Monday, December 12, 2005
I must remember...
....why I started grad school in the first place. It was to read as much as possible. But that doesn't mean that I don't need SO much discipline for that. I don't have much discipline.
I was in the library all day reading through a 40-page treatise on "the Jewish race" all in French, written in 1893. The interesting thing is, although the treatise was "racial" it was not meant to be "racist." The writer painstakingly defined each and every element of Jewish charicateristics, and then showed how they were connected to the Israelites of the Bible. He investigated Jewish eye color versus the eye color of the countries in which the Jews lived, such as France, RUssia, Poland, England, etc. etc. Then he went to hair color, skull size, nose width, etc, in order to illustrate all of the elements of beiing Jewish. I will say this again: he was doing this *in favor of* the Jews, not against them. I thought this exercise was very strange. The tone was extremely scientific, but the very lack of solid evidence and the strange methodology made the guy go over his point several times and try to prove and re-prove what he was trying to say--namely that indeed the Jews are a distinct race, and that they are the inheritors of the Biblical Canaanites.
The whole discipline of anthropology just died straight after WWII. Nothing substantial happened in science, I don't think it did anyway, until DNA was discovered. But people realized that mixing scientific-sounding pieces with sociological and ideological arguments was dangerous indeed. Yes-- and at the same time the great powers pulled out of their colonies, answering the nationalisms of the once-colonized areas to emerge and define themselves as they wanted to be defined. The Jews were the first to be analyzed in this racial manner, because Europeans viewed them as the first infiltrators of their "pure" nation-states. Now we can appreciate Darwin for his genius, but it took time to realize that genetics was not what was hurting people-- it was groupings and fixed categories which gave way to scales of inferiority and superiority--a veritible war between Aryans and Semites. Very very strange....
I was in the library all day reading through a 40-page treatise on "the Jewish race" all in French, written in 1893. The interesting thing is, although the treatise was "racial" it was not meant to be "racist." The writer painstakingly defined each and every element of Jewish charicateristics, and then showed how they were connected to the Israelites of the Bible. He investigated Jewish eye color versus the eye color of the countries in which the Jews lived, such as France, RUssia, Poland, England, etc. etc. Then he went to hair color, skull size, nose width, etc, in order to illustrate all of the elements of beiing Jewish. I will say this again: he was doing this *in favor of* the Jews, not against them. I thought this exercise was very strange. The tone was extremely scientific, but the very lack of solid evidence and the strange methodology made the guy go over his point several times and try to prove and re-prove what he was trying to say--namely that indeed the Jews are a distinct race, and that they are the inheritors of the Biblical Canaanites.
The whole discipline of anthropology just died straight after WWII. Nothing substantial happened in science, I don't think it did anyway, until DNA was discovered. But people realized that mixing scientific-sounding pieces with sociological and ideological arguments was dangerous indeed. Yes-- and at the same time the great powers pulled out of their colonies, answering the nationalisms of the once-colonized areas to emerge and define themselves as they wanted to be defined. The Jews were the first to be analyzed in this racial manner, because Europeans viewed them as the first infiltrators of their "pure" nation-states. Now we can appreciate Darwin for his genius, but it took time to realize that genetics was not what was hurting people-- it was groupings and fixed categories which gave way to scales of inferiority and superiority--a veritible war between Aryans and Semites. Very very strange....
# posted by Jessica @ 12.12.05 
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