This post attempts to qualify the arguments of the previous post on Israel and the hopes that Arab Palestinians will actively engage in peaceful struggle for citizenship in a single state, encompassing the totality of the land currently included in Israel and the Israeli occupied territories. Emphatically, I reject the notion of a two-state solution as a basis for peace in Palestine/Israel and as a realization of the aspirations of Arab Palestinians for sovereignty in favor of single, constitutionally secular, pluralist democracy, bringing together Israeli Jews, Arab Palestinians, and others as citizens and countrymen in a new collective national project. My support of such a single state is grounded in my opposition to the project of Zionism. In these terms, I have to definitively articulate my opposition to Zionism in terms that situate my views on the project of a sovereign, sectarian Jewish state in relation to past and present, more-or-less ignorant/prejudicial and more-or-less intellectual/rationalized anti-Semitic ideologies in order to firmly distinguish anti-Zionism from categorical oppositions to Jews and Judaism.
1. Zionism, in my understanding, is the conception that the survival of Judaism, as a religious and ethno-cultural tradition, relies on the capacity of the Jewish people to exist as a sovereign nation-state, with defined geographic boundaries, constitutionally exclusive citizenship to all Jews, and the capacity to wield force of arms in defense of the freedom of conscience of all Jews.
The concept of Zionism established here most directly refers to the ideas of Jewish thinkers like Theodore Herzl (Der Judenstaat (1896). See, Herzl, The Jewish State (1988, New York: Dover Publications Inc., at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25282/25282-h/25282-h.htm). Herzl's foundational articulation of the conception that the survival of Judaism required Jews to constitute an exclusive nation-state remains the clearest theoretic statement underlying the rise of Twentieth century Zionism, culminating in the post-Ottoman resettlement of Palestine by European Jewish migrants and the post-World War II United Nations' mandate for the establishment of a sectarian Jewish state in Palestine. The pamphlet, moreover, constitutes an acerbic indictment of Nineteenth century European societies, liberal Jewish advocates of assimilation, and the failed promises of tolerance and freedom of conscience extended by the project of Enlightenment. It is a dogmatically fatalistic assertion that Jews, framed as a single, geographically displaced, dispersed, and insoluble nation, permanently differentiated in relation to every transitory host nation with which it comes into contact, must infect every geographic context for Jewish immigration with Anti-Semitism and, thus, sow the seeds for new acts of discrimination and repression. Herzl's argument, and the larger argument of contemporary Zionism, per se, is grounded on this conception that the Judaism constitutes a nationality rather than simply a religious faith.
Part of the novelty in this approach inheres to its capacity to mirror the reasoning of the most narrow-minded, Anti-Semitic, ethnocentric bigots in order to adamantly concede the insoluble character of the Jew within European society as the basis for, consequently, arguing that the survival of Judaism is entirely predicated on the separation of the Jewish nation from the eternally antagonistic nation-states/national societies of Europe (and, for that matter, from America). Arising within the context of a century that took the pseudo-scientific nature of Anti-Semitic theorizations and the exposition/formalization of partisan arguments to unprecedented and dispicable extremes (e.g. eugenic conceptualizations on the genetic inferiority and/or criminal predispositions of the Jewish "race"), conceivable only at a stage in the evolution of European politics and the development of the nation-state as mass-political society, it is quite explicable that, within theory, Judaism could take on nationalist trappings and pursue its own self-defense by conceding the impossibility of Jewish assimilation into national societies thoroughly committed to seeing in Judaism incommensurable difference and imagining an existential threat. On the other hand, it is absolutely imperative that we recognize that, dialectically speaking, Zionism is predicated and, in this sense, reliant on its diametrical opposite, in its clearest terms, Nazism - Zionism and Nazism are the opposite sides of the same coin and mutually constitutive discursive frameworks. If Herzl's argument in Der Judenstaat was that the survival of Judaism relied on its absolute separation from European civilization, defined in inherent anti-Semitic terms, then Hitler's argument against Judaism, as the supposed fount of Marxist ideology, in Mein Kampf advances that the survival of European civilization, with the Germanic Aryan as its developmental apogy, is predicated on the elimination of the Jews. To be clear, my contention here is not that Zionism, in some way, contains the seeds of the same sort of genocidal violence defended by the Nazis but that, theoretically speaking, Zionism takes radical anti-Semitism, and especially Nazism, as its generalized point of departure in defining Judaism as a unique and singular nation and contending that the survival of this nation ultimately demands a territorial Jewish state. Judaism would never require its own state if the entire world it had known was not rabidly intent, in thought and practical mass political activity, on its destruction.
