The French Debate on Zur Judenfrage
From an Anachronistic Trial to the Crisis of Secularism
From an Anachronistic Trial to the Crisis of Secularism
Europe’s lower-strata working-class Muslims and the weaponisation of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia
With the elevation of Islamophobia to an alarming degree in Europe and beyond, and the pressing problems of Muslim immigrants and second- and subsequent-generation descendants of immigrants coming to occupy a central subject of debate, critical scholars of racism have drawn politically-relevant parallelisms between the historical ‘Jewish question’ and today’s ‘Muslim question’.
01 September 2023
Antisemitism has grown exponentially over the last decade or so. While it has done so in tandem with other forms of racism, oppression, and prejudice, fuelled by a growing global far right, its recent trajectory from the periphery to the centre of Western racist ideas, discourse, and action deserves attention.
This paper explores contemporary Jewish identity-formation and the centrality of official Holocaust memory and Zionism – understood as the ongoing settler-colonial project aiming at the formation and maintenance of a Jewish-exclusivist state in Palestine – to this process. It argues that identity politics within the Jewish community are based on an understanding of identity, which assumes it to be static and individual. In doing so, this political approach reproduces the essentialisation of Jewish communities under the banner of Zionism and official state history. The paper aims to show how this process of identification between Judaism, official Holocaust memory and Zionism has been a state-led process, rooted in the historical development of antisemitism and European colonialism. In order to do so, it builds on a critique of classical Marxist analyses of the Jewish question. It finally proposes a more fluid approach to identity, which understands it as socially constructed, contested, and subject to political contestation.