Political antisemitism repurposed Orientalist scholarship as internal European racial colonialism

Evidence

The invoking of the term ‘antisemitism’ as a banner for an anti-Jewish politics from the end of the 1870s applied what had been an academic Orientalist concept for understanding ancient human origins to an exercise in internal European racial colonialism. For ‘antisemites’, the Semitic label functioned as a means of Orientalising contemporary European Jewry as a foreign body that was produced in Western Asia, could not co-exist with the Aryan and had to be removed. This notion was contemporaneous with increasingly rigid racial boundaries and preoccupations with purity, corruption and spatial separation in the European colonial world. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 650 (#expands, via linked claim)

The relational frame for thinking through race in the European context has usually been ordered in dualistic terms: anti-black racisms following from slavery and colonialism largely keeping Europe white and blacks out; and antisemitism as embroiled in the long history of exclusion, excision, and ultimately extermination. This dualism has dominated the historical conception and comprehension of Euro-racism at least since World War II, and still underpins common understandings of racial europeanization, as Macmaster among many mainstream analysts exemplifies. These are important constitutive elements of European self-making, implicating slavery, viciousness, and exploitative profiteering as well as exclusion and extermination as central conditions of Europe’s legacy. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 975 (#complicates, via linked claim)

In Orientalist discourse, even when Jews and Muslims are portrayed in different ways, the category of “Oriental” remains in play. In some cases, Jews are less vilified than Muslims, and in other cases the reverse. Reina Lewis describes this as “the latent anti-Semitic aggressions that were otherwise camouflaged or side-lined by a series of periodically more overt hostilities towards the more distant and more successfully ‘othered’ people of the colonies [Muslims].” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 402 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Orientalism was first applied internally to Europe’s own poor and aristocracy — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 136; European anxiety about Jews drove Western interest in the Semitic race; The word antisemite borrowed scientific cachet from orientalist scholarship (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• The antisemitism label applied an academic Orientalist concept to racialize European Jews as foreign #expands (0.95) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 650
• European racial thought is conventionally framed as a black-antisemitism dualism #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 975
• Muslims absorbed anti-Semitic animus redirected from Jews in Orientalist discourse #complicates (0.74) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 402