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GENEALOGIES OF EMPIRE: WHAT JEWISH STUDIES CAN CONTRIBUTE
© 2014 Ivan Kalmar
This is a position paper presented at the Workshop on Jewish and
Postcolonial Studies, University of Toronto, May 15, 2014. Please
do not quote without the author’s permission. The time limit did not allow
many relevant issues to be developed. For information or
conversation regarding the paper, please email the author at
I’d like to thank Willy [Goetschel] and Ato [Quayson] for
organizing this workshop on Jewish and postcolonial studies. All
of us here have been thinking about and working on this topic,
which is hopefully gaining in importance across Jewish Studies
and other disciplines today. My own modest involvement started
over ten years ago. In 2004 I organized a panel on Orientalism,
Colonialism, and the Jews at the Association of Jewish Studies
annual conference, and I have produced a number of publications
on the closely related topic of the joint representation in
western cultural history of Jews and Muslims or Arabs, as related
peoples of the East. Today I would like to sum up, in the time at
my disposal, the importance of this imagined relationship between
Jews and Muslims to the overall genealogy of Empire.
Western philosophy, philology, art,
architecture and literature in the long
nineteenth century abound with representations
of the oriental exotic as Muslim and Jewish. The
fact of this joint representation has not
escaped the attention of such scholars of
orientalism as Edward Said or Bryan Turner, or
in a separate strand of scholarship, of Jacques
Derrida and Gil Anidjar, though critical
scholarship on this topic is, even so, still
scant.
Orientalism and the Jewish-Muslim connection
being my starting point, the path I trace of the
2
genealogy of Empire is different from, for
example, Aaron Mufti and his emphasis on
minoritization and resettlement, though my
conclusions are compatible and I hope
incremental to his. Also, unlike many others, I
do not explicitly address the Israel/Palestine
situation, but remain focused on the origins of
imperialism in the long eighteenth century. I do
not claim, however, that my historiography is
less informed by a concern with the present.
Studying historical representations of Jews and
Muslims together is in itself a way to address
the current situation, but I will remain silent
on that point in my presentation. I’d be happy
3
to address it in the discussion if anyone wants
me to.
By genealogy of Empire I mean essentially the
historical conditions that allowed Empire to be
thought of and to be put in practice. It is
widely agreed that the genealogy of Empire
included the joint appearance, first, of the
modern notion of peoples entitled to be
sovereign in their own state, or popular
sovereignty and second, the idea of western
peoples as entitled to rule others. These two
things, popular sovereignty and imperialism, are
connected. The notion of imperial domination is
connected to, and even derives from the notion
of a people as an agent of history.
4
My aim is to show how both at the level of
the nation and popular sovereignty, and at the
level of Empire and its relation to its subject,
the “Jew” was an important trope: an important
trope for the ideology of both popular
sovereignty and of imperialism as they developed
in the long nineteenth century. This is one of
the things I hope to show; the other is that the
trope of the “Jew” was associated in this
respect with the trope of the “Muslim” and of
the “Arab.” Once I do that, I’ll discuss some
repercussions for joint or at least related work
in Jewish and postcolonial studies.
Let me start, then, with popular sovereignty,
the idea that a state should be representing and
5
governed by its people. This very broad and
vague term, “the people,” has two rather
different items among its many meanings. One is
political: the people as the citizens of their
state. The other is ethnic: the people as a
group of imagined common descent. When we speak
of the people rising against their king in a
revolution, we normally mean the people defined
politically: the citizens. But when we speak of
the German Volk founding a new Germany, or the
Jewish People founding the State of Israel, we
mean the people as defined by imagined common
descent.
The ethnic definition of a people does not
presuppose a state though it gives the people
6
the right to form one.i The political definition,
on the other hand, presupposes the state as
already existing. To put it another way, the
people defined ethnically are defined
independently of the state. But the people
defined politically are defined by the state. So
there is a problem here: the people as a
political unit are sovereign in a state that was
already formed before they became sovereign. And
it was formed not on the basis of popular
sovereignty, but through the conquests,
marriages, and business dealings of monarchs.
