Mosaic" on his passport, which I've never heard of elsewhere.
Generally, if you grow up as a diaspora Jew you belong to two cultures, Judaism and that of the country you live in. (I feel more Jewish than British, perhaps because it's a stronger identity or because it's one that goes against the norm and thus stands out more.) This can result in bizarre phenomena such as the very Jewish family Christmas dinners I attended (and loathed, but that's another story) as a child, which were distinguishable from the family dinners held on Jewish festivals mainly by the slight difference in some of the food and by the whole family's being there (the doctors, and it's a medicky family, had difficulty getting time off work for the Jewish festivals, so Christmas was easier to arrange). It gets interwoven. If someone's been raised on Jewish food and always cooked Jewish food, they're unlikely to stop if their belief in God changes, assuming they're not simultaneously rejecting Judaism in its entirety. I'm currently not attending synagogue, where I was a regular and the assistant musical director, because I've recently come to recognise that I probably don't believe in God. I'd see no reason to change what I cook anyway (sometimes it's Iranian Jewish, sometimes it's Thai), but I'm finding that I hold on to the domestic rituals, including lighting the Friday night candles and reciting the Shema daily. This is a little odd - after all those years not believing in it much, prayer sticks more than I'd thought - but I'll see where it goes. I'm almost certainly going to continue making Judaica (I've promised to embroider a tallit [prayer shawl] for my best friend, and a challah cloth for the Jewish community here, very possibly a Torah mantle as well) and will do so in a spirit of respect for the religious items and affection for the recipients. I miss synagogue services, particularly the music and the poetry and the community and the contemplation. I know Jews who attend synagogue just for those. I've always regarded them as rather hypocritical, just as I feel strongly that a couple should not enter a religious marriage unless both believe in that religion (my stepsister upset my stepfather by getting married in a registry office, since both she and her husband are Jewish but don't believe in the religious side of it, something I really respect her for). In that case it can be difficult, family pressure and what feels normal and so on. I've always opposed matrilinearity and thankfully managed to end up in the only denomination of Judaism that I know of (Liberal) which holds that Judaism is a matter of upbringing and/or education, not of bloodlines. I am having trouble staying friends with a woman from my school who refuses to date non-Jews, although she has been having a strange sort of affair with a non-Jewish friend of hers (whom she'd never go out with properly, of course, because he's not Jewish and also because he has a girlfriend), and who can't understand why some people see this as racist.
As for why they've been accorded protection as an ethnic group rather than as a religion, it's probably because historically attacks on Jews have been directed at cultural practices and differences (which are more visible, apart from anything else) rather than at beliefs. Religious and racial hatred are often fairly muddled and use one thing to excuse another. Look at the wave of anti-Muslim attacks after 9/11, for instance; hell, there were even anti-Jewish attacks, the whole situation was so screwy. I'd regard both types of attacks as both religious and racial hatred, since they involve both, and I'm not sure it's useful to conflate the two just for the sake of filing something neatly. If the vulnerabilities of one group to attack gets noticed before another group, the solution is not to whine that the first group shouldn't be protected but to make sure that the second group gets protection.
Indeed, I feel that such conflation makes the problems worse. There are far too many people who blame the whole of Israel for some of its governmental policies (are all Britons responsible for Iraq, or historically for slavery?), and then extend this to blaming all Jews, assuming amongst other things that all Israelis and all Jews approve of all of the actions of the Israeli government and of the small number of extremists who cause trouble in particular (a lot of the main troublemakers in Israel are in fact fanatics in the settlements who have immigrated from America and aren't much loved in either country. "Zionism" is a minority opinion). Similarly, Muslims worldwide get branded as terrorists because of the actions of a small minority who are generally denounced by mainstream Muslims as completely corrupting the message of the Quran anyway, and this is extended to the point where a headscarf can be read as a sign of terrorist sympathies - and this can be pulled into a debate about hijab which had ostensibly been about issues of female sexuality. The vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians just want to get on with their lives in peace, notwithstanding the understandable bitterness on both sides (the situation is shitty, horribly complicated both now and historically, largely deadlocked), but the second there's an atrocity - a suicide bomb, an Israeli soldier shooting an unarmed child - the whole nation is blamed and everyone's expected to take one side or the other, even though such atrocities are far from the norm and in no way reflect the views of the majority.
Conflation also seems to lurk in those topics it's really difficult to discuss without things going pear-shaped rapidly. I've noticed two topics I tend to stay away from are Israel, because you too often get pounced on the minute you declare you're Jewish and told that you therefore approve of the occupation, and Muslim veiling, because you can say "I disagree with the ideology behind veiling but every human being has the right to dress as they like, including the right not to be pressured into a form of dress" till you're blue in the face, you just get told hat you're interfering with Muslim/women's rights. Similarly, try having mixed views about abortion, which has turned into whole political movements with loads of baggage attached to one issue (if you dislike abortion you are automatically antifeminist, anti-contraception, anti-sexuality and far right Christian). Blake Head, if you're reading this, what was it that teacher at school told you about a tendency to reduce complex matters to simple ones being a sign of fascist thinking? |
|
|