2. Anti-Semitic theories and practices need to be understood on multiple different levels of complexity and theoretic assemblage to encompass basic conceptualizations on the "alien" character of Judaism relative to national ethno-cultural communities, prejudicial reactions grounded in ideological religious narratives, and pseudo-scientific reflections on supposed genetic predispositions/tendencies.
The point here, critical in differentiating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism, is to articulate the multiple forms and levels through which Jews and Judaism have been categorized in separation from non-Jews and non-Judaism. It is, moreover, essential that such distinctions take on a categorical nature that renders Judaism and the Jew, per se, rather than a particular political project in some way associated with Judaism (i.e. Zionism), the source of the distinction and, perhaps, the incitement to antagonism. That is to say, I am concerned here with characteristics applied universally against adherents of Judaism in order to definitively argue that there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic in anti-Zionism, except insofar as Zionism is attributed mistakenly as a universal attribute of Judaism and Jews. Emphatically, as if the notion could be taken to be oxymoronic, Jewish anti-Zionist organizations can be found in the world! (See International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN), at: http://www.ijan.org/).
Articulating specific threads of anti-Semitic thought and ideological groundings for prejudice against Jews and Judaism, religious sources in the Western traditions appear as an obvious starting point. In this regard, Christian anti-Semitisms proceed from archaic foundations in the Gospel accounts, grounded in the narrative of Christ's Passion/crucifixion at the behest of the Judean Temple authorities (Sanhedrin). In this respect, the interpretative legacy of the Christian Passion narrative, as a wellspring for Christian anti-Semitism, is thoroughly ambiguous. Certain passages of the Pauline epistles, for example, sanction a broadly anti-Semitic reading on the crucifixion of Christ and subsequent persecutions by Jewish authorities of the early Judaic-Christian sect (e.g. First Thessalonians 2:13-16). On the other hand, other passages of the Christian New Testament directly offer their testimonies to a Jewish audience in order to appeal to messianic predispositions otherwise through conformity with Mosaic law. As such, emergent relations between mainline Judaism and Christianity, at least until official acquiescence in Christianity by Constantine and the Council of Nicea, reflect a broader debate over the nature of Mosaic law as a requisite over converted Gentile populations. Clearly, religious arguments from Christian audiences against Judaism must acknowledge a broader history in which Judaism nurtured the emergent Christian faith, even insofar as Judaism suffered repression at Roman hands.
In the present circumstances in the geographical context of Palestine, the relationship between Judaism and Islam may be much more pertinent. In this respect, however, the record is even more ambiguous! At its roots within the Islamic tradition, this relationship is connected both to the divergent monotheistic practices of Jews and incipient Muslims and to the political alignments of Jewish tribal groupings in the immediate aftermath of Muhammad's flight (Hijra) from Mecca to the oasis of Yathrib (Medina) in 622. Three Jewish tribes, the Banu Qaynuqa, the Banu Nadir, and the Banu Qurayza, made Yathrib their home. Nearly half the population of the oasis may have embraced Judaism, against which local Arab tribes practiced divergent pagan religions. Muhammad arrives in Yathrib at the invitation of local Arabs, seeking the charismatic preacher as an arbiter to bring peace among feuding tribes. He initiates the Commonwealth (ummah) of Yathrib, a constitutional entity embracing all the tribal groups in the oasis and providing for the adjudication of disputes in accordance with divergent sectarian legal standards - Jews were to be held to account under Jewish Mosaic law, Muslims were to be held account under the emergent standards of Shar'iah (encompassing the Qur'an/direct pronouncements from God and legal and moral principles enunciated by Muhammad (e.g. the Hadith)). The unity of Jews and Muslims under Muhammad's Commonwealth quickly dissipates, however. In 624, apparently after a series of violent altercations between the Jewish Banu Qaynuqa and Muslim populations, Muhammad forcibly expels the tribe from Yathrib. In 625, the Banu Nadir were expelled after an apparent failure of an assassination attempt on Muhammad. Finally, in 627, the Banu Qurayza collaborated with the Quraysh of Mecca in an attempted siege of Yathrib. Muhammad subjects the tribe to a trial by an impartial arbiter of Banu Qurayza's choosing. Finding the tribe guilty of plotting against the Muslim defenders of Yathrib, the judge applied Jewish scriptural standards condemning all the males of the tribe to death for its actions in breaking their covenant with the Muslims.
