Re: re: Under Andalusian skies

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Devine, James" wrote:
>
> I wrote:
>  This is sort of on the edge of my knowledge, but I know that
> >religious "heretics" and witches were persecuted during the Middle Ages. So
> >it makes sense that Jews were too, doesn't it?<
>
> LP:>Absolutely. Christian anti-Semitism precedes capitalist property
> relations.
> It even precedes feudalism.<
>

There is a large literature (e.g., Vol. I of _Black Athena_, Coontz,
_Social Origins of Private Life_, Laqueur, _Making Sex_) which points
out that "anti-semitism" changed its nature around the beginning of the
19th century: prior to that it had been strictly _religious_ in nature.
Consider _Merchant of Venice_, in which the Jew Shylock is punished by
being forced to allow his daughter to become a Christian and marry a
Christian. Can you imagine a black man in 19th c. U.S. being punished by
being forced to allow his daughter to marry a member of the Southern
'aristocracy'?!

But with the full development of modern racism and the invention of the
biological category of "race," religious anti-semitism became racist
anti-semitism.

Carrol