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Foto: Astrid Nydahl
Michele Battini är Full Professor
of Modern History at the University of Pisa. Han har en rad andra akademiska tjänster bakom sig, bland annat vid Hebreiska universitetet i Jerusalem. En av hans böcker, Socialism
of Fools. Capitalism and modern anti-Semitism, har utkommit på
engelska och recenseras i veckans nummer av TLS. Eftersom boken är alldeles för
dyr för mig att köpa (det är universitetsutgivna böcker alltid), så vill jag ta
hjälp av Ian Buruma att fästa uppmärksamheten på den). Han tar sin utgångspunkt i den senaste tidens tumult i brittiska Labour där medlemmar och representanter på betydande hög nivå uttalat sig både antisemitiskt och allmänt korkat. Buruma skriver:
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have little doubt that Jeremy Corbyn was sincere when he originally denied that
anti-Semitism could be a problem for the Labour Party, since it had always been
staunchly opposed to racism. London’s former Labour mayor Ken Livingstone also
probably believes that his fierce anti-Zionism has nothing to do with
anti-Semitism. As he put it: “A real anti-Semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in
Israel, they hate their Jewish neighbour . . . It’s a physical loathing”. But
hating Jews in Israel is apparently OK; they are Zionists, after all, and the
loathing isn’t physical.
The
reason Corbyn and Livingstone can make these claims with such conviction is
that anti-Semitism long ago came to be associated with the Right. To them,
left-wing anti-Semitism is an oxymoron; such prejudices are strictly for
reactionaries. This view owes a great deal to the Dreyfus trials. The
Dreyfusards were, on the whole, liberal, secular defenders of the French
Republic. And the haters of Dreyfus were right-wing Catholics who still
detested the fruits of the French Revolution, and blamed Jews, liberals,
Protestants and Freemasons for undermining the national Gemeinschaft with
their talk of individual freedom and universal rights. Conservatives who
lamented the loss of the old order were very often anti-Semites too.
Längre
fram skriver han:
With
the collapse of the ancien régime, the onset in the nineteenth century
of a self-regulating market economy and the rise of a newly empowered urban
bourgeoisie, various groups felt victimized. In Catholic countries, the Church
and aristocracy were deeply resentful of losing their traditional privileges.
The guilds and corporations, which no longer had a role to play in the
capitalist economy, were equally bitter. And the peasant class, no longer
protected by traditional patronage, felt ex- cluded in the new economy that
privileged liberal urban elites, such as bankers, financiers and businessmen.
Mot slutet argumenterar Buruma för en läsning som tar upp argumentet om de universella rättigheterna - en av Hannah Arendts viktiga ämnen - som garanti för ett samhälle där judarna har sin självklara plats. Tillåt mig tvivla på att det kan bli så, men så här skriver han:
After
reading Battini’s painstaking investigation of so many odious texts one can
only marvel at the sheer toxic idiocy put to paper by famous intellectuals, not
just in France of course. But interesting though all this is, there is a touch
of monomania to Battini’s book. Over and over, he bangs away at the concept of
anti-capitalist anti-Semitism, as though this were the only key to the
catastrophic fate of the Jews in Europe. The Shoah, he writes rather blithely,
can be considered modern “because ‘the Jew’ had been definitively adapted to
the image derived from the forgeries of propaganda and of the anti-Jewish
anticapitalist literature”. Really? Was that all? Battini arrives at this
conclusion largely because he concentrates his scholarship almost exclusively
on Italy and France. Other scholars, who paid more attent- ion to the history
of anti-liberalism in Germany, such as the Hungarian philosopher Aurel Kolnai,
have highlighted the specifically racist aspects of anti-Semitism, which
Battini tends to ignore. If Battini is to be believed – and he quotes Hannah
Arendt’s theories to corroborate his own – modern anti-Semitism was social and
political, rather than religious or racial. Without universal rights and Jewish
emancipation, this type of anti-Semitism would never have emerged.
Hela Burumas artikel kan förstås läsas i TLS.
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Propaganda från det tyskockuperade Frankrike 1943. Illustrerar Burumas artikel i TLS.
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