There are multiple possible interpretations that can be applied to these concrete historical events. Critically, differences in sectarian religious practices and beliefs between tribal Jewish groups and Muslims in Yathrib seem to assume secondary relevance in relation to the acute political imperatives, in turn, driven by economic forces - the Jewish tribes in Yathrib seem to have been strongly represented in agricultural production and commerce to the extent that changes in their external relations with the Quraysh would have impacted their livelihoods. They possessed an obvious economic rationale for maintaining the peace with the politically and economically dominant tribal grouping in the Hijaz region, even as Muhammad, a Quraysh himself, struggled religiously to convert his pagan fellow-tribesmen to Islam and to secure Yathrib as a home for himself and for his incipient religious sect. In any case, the Jews emerge, at Islam's formative stages, as innately materialistic, disconnected from the spriritual demands of God by blind obedience to their worldly necessities. Such materialist imperatives motivate their betrayal of the covenant with Muhammad and the Muslims, which apparently promised secular egalitarianism and respect for religious differences.
The appearance of full sectarian equality and freedom of conscience in Seventh century Yathrib is key, however. The experience of the Yathrib commonwealth constitutes a major formative moment in Islamic tolerance of religious difference, in a period at which the passionate embrace of Islam by its first adherents was at high ebb. It represents the hope that Islam will embrace sectarian/spiritual difference even as Muslims proselytize in conformity with the dictates of God through the Qur'an. Such tolerance has not always been a halmark of Islam. Certainly, in its relationship with Judaism, the experiences of Islam's first century have reinforced distinctly anti-Jewish sentiments in the Arab world (to say "anti-Semitic" would, of course, constitute a bizarre contradiction - Arabs are Semites). Such sentiments are mirrored in certain passages of the Qur'an and in Muhammad's moral and religious adjudicative principles recounted through the Hadith of Muhammad. Perhaps contemporary Salafist understandings of this legacy most directly represent an underlying Muslim antagonism against Judaism. On the other hand, tolerant strains in Islamic thought and political and cultural practice over centuries in the development of Islam (e.g. tolerance of Judaism during Islamic rule in the Iberian peninsula prior to the rise of the unified Catholic monarchy at the close of the Fifteenth century) problematize any definitive reading of the relationship between Islam and Judaism. As such, the foundational stages of both Christianity and Islam resound in experiences both producing/reinforcing alternative sources of prejudice against Jews, otherwise unconnected to sectarian differences and, alternatively, counteracting prejudice in the name of community, traversing sectarian boundaries.
More pertinent to the secular anti-Semitic prejudices of Europeans, the conception of Jews as perpetually alien to the everyday lives and social experiences of Christian populations forms the foundations of pervasive unwillingness on the part of European cultures to accept Jews as countrymen and fellow citizens in modern society/the nation-state. The construction of this alien character is rooted in such conceptions as the "wandering Jew"/le Juif errant, emerging from the late Classical period as a dispersed, disinherited exiled "race," the product of Roman repression through which settlement of lands in Palestine connected intimately to the Jewish spiritual consciousness is terminated and Jews are scattered across the known world. The wandering Jew is rooted in sectarian Christian beliefs regarding God's retribution toward His "chosen" people for having turned away and embraced materialism, but such conceptions ultimately become signifiers disconnected from their initial referents as everyday political, cultural, and economic practices over at least a millenium embed Jewish populations in Europe into particular, marginal social roles. By the close of the European Medieval period around the Fifteenth century, the enforced exclusion of Jews from rural, manorial feudal society and from urban guilds creates a defined set of portraits of European Jewry. In the rural Eastern European and Russian "second serfdom," Jews appear in radically communalistic villages (shtetls) on marginal lands, subject to recurring waves of repression by Orthodox and Catholic Christian overlords. In Central and Western Europe, emerging from feudal times into the rise of the absolutist monarchical state and the age of liberal-democratic revolution, Jews occupy urban economic niche roles in interregional commerce and finance, at the margins of respectability for Christian European society. In these terms, the enforced marginalization of Jews reinforces and reinscribes the story of the wandering Jew in reference to the emergence of mercantile capitalism. Hence, Marx's account of Judaism as the personification of the love of money in his account "On the Jewish Question (1844)" (an account I will return to in the forthcoming section of this post).
