An Imperial Entanglement: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Colonialism (original) (raw)

2018, The American Historical Review

Abstract

Arendt argued that the rise of empires "would have necessitated the invention of racism" had it not already existed. Almost thirty years later, in Orientalism, Edward Said described his subject as the "strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism" and its "Islamic branch." 1 For all the attention that both books have received, scholars of anti-Semitism have largely ignored the point where Arendt's and Said's remarks converge: the complex historical relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism, referred to here as Islamophobia, and the manner in which colonialism has proven crucial to their interwoven development. 2 Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and colonialism have rarely been treated in concert by scholars, especially historians. 3 I would like to thank Maud Mandel for inviting me to Brown University in 2013 to deliver a lecture on the topic of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and colonialism, which led me to begin considering systematically many of the issues explored here. I benefited greatly from feedback at that lecture, as well as from discussion at a symposium on the topic where I participated: "Muslims and Jews: Challenging the Dynamics of Hate," Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, October 5-7, 2014. Comments by colleagues on previous drafts have done much to sharpen and clarify my thinking. I would particularly like to thank James Renton, Maud Mandel, Gil Anidjar, Sharon Vance, the anonymous readers for the AHR and the journal's editor, and most of all, the indefatigable Jonathan Judaken, whose careful and incisive comments on numerous aspects and versions of the essay improved it greatly. I alone am responsible for any errors that remain.

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References (16)

