Abstract
The motif of secret, crypto-Judaism has a history that reaches further back into the theological tradition. It no doubt structurally arises from or closely related to the epistemo-political challenges posed by the unworldliness and absolutely inner being of faith, which in the political or inter-subjective dimension immediately raises the question of evidence. The question of evidence, i.e., for the invisible faith, becomes acute in the case of conversion, where the basic premise is the initial absence of faith. Paradoxically, conversion is consequently the establishment of the convert’s fundamental faithlessness, of her originally non-Christian element, which the convert, in the very same act of conversion, claims no longer exists. It is easy to see the conceptual constellation that would present the convert as structural deception. At the Iberian threshold of modernity, in the face of mass Jewish conversion and assimilation, this paradox appeared in the image of the “new Christians”, the marranos, structurally suspected to be crypto-Jews, to the effect that the ultimate evidence of faith was a certificate of limpieza de sangre, “purity of blood”. This paper will follow the historian Yosef HayimYerushalmi in tracing the conceptual link between the Inquisition’s notion of crypto-Jews and the racialized figure of the Jew in modern anti-Semitism.
Highlights
The motif of secret, crypto-Judaism has a history that reaches further back into the theological tradition
The question of evidence, i.e., for the inner and externally, inter-subjectively invisible faith, becomes acute in the case of conversion, where the basic premise is the initial absence of faith
It is easy to see the conceptual constellation that would lead to presenting the convert as a structural deception
Summary
My analysis focuses on the historical discourse that can be most properly referred to as “anti-Semitism”. Anti-Semitic discourse is defined by a fundamental skepsis regarding the precise nature and significance of the Jewish event of modernity In this discourse, the emancipation and assimilation of the Jews, rather than signifying the ultimate triumph of human progress and civilization, signifies its ultimate downfall. Anti-Semites”, in the same year that Marr’s book was published, 1879, understood “Semitism” to designate a Jewish mindset, expressed in Jewish religion, to the exclusion of non religious “Jewish Germans”.15 In this sense, the term “anti-Semitism”, with its “appearance of scientificity”, served to designate the spirit of Judaism, in contrast to Jewish being merely in the flesh. Whereas Marx, after the polemic with Bauer “On the Jewish Question”, will scarcely ever again write about “Jews”, will replace the theological categories of Christians and Jews with socio-economico-political categories such as Bourgeois and Proletariats, Jews—and not “Semites”—are the constant center of anti-Semitism. Race is the negative of Spirit: it is the negative a-historical ground of history, which is nothing but the history of race’s negation in the gradual “progress of spiritualism”.18
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