The critical point here is that European intellectual culture from the dawn of the Enlightenment well into the Nineteenth century does not adequately historicize European economic development in ways that could adequately situate the particular roles performed by Jews in distinct European social formations to articulate the sources of Jewish marginalization in co-evolution with the development of Christian ethical principles. In these terms, European Jews were explicitly pigeon-holed into social roles that would earn them the moral contempt of their Christian neighbors, compel their separation into insular, homogeneous communities, and nurture a sensibility among Christian populations that Jews represented an incommensurable, alien "other," never capable of assimilation, still less worthy of trust or even basic amity. If intellectuals fail to create the cultural conditions for Jewish integration from the political beginnings of the nation-state, then it stands to reason that within mass/popular culture, Jews were wholly inscribed with the sorts of prejudices initially crafted by religion and further bolstered by centuries of Jewish economic exclusion.
With these thoughts in mind, even in the French heart of the liberal-democratic revolution, the Dreyfus affair at the close of the Nineteenth century is wholly revealing of the degree to which Jews are viewed as outsiders in the democratic project of the nation-state in Europe. As such, Herzl is quite sensible in arguing, in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, that the hopes of liberal Jewish accomodationists for inclusion/integration as citizens in the European nation-state are ill-founded. Again, Zionism, in this regard, is a product of the failure of European Christians (and secularist democrats) to integrate Jews as citizens in a more robust, culturally inclusive sense. The legacy of this failure remains evident in the tepid reactions of Frenchmen and women to the slaughter of Jewish French citizens in a Parisian kosher market by militant Salafists days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Against a background shaped by the realization of the Zionist vision through the state of Israel, the Western European states, who participated in the creation of the Jewish sectarian state through U.N. mandate, might have, thus, consoled themselves for the lingering impact of their failure to defend the Jews against the horror of the Holocaust by conceding the need for the creation of a Jewish state as a prerequisite for the survival of Judaism. It would have been harder for Western Europeans to admit that their own anti-Semitic rejection of the Jews as co-equal partners to their own nation-state projects demanded something completely different - a full and robust reaffirmation of the revolutionary, secular liberal-democratic principles advanced by the Enlightenment to vigorously integrate their Jewish populations and affirm their own responsibility for constituting the conditions that made the Holocaust a possibility long before Nazism and fascism were realities in Europe. Instead fascism and rabid anti-Semitism are alive and well across Europe, as the success of far-right parties like Front National in France, Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom in Hungary, and Golden Dawn in Greece makes clear.
Before advancing a reparative reassertion of Enlightenment secularism against both divergent strains of anti-Semitic thought and the derivative ideology of Zionism, some consideration must be given to America's principal contribution to the development of biological/racialist anti-Semitic conceptions. If, historically speaking, European anti-Semitism is ultimately a product of the intersection of Christian sectarian anti-Jewish prejudices and their impacts on the economic and cultural marginalization of Jews, then American anti-Semitic prejudices, like so many other manifestations of American prejudice, assume distinctly racialist forms, grounded in the pseudo-scientific, quasi-Darwinian conceptions of eugenic theory. Eugenics, which originated in Britain through the writings of Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin who suggested the potential for artificial genotypic selection by means of human breeding practices, came into its own in a country whose obsession with racial hierarchy and the purity of Whiteness manifests itself in political/legal, economic, and cultural institutions from the earliest moments of Anglo-American history. In the U.S., eugenic arguments advanced by educated, academic advocates of racialist genetic engineering, like Charles Davenport and John H. Kellogg, supported both racially-structured immigration restrictions and laws mandating forced sterilization of individuals with "inferior" genetic traits as a defense against the dilution of the White American gene pool. American eugenics invariably developed a body of racialist anti-Semitism, isolating ranges of "genetically"-grounded Jewish traits as arguments for restriction of immigration by European Jewish populations into the U.S. Emphatically, Davenport apparently directly associated particular predispositions toward criminal behavior with the genetic heritage of European Jews.
