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on the other. The colonial paradigm presupposes that there exists an inherent link between the emergence of race and the histories of colonialism and slavery. According to this formulation, the modern concept of race was invented sometime during the early modern period as a means to justify colonial expansion and plantation slavery. It was then imported into Europe, where it was subsequently applied to various groups that were not enslaved, such as the Jews, the Sami, or the Roma.2 The outcome of this kind of understanding of the history of race is a tendency to downplay or overlook the intense preoccupation with questions of difference in non-colonial countries, or amongst non-hegemonic groups, such as women or Jews. The past few decades, however, have witnessed a growing dissatisfaction with this scholarly approach. A large corpus of studies has shown that the emergence of racist thought was closely linked to the emergence of other types of biological determinism, such as modern conceptions of gender and childhood. Indeed, racist imagery was often used in order to discuss precisely these other identity groups, and not necessarily in order to convey colonialist messages.3 In light of this new historiographical trend, more and more research has been dedicated to the study of racial imagery in non-colonialist countries.4 In addition, scholars have also begun to devote attention to the uses and representations of race amongst non-hegemonic groups, and particularly amongst women.5 However, these new historiographical trends have somehow overlooked the Jews. Only a handful of studies have been dedicated to the exploration of Jewish attitudes toward race in early modern Europe, and, of these, none have devoted significant attention to the long eighteenth century (as the period between 1660 and 1830 is often called), which is widely considered a formative period in the history of race.
But, of course, Jews have never really been excluded from the history of race. Quite the contrary: they are widely considered to be some of the primary victims of racialist or racist thought. Numerous studies have attempted to unravel the history of antisemitism, of racist or proto-racist attitudes and practices toward Jews. These studies focus on different periods and regions, and offer a wide variety of perspectives and methods, and yet they all seem to share the assumption that in regard to the history of race, Jews are always passive objects of racialist thought and hardly ever its subjects. The reasons for this one-dimensional portrayal of Jews by historians of racial discourse are manifold. Amongst other considerations, they have to do with the traditional distinction between “Jewish” and “general” histories, and the tendency exhibited by scholars of European history to view European Jewish history as “somebody else’s business,” as it were, an issue to be dealt with by scholars of Jewish history. Clearly, there is also a political aspect to the reluctance to study Jews as active agents in the history of race, which has to do with the understanding of Jewish history as a history of persecution in Diaspora and subsequent liberation in the land of Israel. This meta-narrative of Jewish history dictates an image of the Jews as a persecuted minority that is so strong it completely overshadows other possible images.
This, then, is the lacuna the present book aims to fill. My fundamental premise throughout this study has been that, contrary to their traditional portrayal as mere objects of racialist discourse, European Jews’ attitudes toward non-European peoples offer a compelling platform for the study of the history of race in general and in the eighteenth century in particular. Indeed, from their unique vantage point at the central nervous system of European identity, eighteenth-century Jews afford an invaluable view into the ways in which, upon the threshold of modernity, new religious, cultural, and racial identities were imagined and formed. In what follows, then, I attempt to unfold the ways in which those “intimate Others,” the Jews, who were the objects of anthropological scrutiny, internalized, adapted, and revised the emerging modern discourse of difference to meet their own ends, and the various roles this discourse played in their perception of the “exotic Other,” the “hegemonic Other,” and the construction of their own identity. Were European Jews, indeed, “chameleons”—as claimed by Dutch philosopher Isaac de Pinto—who merely assumed the philosophy, culture, and values of their surrounding environments?6 Were they simply passive recipients of the dominant discourse on identity and alterity, or did they articulate their own unique notions of difference, ethnicity, race, and selfhood?
Of the few studies that have addressed the question of Jewish representations of non-Europeans, almost all have focused on the relationships between Jews and Blacks from ancient times and into the modern period.7 The vast majority of these studies view Jewish attitudes toward race through a colonialist prism, and ignore such fundamental questions as the connection between notions of gender and race; the Jewish uses of non-European peoples as a means for self-reflection; or the widespread Jewish tendency to utilize the image of the non-European as a means to discuss Jewish-Christian relations. The ensuing result is a small corpus of studies focused almost exclusively on colonial Jews, while ignoring European Jews in general and Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of Western, Eastern, or Central European descent) in particular.
An important exception is Jonathan Schorsch’s 2004 Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World. In this seminal work, Schorsch exhibits a keen awareness of the introspective aspect of Jewish discourse on the colonial Other. Indeed, one of the book’s primary arguments is that throughout the early modern period, “Blacks served Jewish authors … as a rhetorical foil against which their own whiteness shone forth.”8 And yet, unavoidably perhaps, Schorsch’s ambitious study, which covers a period of 350 years, has a certain ahistorical quality to it. This is most clearly expressed in the author’s characterization of Jewish (and, for that matter, general) discourse on Blacks as almost unchanging throughout the period, a discourse marked by “a remarkable stasis.”9 I would suggest, however, that the static nature of early modern racialism identified by Schorsch is an outcome of the choice to focus on the issue of skin color—a tendency shared by the vast majority of researchers in the field of Jewish racial thought.10 In fact, it is difficult to see why previous scholarship has focused almost exclusively on Jewish attitudes toward Blacks when most early modern Jewish texts do little to discriminate between Blacks and other non-European peoples, who are most often lumped together under the highly ambiguous term “savages.” The term was something of a floating signifier in eighteenth-century literature, and like so many other eighteenth-century terms, it is virtually impossible to pin down. Contemporaries often used it to denote Native Americans, Africans, South-Sea Islanders, at times even Chinese or Jews (particularly, East European Jews). Still, notwithstanding its ambiguities, savagery was the most basic category of eighteenth-century anthropology.
The scholarly focus on Jewish-Black relations appears therefore to be an anachronism, a symptom perhaps of what Roxann Wheeler has diagnosed as “our current preoccupation with chromatism,” which in much contemporary research “is reproduced rather than challenged by historical difference.”11 And yet, as I demonstrate throughout the present study, at least up until the late eighteenth century, skin color did not play a significant role in European Jews’ depictions of other peoples. In fact, most eighteenth-century Ashkenazi writings on “exotic peoples” tended to associate the physical appearance and cultural practices of these peoples with the different climates in which they lived, or with their different nutritional practices. Accordingly, in most cases the opposition between Jews and Christians on the one hand, and non-European peoples on the other, was established not by turning to skin color or other biological traits, but rather by addressing cultural and religious differences. Cannibalism, nudity, homosexuality, infanticide, atheism, lack of technology or manners, polygamy, and other cultural characteristics served as prime markers of difference for Jews and Christians alike. It was only later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, that these contingencies were to be gradually replaced by other, more essentialist notions of difference, most notably skin color.12 Indeed, the central thesis of the present study is that something did change—and change radically—in the ways in which Ashkenazi Jews understood difference during the early modern period.
Throughout the book, I ask two fundamental questions concerning this change. First, I attempt to expose the contours of the change itself, and tackle the ways in which it affected the uses and representations of race in Jewish discourse over the long eighteenth century. Second, I review how these Jewish uses and representations of race correspond with racial discourse in non-Jewish thought during the same period. These questions are answered in four separate chapters of