Of Blood and Country

Harry's Place reports that the new Macmillan Encyclopedia on Race & Racism has an entry on Zionism, unsurprisingly calling it racist. I say unsurprisingly, because my unfortunate experience is that whenever Zionism gets singled out for focus amongst various nationalist ideologies (which it was here -- indeed, "nationalism" itself didn't even warrant an entry), it's not going to be in a manner that is precisely equitable or fair-minded to the Jews.

The author of the section on Zionism is a Noel Ignatiev, who, though having done interesting work on the normative status of Whiteness, does not have any particular expertise on Zionism or Jews that I know of (he was born to Jewish parents, but I'm pretty sure he does not practice or identify at all). He has on occasion written on the topic, such as in this lovely essay where he alleges that Zionism served as a Nazi collaboration project and claims that "Osama Bin-Laden was telling no more than the truth when he said that the Muslim world is facing an alliance of Zionists and Crusaders." So, you know, a neutral figure to construct an encyclopedia entry.

Anyway. Insofar as Dr. Ignatiev has an academic specialty, it is on race, and particularly Whiteness, which he wishes to "abolish". This is a polemical claim, and though I find myself disagreeing with it, it is easily misunderstood. But I fear that in this case, Dr. Ignatiev's lens of Whiteness as the paradigm by which he views race leads him to significant misunderstanding of how "race", Judaism, and Israel intersect.

Ignatiev's justification for labeling Zionism as a fundamentally racial endeavor is the following:

Because it defines 'Jew' not by religious observance, language, place of birth, or culture, but by descent, Zionism is an ideology of race.

Now, there a couple things to be said about this. First, strictly speaking, this is inaccurate, as one can convert to Judaism and persons duly converted as considered to be full members of the Jewish community. There are, of course, disputes about who is eligible to oversee a conversion and thus which conversions are legitimate, but the principle is well established that, both religiously and as far as the state of Israel is concerned, one can be Jewish without having Jewish descent.

Second, the subtext to Ignatiev's claim here is that the "descent" definition is exclusionary, hence why it is problematic. This comes out of his dominant framework for understanding race, Whiteness, by which using "White" as a defining characteristic (as opposed to other potential identification axes) was done specifically to point at a given class of Other people and say "not for you". But the descent framework for Jews has the opposite effect -- it is considerably more inclusive than alternative frameworks, such as place of birth or degree of observance. Ignatiev could argue that Whiteness served the same effect by uniting disparate European nationals with little else in common under a single banner for the purpose of exploitation. But that "little else in common" is the kicker here, which moves me to my next point....

Third, the definition is remarkably ahistorical. As noted by some critics of Ignatiev's entry, his encyclopedia article makes no mention of the Holocaust. This, of course, is problematic, because it, and the broader currents of anti-Semitism from which it stemmed, were instrumental in making the definition of Jew what it was. Jew was defined broadly because it was intended to capture all those who would be targeted for death by anti-Semitic violence. It is asinine to assert that the broad definition was created for purposes of domination and control. It rather clearly was done so as to protect the maximum number of people possible. The broadly defined "class" of Jew does share something in common, and that something is anti-Semitism. It is little consolation to religious Jews if violence is being directed at their less observant brothers if that violence is occurring due to their Jewishness -- it is still equally threatening. And Israel has practiced what it preaches in this respect: when Jewish-identified persons whose Jewish descent is subject of question and debate by Israeli authorities (such as the Ethiopian Jewish community) seek to emigrate, they are welcomed in regardless of whether it is ultimately determined that they are Jewish-by-descent (indeed, the Ethiopian Jewish community was encouraged to convert, indicating that the relevant authorities did not think they were "actually" Jewish through descent).

Fourth and finally, I think that Jews as a community show an interesting malleability to such concepts as "race", "religion", "nation", and "culture". I've often heard it demanded that Jews "pick one", for example, that Judaism is "properly" a religion and thus should not be able to claim rights rightfully restricted to nations. For those of us who think those concepts should be destabilized, or at least shaken up a bit, the way which Judaism blends these categories should be exciting and laudable, as we seem to reject the notion that Jews as a "race" or "nation" or "religion" has to be calcified and eternal across all time. But Ignatiev is insistent upon keeping Jews in one box: if we're acting like races typically do, then that is the root of any national policies we promote, regardless of whether we ourselves see religious, cultural, communal, or historical influences as being as much or more important to the behavior.

Ignatiev, in short, doesn't see Jews as Jews. He sees them through eyeglasses tinted by other experiences, and expresses no interest in hearing our own tale as we express it. In doing so, he inevitably misses the reality of our situation, and will find it impossible figure out a solution that promises the flourishing of Jews qua Jews as one of its characteristics.