In an immigrant country otherwise founded on the basis of liberal-democratic revolution and the Constitutional extension of national citizenship, the historical development of American genetic-racialist anti-Semitism perhaps reflects an otherwise perverse sentimentality of White Americans of Western and Northern European descent for the fictive racial purity of long-separated European ancestral-home countries. In any sense, the particular zeal with which American defenders of White racial purity against the pollution of Jewish racial contamination sought to exclude Jews clearly shaped the development of European anti-Semitism in ways that made the co-evolution and alliance between German eugenics and Aryan racialist German ultra-nationalism, culminating in the Nazi seizure of power, more likely and more virulent with respect to the articulation of racialist ideologies in association with anti-Jewish state policies. Maybe German eugenicists allied with the early-Twentieth century German ultra-nationalist political right did not require the particular academic ammunition supplied by like-minded American anti-Semites to create the circumstances in which the forcible extermination of millions from a "genetically-criminal" "race" could arise as the culmination of eighty years of pseudo-scientific racial prejudice, but the legacy of American racial anti-Semitism remains an indictment against the "enlightened" character of American thinking for which we must take account, if only for its fundamental incompatibility with the liberal ideals of some of our political forefathers and their revolution.
3. The project of the liberal Enlightenment, anchored, in part, on the principle of universal freedom of conscience, is fundamentally antagonistic toward both anti-Semitic conceptualizations of Judaism and the sectarian project of Zionism. On the other hand, the contradiction of the liberal (political) state and civil society/practical individuality lays the groundwork for the Nineteenth century "Jewish question" that gives rise to both Zionism and Nazism as contradictory illiberal responses. Against such responses, imperfect compromises between liberal humanism/pluralistic individualism (unity in the generalization of difference) and socialism (unity in imposed homogeneity) seek to articulate a practical humanism, respecting both divergent spiritualities and the imperatives of human (species) collectivity.
Speaking as a Marxist, the Enlightenment castes an array of incommensurable philosophical (ontological) problems in approaching the social nature of human existence and the organization of social processes. Succinctly, as a defender of the Enlightenment, I must confront the lingering methodological individualism latent within liberal thought and, following Althusser's anti-humanist critique, challenge the abstract, individualist foundations of the liberal conception of man (e.g. man in the "state of nature"). Man in Marxian theory, as I understand it, is a site of overdetermination, devoid of innate, "natural" characteristics transcending the particularities of the biological, chemical, physical, political, economic, and cultural processes combining to constitute each man and woman at a particular temporal moment and spatial geography. In these terms, it is impossible to extract from the body of thought that emerges in the Enlightenment a set of timeless principles governing either the physical reality of the universe (e.g. Newtonian physics) or the relations between abstract human subjects unified by the imperatives of self-government (e.g. Locke's two treatises). Moreover, the legacy of the Enlightenment relative to anti-Semitism is, in itself, unclear. Assembling a broader summation of Enlightenment thinkers and Enlightenment thinking here would proceed beyond the limited ends of this brief account - all that I mean to do here is theorize the particular ways in which the Enlightenment produced (if unintentionally) both fascism/Nazism and Zionism despite nominally opposing both such illiberal ideological structures. For my purposes, I need to articulate an argument defining the Enlightenment project, connecting it to fascism/Nazism and Zionism, and advancing why it is now necessary to extract from the Enlightenment the liberal seeds to a new project succeeding the fragile imperfections of Enlightenment thinking, liberal principles infused with Marxian-inspired globalist aspirations in a new practical humanist project.
