From: LeoCasey at dont.panix.com Message-ID: <b6.fc78899.2790ceeb at UNKNOWN> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 16:19:39 EST
I find two of the recent threads interesting, and somewhat parallel in their themes.
It has been a staple of anti-Semitic discourse over the past two centuries to connect Jews to finance capital, and to present both as "parasitic." [Thus, the exceptionally prominent role played by the Rothschilds and such in anti-Semitic iconography.] Historians have generally stressed the origins of this particular trope in the fact that mediaeval Jews often took up the occupation of moneylender, given the then Christian prohibitions on usury. While I would not discount the matter of historical origins, I think it is a mistake to reduce the trope entirely to that moment. There is an entirely contemporary quality to this articulation of elements, one which brings together various phenomena that seem to escape and resist the power of a homogenizing nation-state -- the "rootless, disloyal" Jew and the "rootless, disloyal" banker. Throw in the "rootless, disloyal" gypsy and homosexual for good effect, and one can begin to see a logic at work in the modern authoritarian personality -- the need to secure a fixed homogeneous center, and eternal and unchanging boundaries, in a world of ever-shifting, ever-changing heterogeneity.
It must be noted here that Marx contributed to this trope in his _On The Jewish Question. _ To wit:
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general...
...Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, vendible objects subjected to the slavery of egoistic need and to trading. A0Selling [verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation [Entausserung]. Just as man, as long as he is
in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity -- money -- on them...
...Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism -- huckstering and its preconditions -- the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man's individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished...
On a related matter, I think that Max was entirely correct to note a connection between the charge that New York City is a center of "Zionism" and the fact that it has such a large Jewish population. Geographical sites perform a representative role in the political imagination. New York City is, of course, a center of finance capital, by virtue of Wall Street, with all of the accordant symbolic power. But it is also a center of large, strong and powerful Jewish, African-American and gay communities and cultures, and is as much linked with them in the popular political imagination [the 'decadent' city of others] as it is with finance capital. The use of the term Zionism, which often functions on the left as a politically protected, indeed even correct, form of invoking anti-Semitic images, does indeed raise serious questions here.
The discussion of 'Southern bashing' failed, I believe, to really address how geographical sites represent different forces, become icons, in the political imagination. Just as NYC represents certain forces, so does San Francisco [Sodom and Gomorrah in Christian right discourse], Hollywood [another site represented as paradigmatically Jewish], Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and so on. It is important, I think, to recognize that the 'South' functions as a political signifier in precisely the same way -- and not simply because of its history, as the cradle of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, as the land of the 'strange fruit.' It remains today the center of the most culturally and socially reactionary forces in the US, the home of the Delays and the Lotts, the Gingriches and the Helms. Of course, it is also the home of the John Lewises and the Cynthia McKinneys, and in a careful political analysis, one should not treat it, any more than NYC, as without contradiction. But if we want to understand what it invokes as an image, as a political trope, we must look at those matters.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)