Carnal Israel
Spengler writes in response to the recent British court case over defining a Jew:
Judaism certainly has nothing to do with "scientific racism" of the Gobineau variety. The fact that, according to religious authorities, a child born of a Jewish mother is fully Jewish while a child born of a Jewish father is not Jewish at all proves this disconnect. Converts to Judaism are also fully Jewish from a theological standpoint. "Half-Jewish" is a modern racial category, and counter to the "all or nothing" traditional Jewish self-understanding.
Yet Spengler himself, by extolling "DNA evidence" in support of Jewish claims of literal descent from Abraham, implicitly points to the widespread modern acceptance of Jewishness as indeed a racial (or ethnic) category. Of course, as Spengler mentions, there are black Jews. Yet if all Jews were black, and thus obviously of non-Semitic descent, Jewish claims to the land of Israel would be taken much less seriously - including by secular Jews. An inchoate notion of race does indeed partially define modern Jewish identity, and to deny this is disingenuous.
Controversies of the kind raised by the British court system will only multiply in the secular Protestantly-correct world. Jews should either conform to that world by accepting a distinction between ethnic Israelites and religious Jews; or challenge it openly instead of arguing that Judaism is Christianity lite. "Judaism has nothing to do with race, but-" is a weak response. "Judaism does not accept the Christian-Platonist bifurcation between spirit and flesh, and that does not make it ipso facto racism" is a better one. The revolutionary potential of Judaism is precisely to offer an alternative to both the Christian-liberal "man is nothing but subjectivity" and the Nazi-determinist "man is nothing but bloodline." Carnal Israel is spiritual Israel, even if it's prone to forgetting.
Judaism has nothing to do with race–there are Jews of every race–but it does have to do with family. Jews are members of Abraham’s family. Not only tradition, but a great deal of DNA evidence support this claim. To insist that Jews adopt the criterion of “belief” for membership is to rule that God must act in accordance with a human court’s notion of the permissible range of God’s behavior. No wonder the Reform Jews and the British Humanist Association support this.
Judaism certainly has nothing to do with "scientific racism" of the Gobineau variety. The fact that, according to religious authorities, a child born of a Jewish mother is fully Jewish while a child born of a Jewish father is not Jewish at all proves this disconnect. Converts to Judaism are also fully Jewish from a theological standpoint. "Half-Jewish" is a modern racial category, and counter to the "all or nothing" traditional Jewish self-understanding.
Yet Spengler himself, by extolling "DNA evidence" in support of Jewish claims of literal descent from Abraham, implicitly points to the widespread modern acceptance of Jewishness as indeed a racial (or ethnic) category. Of course, as Spengler mentions, there are black Jews. Yet if all Jews were black, and thus obviously of non-Semitic descent, Jewish claims to the land of Israel would be taken much less seriously - including by secular Jews. An inchoate notion of race does indeed partially define modern Jewish identity, and to deny this is disingenuous.
Controversies of the kind raised by the British court system will only multiply in the secular Protestantly-correct world. Jews should either conform to that world by accepting a distinction between ethnic Israelites and religious Jews; or challenge it openly instead of arguing that Judaism is Christianity lite. "Judaism has nothing to do with race, but-" is a weak response. "Judaism does not accept the Christian-Platonist bifurcation between spirit and flesh, and that does not make it ipso facto racism" is a better one. The revolutionary potential of Judaism is precisely to offer an alternative to both the Christian-liberal "man is nothing but subjectivity" and the Nazi-determinist "man is nothing but bloodline." Carnal Israel is spiritual Israel, even if it's prone to forgetting.
Comments
Post a Comment