The Enlightenment, as I understand it, encompasses a broader explosion of intellectual activity over the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, with its roots in the Copernican revolution of astronomy and the subsequent spillover of speculative thinking and empirical research into physics, chemistry, and biology. The evolving transformations of the natural sciences toward contemporary manifestations of these disciplines promoted, philosophically, a revolution in ontological and epistemological conceptualizations, creating the tradition today comprehended by the label "modernism." Critically, the Enlightenment thinkers resituate man in relation to the universe, slowly rejecting Neo-Platonic and Christian cosmological ontologies in favor of comprehensive naturalism and, progressively, a god-less universe. Moreover, they pursue such a reframing of man with a deepening faith in both introspective rationalism and empirical speculation/positivism as means by which man could unravel the objective truths of the universe. Finally, the Enlightenment introduces a revolution of political thought, conforming to such a resituating of man in the universe, inviting unbridled inquiry into the nature of government, the rights and liberties of human agents, and relational ethics in social life, including civil government and market relations/economics. The evolving body of Classical Western liberal thought, thus, has its birth in this period, culminating in the late Eighteenth century liberal-democratic revolutions of Anglo-America and France.
To some extent, it is simply impossible to disaggregate racial from sectarian/religious breeds of anti-Semitic thought and practice in ways that enable us to trace the genesis of modern formulations within certain streams of Enlightenment theory. Over two hundred years of development have rendered each thoroughly intermeshed. Generalizing again, however, the "Jewish question" in Europe at the dawn of the nation-state is, first, a religious/sectarian issue and, secondarily, in the wake of the liberal democratic revolutions, a question of citizenship and inclusive nationalism. Emphatically, for Marx as for Hegel before him and for the excommunicated secularist Jew, Spinoza, from whom each drew a substantial influence, there is no racial (i.e. biological/genetic) question in association with Judaism. And yet, the absolute exclusion of Jews from European civilization exists as a fundamental point of departure in social analysis and for inquiry into the question of assimilation. The same observation can be adduced later in regard to Nietzsche, for whom the Jew, as member of a "race" is representative of a particular set of characteristics linked more decisively to socio-cultural development than to biology/genetics. The European "Jewish question" emerging from the Enlightenment continuously fails to become a racial/biological/genetic question in a manifestly pre-Darwinian landscape of biological knowledge. Even to the extent that Enlightenment biological theorists like Carolus Linnaeus were anxious to include humanity within the animal world rather than allow it to suspended precariously above Creation in accordance with Christian cosmology, the types of knowledges required to assemble robust racialist hierarchies against which Jews could be situated fail to arise until Darwinian evolutionary theory and modern genetic theorizations, both Lamarckian and Mendelian, lend to aspiring racialists the building blocks for scientifically-inspired prejudices. As such, the point here is to inquire how and why the Jew is excluded from the politically liberatory promise of the Enlightenment to the exclusion of any fictive racialist hierarchies and genetic attributions.
In this respect, it is necessary to inquire into the particular ways in which Enlightenment political thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau approached religion, sectarian differences, and Judaism, in particular, to determine how such differences promoted the exclusion of Jews, in practice, from the liberal nation-state, an absence that continues to the present day in Europe and America. With regard to both Locke and Montesquieu, the liberal-individualist influence of Protestant thought leaves the clearest imprint. For both, the certainty of Christianity as the predominant religious tradition operative within European polities resonates as the point of departure against which the "Jewish question" (or, for that matter, the "Muhammudan/Muslim question") concerns the tolerance of a faith that exists by virtue of the relative ignorance of its adherents in relation to the "true" religion. For Locke, in particular, Christianity and scriptural texts rooted in the Gospel remain the foundations for all true ethics, and the prerogative/responsibility of all believers to engage personally in scriptural reading, interpretation, and ethical incorporation, in conformity with the individualist ethos of the Protestant Reformation, forms the true basis for all interpersonal relations, law, and civil government. As such, Lockean toleration of religious diversity (or, for that matter, the tolerance of religious diversity for Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, or other prominent American Lockeans) constitutes a kind of charity accorded to minority religious traditions whose influence on the wellbeing of a polity is too miniscule to merit repression in the name of truth. By contrast, for Locke, Roman Catholicism deserves none of the same threshold of tolerance as Judaism or Islam because Catholicism poses a palpable threat to the authority exercised by Anglican ecclesiastical officials and by the monarchy, standing as the head of the church in confrontation with the external authority of the Papacy.
