Re: [Marxism] When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?

["C W Sedley" <cwsedley@xxxxxxxxx>]

> But while a Swedish businessman and a Morrocan cabdriver and a New York
> intellectual may all practice Jewish religious rituals and/or identify
> themselves with the history of the Jewish people, they do not belong to a
> common Jewish "nation" sharing the same language and culture, ethnicity, or
> geographic territory, which remain, IMO, the essential attributes of
> nationhood.

Bad call. Buying into the idea that there are "real" races and "fake"
races is, to my mind, only one step removed from juxtaposing good,
superior, or friendly races to the wicked, inferior, abject ones. You
can now see the argument made daily, if not hourly, that attacking
Muslims as a mob of dirty, mentally defective cannibal monsters is
perfectly acceptable and not at all racist, because Muslims aren't
even a race. Saying that Muslims or Jews as a group are missing some
proper kernel of racial authenticity seems like a near paraphrase of
"rootless cosmopolitan".

There are no real ethnic nations with "essential attributes". They're
all made up. If Jews did really share a language, a culture, and a
territory, and an "ethnicity" (what does that mean, a look?), then it
wouldn't make Zionism okay. Relying on the argument that the Jewish
race is somehow uniquely imaginary reinforces the logic of racial
nationalism by suggesting that the problem of Israel is that it grants
a nation to a people who don't deserve it.

Cheers

CWS

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