The territory of the state does not a priori have
any foundation in popular sovereignty. In a way,
then, popular sovereignty depends on prior
7
monarchical sovereignty. This is ironic, since
popular sovereignty is generally held to be an
idea that is opposed to monarchy. It is far more
acceptable to those who believe in popular
sovereignty for the territorial state (the only
kind we know) to be established on some
principle other than the monarchical. And this
gives the ethnic definition its power. It is the
reason why nationalism appeared historically as
an almost immediate consequence of popular
sovereignty, not only among nations without a
state, like the Germans, but also, though
admittedly in a less powerful manner, among long
established nations like the French.
8
A definition of peoplehood is needed that is
independent of and precedes the formation of the
state. And, like I said, that definition is the
ethnic or national definition, based on imagined
common descent. I say imagined in the sense of
Anderson’s “imagined communities,” where imagine
may, but does not have to, mean imaginary. With
the people defined by imagined common descent,
the problem of defining the state by the nation
and the nation by the pre-existing monarchical
or colonial state, has disappeared. But of
course, other problems raise their head.
First of all, how do you recognize common
descent of the kind that defines a people? At
first the answer was, by a common language.
9
Later linguistic definitions of a people were
often biologized under the influence of popular
Darwinism, and peoples were ambiguously and
inconsistently classified into the higher-level
units of biologically defined “races.”
The definition of peoples by language was not
the work of linguists but of philologists. The
objective task of philology was the linguistic
study of texts, especially historical documents.
Its broader task, however, was to posit from
extant texts the genius of the people who
produced them. The distinctive genius of a
people was originally a philosophical notion as
well as of course a popular one: Montesquieu
called it l’esprit des* peuples, Locke in a slightly
10
different sense National Character, and Hegel Volksgeist.
It was philology that functioned as the
scientific tool for circumscribing peoples as
real or potential creators of a nation state. It
was philologists who were the scientific experts
of the ideology of real, potential, and to be
revived nations like Germany or Italy. They blew
breath into the nostrils of cultures and
languages that seemed to be on the way to
extinction, setting the pattern that would
eventually also include Hebrew.
But how could the Hebrew language define the
Jews, when few of them actually spoke it?
Actually, the language that philologists used to
identify peoples was not necessarily spoken by
11
them, but was imagined as having been spoken by
them in the past. The Irish, Czechs, or Finns
had also largely lost their language, though not
to the extent as the Jews. Their nationalist,
also, strove to revive the language as a means
of reviving the nation and of giving it popular
sovereignty in their own state.
Almost uniquely, in the Jewish case a
submerged historical language was joined in the
definition of peoplehood by a submerged, if less
so, religion. It is only in the Jewish case that
the definition of the people by common descent
was not only joined but in fact depended on
prior definition by religion. For the authority
for the universal assumption that the Jews were
12
a people itself came from the Bible, a religious
text. Indeed, the only near-universal objective
feature distinguishing Jew from non-Jew was
religion, though not necessarily practiced by
any individual Jew. It is more precise to say
that what defined the Jew was descent from
someone who practiced the Jewish religion. This
is what the Nurenberg Laws basically said, but
the Nazis were only picking up on a popular
definition that was already in place. For
example, Benjamin Disraeli was routinely
referred to as a Jew by himself and by others,
even though he was baptized. So this is the
paradox. The modern definition of the Jewish
people in the context of the reise of the
13
national idea is based on common descent and is
meant to replace the religious definition, yet
the religious definition remains crucial to the
ethnic: you were Jewish if your ancestors
practiced Judaism. In the history of the long
nineteenth century, Jewish families, therefore,
the transformation of Jewishness from a
religious definition to a definition by descent
took place in a most literal sense.
The fact that Jewishness is defined at least
partly by religion, and not by the usual
criteria of a distinctive language or a single
somatic type has not prevented many people from
regarding the Jews as a people. Quite on the
contrary.
14
In the long nineteenth century some Jewish
Germans or French may have protested that being
Jewish was “just a religion” like any other, and
that apart from that they were like other
Germans or French. This, however, always had a
programmatic tinge to it, since at no time
during the long nineteenth century did anyone
doubt that at least historically, the Jews were
a separate people who migrated to Europe from
the East.