In L'esprit des lois, alternatively, Montesquieu's larger concern resides in the rationality of preponderant faiths and the influence of toleration as a means for maintaining the peace and civil harmony within a polity, characterized by at least some margin of sectarian heterogeneity. That is to say, Montesquieu's concern for toleration appeals more strongly to the relational necessity of good will among citizens of divergent faiths than toward a practical and innocuous indifference of inconsequential minorities. For neither Montesquieu nor Locke is there a fundamental need to engage with sectarian differences in connecting religion to civil governance, which, ultimately, respects the self-interests of all members within the polity regardless of their individual sectarian affiliations. As such, for Locke and Montesquieu, any binding tie between religious faith and civil governance remains divorced from the practical need for the maintenance of the peace and the protection of each individual in their persons and their property, the overriding foci of Classical liberal discourse. On the other hand, Protestant Christianity, as the grounding against which liberal discourse discloses the centrality of the individual as the fundamental entity in an atomistic social theory, remains a critical backdrop, periodically revealed in explicit terms, especially by Locke. The political liberalism of each reflects theological liberalism, extending the principle of toleration to the extent that it seems practical and/or imperative.
Rousseau's Du Contrat Social, by contrast, remains anchored to a utilitarian rationality principle in advancing the argument in favor of absolute toleration of sectarian differences, but further asserts the need for a binding spirit of "civic religion"/faith in collectivity as the glue cementing each individual within the polity as individual members of the collective sovereign. This difference from Locke and Montesquieu is relevant for two reasons related to my larger argument regarding anti-Semitism emerging from the Enlightenment. First, Rousseau diverges from the rigorous Protestant individualist influence apparent for other Classical Enlightenment liberals to reinforce the notion of collectivity advanced in the idea of social contract. If the social contractual logic emerges from the pursuit of naked individual self-interest in the protection of person and property, for Rousseau the realization of the polity as political community is a transformative act, re-grounding individual members within a collective body politic. The notion of civic religion is proper to the individual in this second, collective sense as a citizen. In contrast to the perspectives of Locke and Montesquieu, which continue to take Christianity as a point of departure and the preponderant Christian faith of individuals in their own national contexts as an irreproachable given against which the state must remain indifferent, Rousseau, in certain respects, rejects all sectarian religious faith, per se, and marginalizes the faith practices of individuals as inconsistent with the demands of civic unity. Critically, as the second major divergence in Rousseau's approach, collectivity, as a phenomenon of social psychology, demands a structure of unifying ideology, by any other name, religion. If, as such, Rousseau does not advocate militant atheism or even a rationally conceived ecumenical deism for all individuals, then he does rigorously argue that sectarian differences militating against the broader principles of a unified (national) civic ideology are intolerable to the state and to the sovereign polity that underlies it.
To (inadequately!) summarize the expansive political theoretic legacy of the Enlightenment on the relationship of sectarian religious faith and national citizenship, a critical divergence between liberal individualism (expressed in commitments to political liberties) and inclusive ideological nationalism emerges from Seventeenth and Eighteenth century political theory. The Nineteenth century "Jewish question" derives from the latter theoretic vein. In important ways, Rousseau's own understanding of Judaism as a faith tradition within which individual morality and civil law are unified through the Mosaic law creates the basis for questioning the capacity of Jews to be assimilated within European national polities. Minimally, the sort of inclusive nationalism reflected in Rousseau's social contractual theorization seems to invalidate transnational linkages expressed weakly in regard to the sectarian ecclesiastical unity of Roman Catholics and expressed in much less ambiguous, strongly sectarian nationalistic terms by late Nineteenth century Jewish Zionism. Moreover, the progressive unification of national political forms and the gradual retraction of feudal and absolutist monarchical governance in the wake of liberal democratic revolution, supported, in part, by Rousseauean civic republican and inclusive-nationalist conceptions of citizenship, make such "Jewish questions" inevitable without simultaneously enforcing an a priori resolution. I consider it critical that there is nothing either in Rousseau's theoretic approach to civic religion or in the initial articulations of liberal-democratic nationalism (e.g. the formative stages of the early French republics and Napoleonic-era France) that posits the insoluble character of the Jew relative to the European national polity. Emphatically, Rousseau and the early secularist liberal democratic revolutionaries both defended, more or less dogmatically, the freedom of conscience of all individuals and absolute toleration of religious diversity in the eyes of the state. Invariably, pursuing the evolution of the "Jewish question" through the Nineteenth century and into the Twentieth, from the initial stages of the French Revolution to the Jewish Holocaust and the contested realization of a Zionist state, compels us to sort through the reasons why the Enlightenment promises of individual freedom of conscience and toleration, particularly in the case of Jews, failed.
