Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism
by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz
Indiana University Press, 2007
Book reviewed by Abraham Lavender
From HaLapid, Winter 2008
The Colors of Jews discusses a number of topics, but included are some topics of special interest to crypto-Judaic studies. The author begins with the question "Who, what is the Jewish people?" She tells of growing up as an Ashkenazi in Brooklyn where she thought that Jewish was something you were born to, and where Yiddish, cabbage soup, and kasha varnishkes were the Jewish things. The whiteness of her skin and the other Jewish people she knew also was an important part of her perspective. She thought that "you either were or weren't Jewish; it was not something you could become" (p. x). But then, in her thirties, she was living in New Mexico and perceived that "Jews were rare, invisible, or thought to have horns. I began to encounter my own Jewishness" (p. x).
The author is an activist against racism, economic suffering, narrow perspectives of Jewishness, and other issues. She wrote this book with the explicit intent to change some assumptions she saw among many Jews – that Jewishness is only religion, that real Jews are born Jewish, that Jews and Arabs were always enemies and could never be friends, and that life in the diaspora has always been a vale of tears that all Jews aspire to escape (p. xi).
The first chapter of the book is "Are Jews White?" Kaye/Kantrowitz talks forcefully about the negative effects of European racism followed by Christian anti-Semites, and uses the Sephardic conversos as an example: "And the experience of the Sephardic conversos, whose difference came to be seen as more and more racial in their lack of limpieze de sangre (purity of blood) despite their actual or pretended acceptance of Christianity, suggests the increasingly frenetic intertwining of racial and religious bigotry as the modern age unfolds. In many parts of the Islamic world, too, though nothing matched the systematic reach of the Inquisition, crypto-Jews who converted by choice or by force continued to be set apart and persecuted. The accusation of Judaismo (Judaizing) could be levied against someone ‘with no more than one-twentieth of Jewish blood in his or her veins,' a percentage that actually outstrips the Third Reich" (p. 13). The author references The Cross and the Pear Tree by the late Victor Perera (died June 14, 2003, aged 69) who was well-known to, and admired by, many members of the SCJS.
One chapter entitled "Who Is This Stranger?" includes a discussion of Sephardim and Mizrahim. The author quotes Perera's statement that the Sephardi "is still marked by the inner dialogue between the ancestral Jew and the Christian and Arab ‘others' who inhabit [his] psyche. The author reminds readers that it was in Spain that Europe and Africa met, and writes that "What needs to be stressed, repeated, hammered home is the shared Judeo-Arabic culture, the rich cultural flowering and the intimacy" (p. 76) She refers to Perera's statement that the Christian conquest of Iberia and the Inquisition formed "a holocaust stretched over centuries' which included forced conversions, torture, death or expulsion of Muslims and Jews alike" (p. 81). She strongly criticizes the dominant perspective within Jewish Studies which omits or minimizes Sephardic and Mizrahi experiences, even in Ha Shoah. She notes, for example, that Salonika, Macedonia , and Rhodes "were ravaged at a rate topped only by Lithuania , Poland , and Germany ," and that almost no attention is given to the Nazi deportations, concentration camps, and slave labor camps suffered by Jews from Morocco and Tunisia , even as the Muslim king of Morocco tried to protect the Jews (p. 89).
Katz/Kantrowitz states, accurately, that anthologies, performances, booklists, conferences, seminars, and Jewish Studies Programs usually include only Ashkenazi culture, history, and experiences. She argues for "De-Ashkenization" by which she means broadening perspectives to include all Jews. She admires Yiddish and other aspects of Ashkenazi culture, but emphasizes the necessity for a broader perspective in order to give an accurate picture of world Jewry. For example, she reminds readers that "Prominent Sephardic rabbis of the nineteenth and twentieth century reveal more commonly a stance of flexibility even towards Halakkah (Jewish law), emphasizing common sense and the ability to formulate new rulings, and the need to synthesize religion with science and technology, self-defense, secular education, and modern political values such as democracy and solidarity" (p. 83). She notes Zvi Zohar's argument that "Sephardic elasticity mirrors Islamic society, as opposed to the religious fragmentation of the Christian west" (p. 241). The author reports on seven groups that work for a broader perspective of Jewishness. Included is an 8-page section on the Levantine Center , a progressive group in Los Angeles , with discussions about Sephardim, Mizrahim, and Jewish-Palestinian coexistence. The Colors of Jews is a progressive, well-written, and interesting book. For those interested in the potential of a broader perspective, I recommend it.