It would seem to me that in fact Jewish
peoplehood is both atypical and prototypical. It
is atypical in its dependence on religion, but
it is also prototypical for the same reason. In
my work I have argued that the nation as a unit
15
of imagined common descent owes much in western
cultural history to the Bible and its portrayal
of the Jews as just such a nation. The reason
Jewish peoplehood is uncontested and exerts a
powerful influence on the imagination, is that
it is so deep-seated, embedded as it is in the
text that defines the historic imagination of
the Christian West, and its transforms both here
and in the postcolony.
For there is still very little doubt
expressed about the peoplehood of the Jews on
the common descent criterion today, In fact,
with recent skeptical work by Shlomo Sand being
the hotly contested exception. Sander Gilman
details how postcolonial authors stress the
16
hybridity of their own identities, but only to
contrast it with Jewish identity as a primitive,
undefined and unchanging constant: the people
who are eternally different. Characters of mixed
Jewish-gentile ancestry are common in
postcolonial literature, as Aaron Mufti has also
shown. But the Jewish part itself is assumed as
a given, unlike the other parts such as Hindu or
Muslim which are emphatically understood as
constructed, typically by essentializing an
identity that is actually hybrid at the core.
Gilman suggests that “The postcolonial writer
has inherited from the legacy of orientalism the
trope of the Jew with all its simplifications
17
and all its complexity as the eternally
Different.”
You cannot get more essentialist about
peoplehood that to make it the eternally
Different. The eternally Different is therefore,
much as it is different from existing national
identities, the ultimate model of essentialized
national identity.
Please note that I am not saying that the
biblical notion of Israel caused the idea of the
nation as a group of imagined descent. But,
given that in the long nineteenth century
everyone in the West knew their Bible quite
well, biblical peoplehood was an important part
of the genealogy of the modern notion of nation.
18
Now, to move on from the national to the
imperial, I would suggest that, similarly,
Christian readings of the Bible were a part of
the genealogy of modern imperial thought. In the
Bible the Jews have a special role as a people,
to serve God’s plans for the history of
humanity. This matched well with the modern idea
of human progress in stages led by nations, of
which, once again, I would point to Hegel as the
founding philosophical exponent.
The difference is, other than the secularized
language, that in the Bible the Jews remain
God’s chosen people, while in modern stageist
historiography different peoples take over at
different stages. The condition of possibility
19
for stageism is not the election of Israel so
much as Christian supersessionism, the idea that
the New Testament supersedes the Old and
Christianity supersedes Judaism. In the stage of
imperialism, of course, the West supersedes
everyone else. But given that it was also the
stage of the nation state, each national state
appropriates for itself to the role of leader of
the world. And then again it does so on behalf
of the Western world, or of “the white man” in
general. It becomes a kind of imperialist chosen
people. There is good literature, in fact,
discussing the way that England, the New
Jerusalem, imagined itself as the chosen people
20
as it was becoming the world’s greatest imperial
power.
While England and the other western powers
saw their own imperialism as a gift to humanity,
in typical supersessionist manner antisemites
accused the Jews instead of striving for world
domination. The world Jewish conspiracy was seen
as a kind of underground, transnational anti-
empire.
The notion of national imperialisms
threatened by a religiously derived
transnationalism did not, however, target only
the Jews. Almost from the beginning of modern
nationalisms in the Christian world, many
national movements came into conflict with
21
religion, primarily as represented by the pan-
national Catholic church. In the Pope’s own home
country, Italy, unification was followed by
measures to control and even dissolve religious
fraternities. Both in Catholic and in Protestant
Europe, conspiracy theories about the Jesuits
secretly ruling the world were held passionately
by many respectable as well as not respectable
people, well before such theories were directed,
often with very similar content, against the
Jews. Catholics, with support from other
conservative Christians, often responded by a
similar suspicion of deist movements, and
especially of the Freemasons. Towards the end of
22
the nineteenth century, anti-Masonic sentiment
began to associate the Masons with the Jews.
