Ghosted: Jewishness and the Haunted Hegemony of Racial Modernity

Abstract

In this article, I introduce affect as a theoretical paradigm for describing and understanding the logic of racialization by focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century discourses of religion, Orientalism, and civic equality, and the specific case of Jewish racialization. Describing racialization primarily in affective terms, I focus on the case of Jewish “racial affect”—the unseen circulation of feelings about Jews, about what Jewishness makes Europeans feel—as a spectral and haunted discourse of European racial modernity. I suggest that Jewish racial affect can help illuminate how racialization and racial formation, more generally, form “affective economies” that help the idealized citizen-subject of national identities orient themselves, feeling their way past those negative carriers of racial impurity and disgust and securing borders and banners in the name of their own likeness. Thus, the spectral figure of the Jew provides a figure of a living death (to conjure Leon Pinsker’s description), an undead past that continues to haunt an increasingly secular modernity in which race organizes presence in order to mark religion as a necessary exclusion. Focusing on the negative affects attributed to Jews in the Enlightenment discourse of “civic improvement,” the imagined role of the “Semite” in Orientalist literature, and the anxiety triggered by Jewish persistence in historical exile, I outline the spectral role of the Jew in the shifting discourse of religion and secular historical thought in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.