From ‘sexy Semite’ to Semitic ghosts: contemporary art between Arab and Jew

Abstract

ABSTRACT Semites, Semitism, the Semitic, the Semite. We all know the terms: we’ve heard them many times. We know of Semitic languages, we know of growing antisemitism, and we are familiar with book titles about Semites and Semitic cultures. And yet, these terms, these words, these adjectives remain for us today somewhat misty, imprecise and ambiguous in a way they did not seem to be for readers of nineteenth-century philology, theology or travel journals. Who are the Semites? What makes a culture Semitic? These today are questions we find hard to answer. But perhaps the terms belong to the past. Indeed, is there any good reason to return to the Semite? To revive and revisit the concept of Semitism? Should we not just let it go, die, fade into oblivion, together with many other nineteenth-century colonial, imperial and racist terms? Hochberg’s essay attends to these questions by engaging with several artistic projects that return to the figure of the Semite and revive it into current political contexts. Hochberg argues that today, perhaps more than ever, we must remember the Semite and, by the same token, re-remember the Semites: the Arabs and the Jews. This, she suggests, is important because it may be very useful to compare nineteenth-century European discussions of the Semitic mentality to today’s discourse on refugees and immigrants (particularly Muslims), but also because ‘the Semite’ enables us to make historical connections between antisemitism and Islamophobia, as well as between Jews and Muslims/Arabs. These connections are particularly worthwhile in the European, Christian and western context in which Jews and Muslims/Arabs have been more recently positioned against each other, and often played against one another. Finally, to revive the figure of the Semite, or the so-called ‘Semitic bond’ between Jews and Muslims, is not to cling to anachronism and nostalgic fantasies about the past or to romanticize the relationships between these people. In fact, it has little, if anything, to do with the past or history altogether. This ‘rememory’, to borrow Toni Morrison’s term, is not a historical project; rather, it is about returning to the present by rejecting its confining myths.