Secular imperial ideology racialized civilization in ways that excluded Jews

Evidence

Imperialist ideology reformulated Christian evangelism in secular terms. Much of it concerned the purported need to spread to the rest of the world not only the Gospel but the superior civilization of the West. And that civilization was, fatefully for the Jews, understood as the achievement no longer only of the Christian faith but also of the European “races.” It was not generally believed that the Jewish “race” was one of them. The relative absence of the Jews in the imperial enterprise made it easier to argue for excluding them, along with the “natives” of the colonies, from the benefits of the “Western” guarantees of liberty and equality, and indeed of residence in the West. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece’s theme of class/identity signaling, and more broadly to postcolonial readings of European self-definition. — connects to: Settler and imperial justifications rest on denied racialized us-versus-they splits — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1851; Israel’s religious-secular binary functions as a self-purifying rhetoric that masks racial exclusion — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 708
• DEEPTHINKING: The shift from religious to racial framing of ‘the West’ — and how Jews fell into the same exclusionary category as colonized natives — is a subtle mechanism worth sitting with.