Now here is the sublime irony. In actual
fact, it was neither the Jesuits, nor the
Masons, nor the Jews that strove for world
domination. It was the imperialist, historically
Christian nations of the West. It was they
themselves who pursued a supranational agenda of
imperial expansion, whose logical end was global
domination. The Jesuit, Masonic, and Jewish
conspiracies were, therefore, a parody of and a
competitor to, national dreams of trans-national
domination in all of the important nation states
from England to Russia.
23
These religiously identified conspiracies
were the enemy of nation and empire within the
West. At the same time, on the outside of the
West, the old enemy, Islam, represented a
religiously associated force that was widely
recognized as a source of resistance to western
imperialism in spite of efforts by western
conquerors, from Napoleon on, to convince
Muslims that Christians could be good overlords
for them.
Unfortunately for the Jews, antisemitism was
strengthened by the fact that they were
construed not only as one of the West’s internal
enemies, but also as racial relatives of the
external enemy, the Muslims. The religious
24
kinship of Jews and Muslims is an idea in
Christian thought that has a venerable medieval
pedigree. Hegel updated it with the due
philological and civilizational correlates when
he classified Judaism as an “Arab religion”
along with Islam. This was symptomatic. For in
conjunction with the racialized concept of
“Jew,” and not before, we begin to see the rise
of the notion of the “Arab” as a nation. Though
most educated people would know that not all
Muslims were Arabs nor were all Arabs Muslim,
the “Arab” nation came to be understood as a
nation that produced and was still the main
professor of Islam, just as the Jewish nation
was the creator and follower of Judaism.
25
The philological support for redefining the
Jewish-Muslim “kinship” from strictly religious
terms to ones of common descent came from the
study of language families. As Hannah Arendt
recognized, the logic of nationalism,
philologically defined, led beyond the nation to
pan-national units associated with language
familes. Hegel considered the Volk that most
advanced the work of the Weltgeist to be not
Deutsche or Germans, but Germanen or Germanics.
This is a linguistically based term that
includes speakers of Germanic languages like
Dutch or English. In the case of the Jews’
ancestral language, Hebrew, it had long been
known that it resembled Arabic in form.
26
Therefore not only Hegel but also a British
imperialist like Benjamin Disraeli, who was of
Jewish origin, was able to refer to Jews as
“Arabs.”
It was mainly through the efforts of the mid-
nineteenth century orientalist, Ernest Renan,
that the name of the language family, “Semitic”
was also transferred to a pan-national entity,
and one began to speak of Semites as a people,
construed on an analogy with the Germanen or the
Slavs. The higher unit above these language
families, also philologically defined, was the
Indo-Europeans, known in Germany as Indo-Germanen.
These were also referred to as Aryans. By the
end of the nineteenth century the Aryans were
27
depicted as the carriers of the most advanced
form of civilization. Antisemites would speak of
a clash of civilizations between the Aryan and
the Semite, represented in Europe by the
struggle between the gentile nations and the
Jews. A few, like the Austrian anthropologist
Adolf Wahrmund, explicitly connected this to the
imperial struggle against the Semites outside
Europe, waged against the Arabs.
The assessment of a common Semitic character,
ascribed to both Arabs and Jews, reflected
closely the inherited Christian opinion of
Semitic religions. Hegel summed it up in his
monumental and systematized Philosophy of History when
he referred to both Judaism and Islam as
28
“religions of the sublime.” The follower of the
“religion of the sublime” obeyed the sublime
power, that is God, as something outside of
himself or herself. Only Christianity, a
Germanic religion in its essence according to
Hegel, led to truly internalized obedience. Such
obedience is what German philosophers called
freedom. Kant’s notion of the free subject is
one who gives his consent to state authority
because the state’s and the citizen’s political
morality are based on identical principles. The
exact opposite was imagined to be the case in
Jewish and Muslim religion, in the biblical
Jewish commonwealth, and in existing Muslim
states. The Jews’ Jehovah like the Muslims’
29
Allah, is portrayed as a God who rules like an
oriental despot, expecting to be unquestioningly
obeyed in all circumstances.