Even in its most radical theories and at its most radical instances of political practice, the liberal Enlightenment operates with an impoverished conception of man that ultimately hinders its capacity to achieve a real and enduring cultural transformation to transform Europe's emerging national social formations into rigorously liberal, culturally inclusive, constitutionally-defined social formations. That is to say, outside of its most cosmopolitan spaces, the citizens of a nation-state like France continue to comprehend the existence of state-political boundaries through which it can exclude populations that they regard as non-French. In its juridical practices, such states may similarly dichotomize constitutional liberties conferred on citizens from those conferred on political "aliens," in order to differentiate between those privileges to which citizens are specifically entitled as a function of their belonging to the nation. Pointedly, the potential of citizens to conceive of individuals external to the boundaries of the liberal polity evokes, in part, the failure of Enlightenment liberalism to realize its logical conclusions as a universalistic ideology - as a corpus of ideas to suture disparate "nations" into common humanity.
In his 1844 essay "On the Jewish Question," Marx targets the problem underlying political liberalism. The essay constitutes a critique of the limitations of political liberation (i.e. the constitutional specification of individual liberties against repressive state interference) relative to a more comprehensive human liberation, elevating man above the superstitions and mysticisms of religion as well as chauvinistic prejudices of nationality. Emphatically, the inability of liberalism to transcend a vision of liberation wholly excluded to the notion of political man/the citizen inhibits its capacity to forge a fundamental species-unity and nurture a conception of human political, cultural, and economic development that will not simultaneously aggrandize individualistic egotisms and nationalistic exclusivities. In these terms, the real Jewish question does not concern the extension of freedom of conscience on Jewish worshippers by the national state or assimilation of Jews as citizens with full political liberties but the abolition of Judaism as a particular religious tradition with particular superstitions and cultural proclivities. However much Marx can be criticized, in this respect, for generalizing about Judaism and its particular relationship to certain economic activities and character traits without adequately historicizing the roles of Jews in the emergent market economies of capitalist Europe, he must, at least, be credited with maintaining a particular, rigorous, if abstract, conception of man transcending the liberal project.
Notwithstanding the ontological shortcomings of Marx's own Hegelian-inspired understanding of man in 1844, the central critique remains valid - liberalism fails to achieve its potential as a universalistic ideology precisely because it is predicated on a bifurcated conception of man that leaves intact the sources of irrational prejudice dividing human beings into sects, nations, races, classes, and other groupings. The continuity of such a divided conception of man (i.e. between political man/the citizen and the (classed) individual of "civil society"), moreover, shapes the lived experience of Nineteenth and Twentieth century European politics, particularly in conjunction with the development of industrial and finance capitalism in Western Europe. The citizen, as a legally free person and a free possessor of his/her own labor power, remains a subject to diverse political, economic, and cultural processes operating to both constrain and/or empower him/her in relation to other citizens. Equality before the state and the law constitutes neither total human equality of state nor equal developmental potential. Minimally, within the Marxian theoretic/class-analytic frame, citizens may approach each other in differential states through labor markets as possessors of labor power subject to its contractual alienation and exploitation/extraction of surplus labor. The persistence of particular alignments of individuals within class processes, with given individuals effectively constrained over time to occupy a role as exploited producer of surplus labor against a given capitalist exploiter, manifests consequences for the maintenance of peace and civility within social formations shaped by the principles of Enlightenment liberalism. From within the blind spaces constituted by liberal political ideology and its abstract constructions of the citizen emerge complex refractions of class inequality and derivative illiberal ideological responses (e.g. prejudicial characterizations of the Jew as the caricature of the bourgeois capitalist).
In these terms, the sort of European anti-Semitism that arises in the Nineteenth century over the course of the development of Western European industrial capitalism, while shaped by the lineages of pre-industrial, sectarian Christian anti-Semitism, takes on, among other things, an accentuated economistic dimension, through which nationalistic anti-Jewish chauvinism stands in for the articulation of an actual anti-capitalist theory and political project.
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