How to Invent Racism and Antisemitism for Antiquity

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes NOTES 1. There are friendly but absolutely uncritical reviews with titles like Paula Fredriksen's “Beautiful People” in The New Republic Online (21 March 2005), but take, for example, Shelley P. Haley's review in the American Journal of Philology 126 (2005): 451–54 with its accusations against Isaac's fundamental racism concerning black people in past and present: “the lack of any discussion of racism and anti-Semitism as systems of oppression,” “this book adds nothing new or insightful to our understanding of how difference was negotiated in classical antiquity,” etc. Craige Champion (Scholia Reviews 14 [2005]: 10) is lyrical about the existence of this book, but produces a long list of more or less serious and detailed criticism. Although James H. Dee recommends the book politely (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 6 [2004]: 49) he questions many things, among which the tricky notes-policy, the absence of any exploration of the “complex real-world sociohistorical interactions of individuals and groups in specific places and times,” etc. Evin Demirel's honors thesis (2006) Black and White in Ancient Rome: An analysis of Four Influential Books on the Issue of Racism in Antiquity’ (www.uark.edu) prefers in the end the studies of Frank Snowden and Lloyd Thompson as near classics in the field to Isaac's, because it is “difficult to refer to ancient Rome as a racist society.” There were no laws associated with race; blacks were not discriminated because of skin color, while some white-black antagonisms did not exist, etc. Brent Shaw (Journal of Wold History 16 [2005]) does the same as James Dee and this, to my mind, even more radically. The most remarkable is Michael Bakaoukas's article (Anistoriton Journal 9 [2005] sec. E0501) who comes up with opinions like those of Demirel; he stresses that it is not allowed “to read back twentieth-century ideas into ancient Greek texts” and that “ancient Greek racism … never existed.” Later on, however, he accepts Isaac's “proto-racism,” starts writing about Greek “cultural racism,” apparently because he is involved in present quarrels between Greeks and Macedonians! 2. I found it in the first chapter of Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), called “Early Race Theories” with this difference that here Gossett is “comprehensive” by not only referring to Greeks and Romans but also to “fanatic racism … [which] occurred in Israel long before the days of modern racism” (5). Nothing about it in Isaac's book, but the question arises whether Isaac will defend also the thesis that there is a direct link between this Israel and the Shoah? Apart from this, Isaac should apologize in the paperback edition for using an existing title published in 1983. 3. Leon Poliakov, A History of Anti-Semitism (1965; New York: Schocken, 1976), 3–12; Poliakov points also to the fact that Greek authors never mention Jews until the reign of Alexander, although they knew the country very well: “we observe in pagan antiquity none of those collective emotional reactions that would subsequently render the lot of the Jews … in general, the Roman Empire in pagan times knew no ‘state anti-Semitism’ despite the frequency and violence of Jewish insurrections” (11,12). Does Isaac dismiss Poliakov for this outcome (n. 3, p. 440)? An essay on “anti-semitism” in antiquity by the Dutch scholar Hendrik Bolkestein (1877–1942), among the foremost students of the social and economic relations in antiquity (Socialistische Gids 21 [1936]: 152–66), is judged as “lucid” by Isaac (n. 9, p. 442), who correctly discusses its content (n. 10, p. 443) but does not use it. Bolkestein concludes that there is no basis for racism or antisemitism in antiquity and that anti-Jewish measures (at times very strong ones) are mostly not different from those taken against the many kinds of foreign groups; as a source for hatred they must be related to the provocative rabbi-monotheism with its strong isolating effects and off-hand manners within a non-monotheistic world; the large bulk of migrated Jews (later called “diaspora-Jews”) c.q. ex-inhabitants of Palestine, had during many generations no problems whatsoever.