Difference of a Different Kind. Iris Idelson-Shein

      Introduction

      There is an amusing scene in V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, in which Ralph Singh, a Caribbean immigrant in London, describes his impression of his English landlord, Mr. Shylock: “For Mr. Shylock … I had nothing but admiration. I was not used to the social modes of London or to the physiognomy and complexions of the North, and I thought Mr. Shylock looked distinguished.… He had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear and inclining his head to listen. I thought the gesture was attractive; I copied it. I knew of recent events in Europe; they tormented me; and … I offered Mr. Shylock my fullest, silent compassion.”¹

      Naipaul’s portrayal of the enthusiastic young immigrant, who has his heart set on becoming a true Englishman, is, of course, ripe with irony. But there is also something unsettling in this description; as we, the readers, cannot help but notice that Singh’s object of admiration is not a true Englishman at all, one graced with “the physiognomy and complexions of the North.” Rather, Singh’s landlord is a Jew, and not just any Jew at that, but one named after the archetypical “ugly Jew” of English literature—Shakespeare’s Shylock. Indeed, the man Singh is trying to mimic in order to become an authentic Englishman is in himself a “mimic man.” The irony inherent in the situation reaches its climax toward the end of the paragraph, with Singh’s implied reference to the Shoah. Here, the tables are suddenly turned, and the Jewish landlord’s mimicry assumes center stage, announcing itself most clearly.

      Naipaul’s short episode offers a tantalizing expression of the dilemma inherent in the “Jewish situation” in Europe. Throughout the history of Europe, Jews have occupied a sensitive location at the discursive crossroads of “sameness” and “otherness.” To adapt Homi Bhabha’s terminology, they have often been considered “almost the same, but not quite.” This ambivalence of Jewish ethnicity goes back all the way to the thought of Ḥazal, the ancient Jewish sages. In the canonical text of the Mishnah (the first compendium of rabbinic tradition, c. 200 c.e.), it is noted: “An intense brightness in the German is dark, and the darkness of the Kushite is intense, [but] the Children of Israel are … neither black nor white, but in between” (Mishnah, Negaim 2:1). Over the years, this “in between-ness” of the Jews, with its religious, cultural, political, and historical implications, has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Historians, anthropologists, theologians, and others have dedicated studies to exploring the Jews’ ambivalent status in Europe; their political and social marginalization have been studied rigorously, the Janus-faced and often tormented relationship between Jews and Christians has preoccupied scholars throughout the ages, and the question of Jewish otherness, uniqueness, or difference continues to excite the imagination of many of our own contemporaries.

      In contrast, however, to this scholarly enticement with the question of Jewish-Christian relations, very little attention has been given to the other side of Jewish “otherness,” so to speak. The question of Jewish perceptions and representations of other Others, and their relationships with them, has been virtually neglected by historians. This scholarly tendency to overlook the question of Jewish agency in the history of race conveys a preconception of what race history—indeed, what race—is all about. It is motivated by two dominant historiographical