Reviewed by: Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture by Dorian Bell Nancy Fitch Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture. By Dorian Bell. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 384 pages. $39.95 (paper). Dorian Bell’s Globalizing Race: Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture is a theoretically informed book that situates the discursive development of modern antisemitism in France in the context of the history of this country’s imperial conquests and fantasies. Given the resurgence of antisemitism in contemporary Britain, the United States, and Germany, as well as in France, a study like Bell’s that attempts to elucidate both its development and its functioning in practical political and social milieux represents an important contribution. The book is impressively researched and employs multiple theoretical frameworks. Bell’s study begins and ends with discussions of recent Muslim violence directed toward Jews in France. Explaining the violence is complicated, and one of the strengths of Bell’s book is that he avoids simple answers and works with fragments, elements, and tropes that come together in different times and spaces by different authors to produce a variety of effects. Since the book is cast as a theoretical intervention, the history here is only provisionally linear; disruptions are as frequent as continuities; cause and effect depend on conjunctures and repetitions contingent on particular spatial and temporal configurations rather than on anything predetermined. This approach, along with his many theoretical digressions, can make Bell’s arguments difficult to follow. Still, he has much to offer through his rich analysis. Bell launches his study with a critical reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Though many scholars and commentators have criticized Arendt’s attempt to historicize antisemitism by linking it to imperialism, Bell aims to show that “Jews and empire do, in fact, have everything to do with each other . . .” (36). Two parts of Arendt’s analysis are especially significant. Both authors want to argue that modern antisemitism developed in the context of the nation state and the rise of empires in nineteenth [End Page 183] century Europe. Although neither argues that one can identify a singular line of causation that culminated in the Holocaust or in twenty-first century antisemitism, both point to a significant rupture with the past when “modern nation-states like France grounded the legitimacy of human rights in the principle of national sovereignty [citizenship]” (54). This development was praised at the time as Jews, Protestants, and others gained rights they heretofore lacked. Still, it meant, dangerously, according to Bell, that citizenship, one’s sense of belonging to a community, effectively depended on an accident of birth. Arendt identified another rupture: the increasing marginalization of Jews as a source of state finance, as bourgeois capitalists engaged in imperial adventures replaced them as the state’s source of funds. Once modern states could depend on non-Jewish money, Jews became “superfluous.” Bell refutes this argument, what he calls her “displacement” theory, by demonstrating that “empire made Jews seem more entangled in government affairs” (30). The final point that Bell makes in his critical analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism is his discussion of Arendt’s “boomerang” thesis. According to Arendt, Europeans developed an extreme form of racism in Africa when they encountered peoples “alien beyond imagination or comprehension” (Arendt, cited on 43). Gradually, the racism and bureaucratic apparatus associated with it “boomeranged” back into continental Europe with increasingly deadly consequences. Bell acknowledges problems in Arendt’s argument, but he recognizes that she opened up analytical space to explore the relationship between Jews, antisemitism, race, and empire more closely. Much of the rest of the book looks at the cultural work that novels, short stories, and newspaper articles performed in nineteenth century France. Bell’s analysis here constitutes the main strength of his book, as he demonstrates how political notes, diplomatic decisions, and fiction mingled to rework old antisemitic tropes into modern discourses of a virulent mass-based hatred of Jews. Major characters are frequently Jewish colonial conspirators, usually born abroad in places like Germany or North Africa. For [End Page 184] Bell, the literature was full of contradictions, as antisemitic...
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Nov 1, 2020
David Seccombe 
Open Access
