Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalisation

Cathy Gelbin, Sander Gilman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138801646
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317625056
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the impact of current globalization processes on Jewish communities across the globe. The volume explores the extent to which nationalized constructs of Jewish culture and identity still dominate Jewish self-expressions, as well as the discourses about them, in the rapidly globalizing world of the twenty-first century. Its contributions address the ways in which Jewishness is now understood as transcending the old boundaries and ideologies of nation states and their continental reconfigurations, such as Europe or North America, but also as crossing the divides of Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, as well as the confines of Israel and the Diaspora. Which new paradigms of Jewish self- location within the evolving and conflicting global discourses about the nation, race, the Holocaust and other genocides, anti-Semitism, colonialism and postcolonialism, gender and sexual identities open up in the current era of globalisation, and to what extent might transnational notions of Jewishness, such as European-Jewish identity, create new discursive margins and centers? Chapters explore the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on cross-cultural relations between Jews and other racialized groups in the Diaspora, and discuss the ways in which recent discourses such as postcolonialism and transnationalism might relate to global Jewish cultures. The intent of the volume is to begin a process of investigation into twenty-first century Jewish identity.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Review of History.

Introduction: Jewish culture in the age of globalisation

Sander L. Gilman

Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

The categories of the ‘global’ in Jewish culture are a controversial source of discussion. Are these positive or negative ways of seeing ‘Jewish’ difference? The Manchester conference, ‘Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalisation’, in 2008 was an attempt to mirror these discussions and seek new and creative ways of understanding the ‘global’ as a productive category in examining Jewish culture.

In his explanation in 1922 of what constituted ‘ethnicity’, the German sociologist Max Weber claimed that ‘the belief in group affinity, regardless of whether it has any objective foundation, can have important consequences especially for the formation of a political community’.¹ One can add to this statement that this is equally true of constituting a cultural community rather than a political one. Non-Jews have regularly constituted the image and nature of the ‘Jew’ as seen from their perspectives and needs (as Jean-Paul Sartre admirably illustrated in his Anti-Semite and Jew²). It should be of little surprise that Jews today – with multiple national, cultural, linguistic, class and gender identities – desire to imagine that what constitutes their own ‘Jewishness’ is seemingly independent of anti- or philo-Semitic images. Yet it is very clear that today, at least within Jewish Diasporic culture, those images are often framed by the debates about multiculturalism.

Theodor Adorno claimed in Minima Moralia that ‘dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable … the house is past … it is part of morality not to be home in one’s home.’³ And yet the claims of a new Jewish multiculturalism beginning with the twenty-first century are that this rupture has been healed. Jews are now ‘at home in national cultures from Israel to Canada’ as well as ‘global citizens’ in China and beyond.

Jewish cultures existing in the Western world during the last two centuries have been and continue to be read as hyphenated phenomena within a specific national context, such as German-Jewish or American-Jewish culture. Even the creation of the State of Israel as a Jewish State has lead to classifications within Israeli society (from the ultra-orthodox to the secular, from the ‘Arab’ [Mizrachi] to the ‘European’ [Ashkenazi]). Add to this the extensive Israeli Diaspora and the complexity of Jewish identity in the twentieth century has become more rather than less contested.

Even historically, such constructs are undermined by the histories of Jewish expulsion and migration, which brought with them the migration of languages and cultural–religious expressions that were written out of the cultural paradigms of particular nation-states and the dominant Jewish communities within. The Enlightenment’s demand that all human beings be understood as equal was paralleled by the nation-states’ understanding of the need for such universality to be defined in terms of national identity. This conflict, which in the West subsumed religious identity with personal or national identity, shaped Jewish identity of all forms in modernity.

Yet to what extent do such nationalised constructs of Jewish culture and identity still dominate Jewish self-expressions, as well as the discourses about them, in the rapidly globalising world of the twenty-first century? In a world in which Diaspora societies have begun to reshape themselves as part of a super- or non-national identity, the virtual Ummah of contemporary Islam, for example, what has happened to Jewish identity? How is Jewishness now understood as transcending the old boundaries and ideologies of nation-states or their continental reconfigurations, such as Europe or North America, but also as crossing the divides of Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, as well as the confines of Israel and the Diaspora? In a post-Zionist world where one of the newest and most substantial Diaspora community is that of Israelis in the new globalised culture, is ‘being Jewish’ suddenly something that can reach beyond the older models of Diasporic integration or nationalism? Which new paradigms of Jewish self-location within the evolving and conflicting global discourses about the nation, race, the Holocaust and other genocides, anti-Semitism, colonialism and post-colonialism, gender and sexual identities does the globalisation of Jewish cultures open up, and to what extent might transnational notions of Jewishness, such as European-Jewish identity, create new discursive margins and centres? Is there a possibility that a ‘virtual makom (Jewish space)’ might constitute itself?