  1. Here I draw upon related arguments about the tensions of empire for France in World War I in Rich- ard S. Fogarty, Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (Baltimore, 2008).
  2. Eugen Weber uses this phrase in Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (London, 1977), 298. The book remains the fundamental work on nation-building in the Third Republic and the army's role therein. 62 For the career of Dreyfus in the French military in a much wider context of numerous Jewish offi- cers, see Derek J. Penslar, Jews and the Military: A History (Princeton, N.J., 2013), chap. 3. 63 Even Maurice Barrès, an ardent anti-Dreyfusard who had spoken of Dreyfus in viciously anti- Semitic terms, now included Jews among the "spiritual families of France." Barrès, Les diverses familles spirituelles de la France (Paris, 1917). The chapters of the book originally appeared as columns in the Echo de Paris. 64 On the anti-Semitic wave against Russians in 1915, see Rosenberg, Policing Paris, 45-46; for shirk- ing accusations and violence against Tunisian Jews, see Philippe-E. Landau, "Les juifs de Tunisie et la grande guerre," Archives juives 32, no. 1 (1999): 40-52, here 44-48. Regarding anti-Semitic publications during the war, see Landau, Les juifs de France et la grande guerre: Un patriotisme républicain, 1914- 1941 (Paris, 2000), 67-77. 65 More than a quarter-million were from Algeria. For the overall figure of soldiers and laborers, see Ty- ler Stovall, "The Color Line behind the Lines: Racial Violence in France during the Great War," American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 737-769, here 741-742, 766. Among soldiers, 173,000 were Algerian, 50,000 Tunisian, and 37,000 Moroccan. Pascal Le Pautremat, La politique musulmane de la France au XX e siècle: De l'hexagone aux terres d'islam-Espoirs, réussites, échecs (Paris, 2003), 146, 173. Of 132,321 total North African Muslim laborers in France in the course of the war, 78,056 were Al- gerian, 35,506 Moroccan, and 18,249 Tunisian. Benjamin Stora, Ils venaient d'Algérie: L'immigration algérienne en France (1912-1992) (Paris, 1992), 14. 66 The concern was particularly acute in the face of repeated calls to jihad by the Ottoman sultan. On Muslim clerics and Quran distribution, see Gilbert Meynier, L'Algérie révelée, la guerre de 1914-1918 et le premier quart du siècle (Geneva, 1981), 438-440, 455; Fogarty, Race and War in France, 187-189.
  3. For Muslim food, see Le Pautremat, La politique musulmane de la France au XX e siècle, 148, 153-154;
  4. Meynier, L'Algérie révélée, 455-456. sions that erupted in the violence of August 1934, the period's greatest Muslim-Jewish altercation on French soil, which left twenty-five Jews and three Muslims dead. Regarding the periodic interwar incite- ment in Constantine, see Joshua Cole, "Constantine before the Riots of August 1934: Civil Status, Anti- Semitism, and the Politics of Assimilation in Interwar French Algeria," Journal of North African Studies 17, no. 5 (2012): 839-861. On the riots of 1934, see especially Charles-Robert Ageron, "Une émeute anti- juive à Constantine (août 1934)," Revue de l'Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, no. 13-14 (1973): 23-40; and Joshua Cole, "Antisémitisme et situation coloniale pendant l'entre-deux-guerres en Algérie: Les émeutes antijuives de Constantine (août 1934)," Vingtième siècle 4, no. 108 (2010): 3-23.
  5. Robert Attal, Les émeutes de Constantine: 5 août 1934 (Paris, 2002), is a valuable history, sourcebook, and memoir. More broadly, for far right parties such as the PPF and the smaller Solidarité française (SF), recruitment efforts often laden with anti-Semitism yielded perhaps 100 Muslim shock troops each, and in the case of the CF's Algerian branch, may have produced a membership as much as 10 percent Muslim. For figures and efforts by the PPF and the SF, see Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933-1939 (New Haven, Conn., 1995), 61, 65-66, 220; for the CF, see Sean Kennedy, Reconciling France against Democracy: The Croix de Feu and the Parti Social Français, 1927-1945 (Montreal, 2007), 70, 90. With regard to anti-communism, far right activists highlighted Bolsheviks' alleged attacks on mosques in the Soviet Union, and spoke sometimes of shared values between Christian and Islamic civilizations in the face of the communist threat. See Kalman, French Colonial Fascism, 156-171, espe- cially 160.
  6. Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars over Cultural Identity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992).
  7. Indeed, contemporary thinkers such as Charles Maurras were heir to the tradition of a certain mea- sure of Islamophilia alongside their virulent anti-Semitism. See Birnbaum, "La France aux Français," chap. 10. 82 For much more on the divergent experiences and interrelations of Muslims and Jews in France dur- ing World War II, see Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood, chap. 3. For a somewhat different view of Mus- lims that emphasizes more the racialization of their bodies and less their agency at this time, see Davidson, Only Muslim, chap. 4.
  8. Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Riots and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca, N.Y., forthcoming 2019). I am grateful to the author for sharing the manuscript with me in its pre- publication version. Cole not only has uncovered tantalizing hints of El Maadi's involvement in the riots, but also offers the most thorough understanding of his prewar political activities.
  9. El Maadi's far right activities in the late 1930s included founding the group Algérie français, joining Charles Maurras's Action française, and taking part in the Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire, or "Cagoule," which stockpiled weapons, assassinated leftists, and planned a coup d'état against the French Front populaire. During the Occupation, through his own political party, the Comité musulman de l'Afrique du Nord, and its newspaper Er Rachid, as well as other propaganda channels, he worked ceaselessly to recruit Muslims to pro-German parties and militias. For more on El Maadi's wartime biography, see Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood, 133-135. A detailed firsthand account of his collaborationist activity can be found in Archives de la préfecture de police [hereafter APP], Paris, BA 2335, report of July 26, 1945. 85
  10. Mohamed El Maadi, L'Afrique du Nord, terre d'histoire (Paris, 1943). While 1943 was the copyright date, it actually appeared only in 1944. 86 Ibid., 102, 113, 128, 130.
  11. See Renton, "The End of the Semites." I am indebted to the author for bringing this issue in El Maadi's writing to my attention. 89 What became the prevalent discourse among the anticolonial nationalists of Messali Hadj's Parti du peuple algérien (PPA) described all Algerian inhabitants, both Arab and Berber, as part of a glorious Arab Islamic civilization. In this framework, the historical connection between Arabicity and Islamic military and intellectual glory became a crucial counterpoint to European claims of civilizational superiority. See Rabah Aissaoui, Immigration and National Identity: North African Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France (London, 2009), pt. 1. Meanwhile, in the narrative of historians such as Tawfiq al- Madani, part of the Salafi reformist circles around the Association des ulamas musulmans algériens, the Is- lamic conquests of the seventh century C.E. fused the Arabs and the Berbers into a single glorious Algerian nation. According to such accounts, Arabs had completed the civilizing of Berbers centuries earlier; thus group identity became frozen in time, and any modern claims to distinctive Berber identity became delegi- timized.
  12. See James McDougall, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge, 2006), es- pecially 78-81, 153-177, 190-205.
  13. Cole, Lethal Provocation, treats the possible significance of this claim. El Maadi's proud use of this word, a Russian term generally used by Jews to refer to acts of European anti-Semitism, is itself highly re- vealing. Regarding the development of the term "pogrom" as a narrative for anti-Semitic violence, see John D. Klier, "The Pogrom Paradigm in Russian History," in John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, 1992), 13-38. In the case of the Constantine riots, Jews themselves often used the term, but of course highly critically. Regarding compet- ing narratives of the riots, including the significance of framing them as a pogrom, see Cole, "Antisémi- tisme et situation coloniale pendant l'entre-deux-guerres en Algérie"; Ethan Katz, "Between Emancipation and Persecution: Algerian Jewish Memory in the longue durée (1930-1970)," Journal of North African Studies 17, no. 5 (2012): 793-820.
  14. El Maadi, L'Afrique du Nord, 141. 92 The figure for the book's print run comes from its copyright page. 93 For membership figures, see APP, BA 1954, report of November 8, 1943; earlier that year, Er Rachid gave a figure of 10,000 members. "Le chef Mohamed El Maadi," Er Rachid, January 1943. The seemingly inflated circulation figure comes from APP, BA 2335, report on Er Rachid of August 14, 1944. In a small notice in its issue of June 21, 1944, the newspaper itself reported 30,000 weekly readers. 94 For a careful examination of Muslim collaboration and its extent and motivations, see Katz, The Bur- dens of Brotherhood, chap. 3. 95 Worthy starting points can be found in recent scholarship in each of these areas. The literature on Jews and Arabs in British Palestine is vast. Renton, "The End of the Semites," is notable for its focus pre- cisely on the shifting relationship between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. For Russia, see Robert D. Crews, "Fear and Loathing in the Russian Empire," in Renton and Gidley, Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 79-98; Crews, "Islamic Law, Imperial Order: Muslims, Jews, and the Russian State," Ab Impe- rio, no. 3 (2004): 467-490. On Nazi Germany, see especially David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany's War (Cambridge, Mass., 2014);
  15. Marc David Baer, "Muslim Encounters with Nazism and the Holocaust: The Ahmadi of Berlin and Jewish Convert to Islam Hugo Marcus," American Historical Review 120, no.
  16. February 2015): 140-171. On postwar Germany, see Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham, N.C., 2008).