The imagined difference with Christianity is
expressed through the traditional notion that
the Old Testament is about the Law and the New
is about Love. The Pharisees, Jesus’ greatest
enemies, hold on legalistically to the letter of
the law, not understanding Jesus’ teaching that
what matters is the Spirit. In contemporary news
talk today still, this old prejudice is
reflected in the practice of labeling Israelis
“intransigent” and Muslims “fanatics.” As
Alberto Toscano has showed, fanatics are always
imagined as motivated by complete obedience to a
30
power that is outside and above the state. It is
this that is ultimately at stake in the
distinction between the external obedience of
the Semite and the internalized obedience of the
Germanic Christian. The first responds to an
irrational power greater than the state. The
second gives his consent to the rational power
of the state. In this sense, political Islam is
not only an external enemy but also represents
the notion of obeying not the political
authorities but the religiously defined,
supranational ones. Political Judaism, that is,
Israel, represents to anti-Semites not only a
foreign power to which the local Jews are
obedient, but also a global principle of placing
31
one’s transnational community above the nation
and the nations, just like Muslims are thought
to do in their own lands and of course today,
with immigration, also in ours.
What are the implications of all this for the
conjunction of Jewish and colonial and
postcolonial studies?
I think it is important, first of all, to
make sure we do not lump all colonial and
postcolonial societies together in this as in
other respects. Jews in the long nineteenth
century imagination, including their own,
belonged to the non-western, or if we recall
Santiago’s work, barbaric world via their
association with Arabs and Muslims. In general,
32
the Jewish Question was far more relevant to
Muslims and Muslim societies, especially Arab
ones, than to others.
But whether I am right about that or not, the
more important question is, What is the nature
of the comparisons that can be made between
Jewish subjects and postcolonial ones, and our
methods and theories regarding them? I think
comparisons can be made at three levels:
metaphor, influence, and genealogy.
A typical metaphor that I am sure you’ve
heard is “the Chinese are the Jews of Asia.” The
value of a metaphor is to clarify one example by
comparison to another. It seems to me that
Mufti’s notion that both the Jews of Israel and
33
the Muslims of Pakistan are the result of the
minoritization and resettlement project that
flows out of nationalism is of this nature:
“Pakistanis are the Jews of South Asia.”
Metaphors have the power to stimulate the
imagination and research. By studying the Jewish
Question, one can learn lessons that one can
apply to studying the Partition of India.
I do not read Mufti to have meant that
British policy towards the Jews was literally
applied to British policy to Muslims in India,
which in turn was adopted and adapted by
postcolonial India and Pakistan. I think that
Mufti does suggest that the Jewish Question was
the mother of all minority questions. But the
34
formal parallels between not only the Muslim-
Indian, but the Hungarian, Czech, Finnish,
Irish, German, Armenian, etc. etc. minority
questions and the Jewish Question stem less from
the power of the last-mentioned to influence
policy, than from the very logic of the
definition of the people, as a descent group
with an ideal right to representation through
exclusive territorial sovereignty. When it comes
to the minorities question, if the Jews had not
existed one would not have had to invent them.
The thesis of influence by the Jewish Question
on issues in the postcolony is a fascinating
one. However, I do not see either Mufti or
35
anyone else having demonstrated that there was
such an influence.
That leaves the issue of genealogy, meaning
conditions of possibility. I think it would be
wrong to say that Jewish existence in the West
was the condition of possibility for colonial or
postcolonial representations or policies.
Rather, I would like to think that it was
nationalism and imperialism that were the
conditions of possibility for Jewish, Muslim,
and many other forms of alienation,
minoritization, racialization, and so forth.
Each of these forms has had its own specific
history, but that of the Jews is most closely
and meaningfully related that of the Arabs and
36
Muslims. The lesson, I think, is that Jewish
Studies and colonial and postcolonial studies in
the historical perspective can be beneficially
connected, but mainly through specific case
studies in Muslim Areas such as the Arab Middle
East or Pakistan, and mainly in terms of a
common genealogy rather than direct influence.
Thank you.
37
i This is true even though, usually, the idea is that they had one
before and now have the right to revive it.