The terms themselves are constituent of the compromise formations necessary to comprehend ‘Jewish’ culture in a self-consciously multicultural world. Thus the term ‘Arab’ (and ‘Persian’) Jews has its own history. ‘Jewish Arabian’ tribes were defeated by Islam in the 620s and early 630s and their medieval relics were the Jews of Khaibar or refugees such as those from the city of Dar‘a in Transjordan and perhaps the city of Hit in Mesopotamia. To modern Iraqi Jews, ‘Hitis’ and ‘Jews of Khaibar’ meant the Karaites, which perhaps confirms Samuel Goitein’s general hypothesis about proto-Karaism among Arabian Jews. Iraqi Jews fiercely dislike Hiti Jews, or more exactly, the Karaite community that used to live in Hit until 1950. ‘Hiti’ is considered synonymous, to modern Iraqi Jews with the despised ‘Yehud Khebar’ that is, the ‘Yahud Khaibar’ of northern Arabia are identified with those who went to Hit. Yet medieval Jews from the Khaibar region had resort to the Gaonate. When Yassir Arafat’s brother held a Kuwaiti-funded chair in the United Kingdom, he focused his research on the Jewish tribes defeated in Arabia, as this provided a history of ‘Arab’–‘Jewish’ conflict as though it was perennial. The ‘Bachutzim’ communities of Tunisia were ‘Arabs’, as perceived by the other Tunisian Jews, that is, the regular Twansa, and the Gorna (the latter being of Leghorn extraction). ‘Arab Jews’ are one of the two self-perceived subdivisions of Jews in Hilla, Iraq, in modern times. A brief experimentation with ‘Arab Jewish’ identity in the 1920s and 1930s was undertaken to accommodate Arab sovereign states. Yet to both Jews and Muslims, it was artificial. Jews felt Iraqi, or Egyptian, and so forth, but not Arab, and Arabs in turn used to be bound to what in Europe was an either pre-modern or a far-Right notion, by which nations are defined by religion, and vice versa (for example, Arabs and Turks are Muslims, and to this very day, in secularist but nationalist Turkey, informal prejudice blocking promotion is based on that, whereas in Ottoman Constantinople Jews could attain high rank from the 1870s, such as medical officer in the army).

We are focusing in this volume on twenty-first century global Jewish culture and identity as positioned vis-à-vis other world religious cultures, such as Christianity and Islam, as well as other minoritised ethnic and cultural groups in the Diaspora. Yet it is clear that the present collection is not ‘global’ in its reach into the Diaspora. The Sephardim and Mizrahim are not represented in this volume. While these areas were present in the papers read at our conference, their authors were unable to prepare them for inclusion in the present volume. It is clear that if one of the major foci of a project on globalised Jewry is the interface with the ‘Abrahamic’ religions then these arenas demand further and more comprehensive study. It is the seeming closeness of these ‘Abrahamic’ religions and their joint history that draws attention to the real or imagined differences to the majority religion and its new form: secular society. ‘The “Abrahamic” religions’ is the newest politically correct phrase: the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ was the catchword for common aspects shared between Judaism and Christianity after the Holocaust made this an acceptable notion; ‘the Abrahamic religions’ is the new buzzword including Islam into the Judeo-Christian fold that has become current only after 9/11. Both phases attempt to defuse the clearly Christian aspects of modern Western secular society by expanding it, but, of course, only reemphasise it. Here Jonathan Sacks’ notion of difference is helpful: in creating categories that elide difference, that stress superficial similarities one believes that one is bridging ‘differences’.⁴ Actually, one is submerging them.

The closeness of Christianity to Judaism and Islam results in what Sigmund Freud called the ‘narcissism of minor differences’. Those differences are heightened in this secular society, which is rooted in the mindset and often the attitudes, beliefs, social mores, civic practices of the religious community – in Western Europe – Christianity. Thus in Western Europe there is a radical secularisation of religious institutions in the course of the nineteenth century. The new minority is promised a wide range of civil rights – including those of freedom of religion – if only they adhere to the standards of civilised behaviour as defined by the secular society. This is rooted in the desire to make sure that that society with its masked religious assumptions redefines the minorities’ religious practice or ‘secularises’ a religious minority into an ‘ethnic’ one. The standards of ‘civilised behaviour’ are, for the most part, secularised versions of the claims of Christianity (either in its Catholic or Protestant forms) for appropriate behaviour. Here the claims are little different than the colonial belief in a civilising mission. Secularisation may be opposed to ‘religion’ but when this opposition is examined, as we find in terms of the warfare between ‘theology’ and ‘science’ (as in the title of a major book of 1896 by the former US ambassador in Berlin, Andrew Dickson White). ‘Theology’ is a specific religious claim or structure rather than religious belief itself. Thus Jewish and Islamic claims as well as those from certain directions of Christian belief (Catholic or Puritan from the perspective of the liberal Andrew Dickson White) are seen as in need of modification. What that modification is and how it is to be accomplished is at the core of our question.

