Anti-semitic violence as reenactment: An essay in cultural history

Abstract

At the turn of the century, circa 1900, the art historian Aby Warburg became interested in the atavistic—how over long stretches of time the seemingly irrational persisted and reemerged in new forms in the modern era. Ritual murder accusations provided a prominent example, and these examples, the article argues, were at the heart of his own conception of cultural history. Using Warburg as a starting point, the article suggests that we have yet to develop a fully articulated cultural history of anti-Semitic violence, and that our explanations remain bound to immediate context and to contemporary politics. This is certainly the case with Shulamit Volkov's famous concept of ‘anti-Semitism as cultural code,’ which lacks sufficiently sharp tools to understand how the long history of anti-Semitism, entangled as it was in Christian – Jewish relations, continued to shape anti-Semitic violence in the late nineteenth century. J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, by contrast, allows us to consider both the synchronic dimension of anti-Semitic violence, and its connection to the diachronic, or long-term. This approach also has important implications for our understanding of hate speech more generally.