We can now look at the experiences within the various strands of Jewish religious (and therefore social) ritual practice from the late eighteenth century (which marked the beginning of civil emancipation) that parallel those now confronting Diaspora Islam in ‘secular’ Western Europe. The similarities are striking: a religious minority enters into a self-described secular (or secularising) society which is Christian in its rhetoric and presuppositions and which perceives a ‘special relationship’ with this minority. The co-territorial society sees this as an act of aggression. This minority speaks a different secular language but also has yet a different religious language. This is odd in countries that have a national language and (in some) a religious language but not a secular language spoken by a religious minority as well as a ritual. Religious schools that teach in the languages associated with a religious group are seen as sources of corruption and illness. Religious rites are practised that seem an abomination to the majority ‘host’ culture: unlike the secular majority these religious communities practise the mutilation of children’s bodies (infant male circumcision, and, for some Muslims, infant female genital cutting); the suppression of the rights of women (lack of women’s traditional education; a secondary role in religious practice; arranged marriages; honour killings) barbaric torture of animals (the cutting of the throats of unstunned animals allowing them to bleed to death); disrespect for the dead through too-rapid burial; ritual excess (in the case of the Jews, drunkenness at Purim; feasting during Ramadan in the case of the Muslims); ostentatious clothing that signals religious affiliation and has ritual significance (from women’s hair covering such as the Muslim hijab to Jewish sheitels to men’s hats such as the Eastern European Jewish shtremil or the Arab kafiyya); and centrally relating all of these practices: a belief in the divine ‘chosenness’ of the group in contrast to all others. The demonisation of aspects of religious practice has its roots in what civil society will tolerate and what it will not, what it considers to be decorous and what is unacceptable as a social practice. Why it will not tolerate something is, of course, central to the story. Thus Alan Dundes argued 20 years ago that the anxiety about meanings associated with the consumption of the body and blood of Christ in the Christian Mass shaped the fantasy of the Jews as slaughtering Christian children for their blood.⁵ But it is equally present in the anger in secular Europe directed at Jewish ritual practices such as ritual slaughter with its obligatory bloodletting.

One of the most striking similarities of the process of integration into Western secular society is the gradual elision of the national differences among the various groups. Muslims in Western Europe represent multiple national traditions (South Asian in the UK, North African in France and Spain, Moroccan and ‘Moluccan’ [Indonesian] in the Netherlands, Turkish in Germany). But so did the Jews in Western Europe who came out of ghettos in France and the Rhineland, from the rural reaches of Bavaria and Hungary, who moved from those parts of ‘Eastern Europe’ – Poland, the eastern Marches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – which became part of the West and from the fringes of empire to the centre. To this one can add the Sephardi Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who settled in areas from Britain (introducing fish and chips) to the fringes of the Austrian Empire. The standard image of the Jews in eighteenth-century British caricature was the Maltese Jew in his oriental turban. By the nineteenth century it was that of Lord Rothschild in formal wear receiving the Prince of Wales at his daughter’s wedding in a London synagogue.⁶ Religious identity (as the Jew or the Muslim) replaced national identity – by then few (except the anti-Semites) remembered that the Rothschilds were a Frankfurt family that escaped the Yiddish-speaking ghetto. The ‘Jews’ are everywhere and all alike; Muslims seem to be everywhere and are becoming ‘all alike’. Even ritual differences and theological antagonism seem to be diminished in the Diaspora where the notion of a Muslim Ummah (or community) seems to be realised. It is the ideal state, to quote Talal Asad, of ‘being able to live as autonomous individuals in a collective life that exists beyond national borders’. But this too has its pitfalls, as the ‘Jewish template’ shows.

Now for Jews in those lands that will become Germany, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in France, and in those lands that will become Great Britain, the stories are all different: different forms of Christianity, different expectations as to the meaning of citizenship. Different notions of secularisation all present slightly different variations on the theme of: what do you have to give up to become a true citizen? Do you merely have to give up your secular language (Western and E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Jewish culture in the age of globalisation
• 2. Towards the global shtetl: golem texts in the new millennium
• 3. The Jew’s passage to India: Desai, Rushdie and globalised culture
• 4. The emergence of alternative Jewish tourism
• 5. Globalisation, anti-globalisation and the Jewish ‘question’
• 6. Jewish law in the age of globalisation: conceptual impacts, multi-player interaction and halachic re-organisation of the Jewish ‘community’
• 7. Holocaust memory in the twenty-first century: between national reshaping and globalisation
• 8. Living local: some remarks on the creation of social groups of young Jews in present-day London
• 9. Jewish cultures, identities and contingencies: reflections from the South African experience
• 10. Samba and Shoah: ethnic, religious and social diversity in Brazil
• 11. The third way: German–Russian–European Jewish identity in a global Jewish world
• 12. Mikvah in Beijing
• 13. Aspects of Italy’s Jewish experience, as shaped by local and global factors
• Index