SANTIAGO SLABODSKY: It is not a coincidence that even with the gradual erasure of Arab Jewish history, Jews at large were still being accused by Western luminaries of having an \u201cOriental Spirit,\u201d portrayed as a \u201cPalestinian Race\u201d or looking like \u201cAsiatic Refugees.\u201d Edward Said points out the connection between anti-Semitism and Orientalism, and Ella Shohat explains how the same logic was applied to Arab Jews. Despite the efforts to split Jewish and Arab populations, the connection between them endured. In the late nineteenth century it was a Jew (Yaqub Sanua) who coined the slogan \u201cEgypt for Egyptians;\u201d during the Holocaust, Albanian Muslims quintupled their Jewish populations hiding refugees; and on the eve of the postcolonial struggle in Morocco, Sultan Mohammed V called for an anti-colonial \u201cJewish-Muslim-Berber\u201d alliance. This bond came to be broken only in 1948 (or during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis) with the ultimate naturalization of Jews as Westerners in Israel, the US, and eventually the rest of the world. The \u201ceternal\u201d enmity, then, was a colonial fabrication built on altruistic discourses that are less than 180 years-old (more realistically, 70 years-old).<\/p>\n
A Decolonial Jewish re-evaluation of narratives of eternal enmity can shed light upon the perverse altruism of the Western project. While witnessing Neo-Nazis shouting \u201cJews will not replace us\u201d in Charlottesville, some may feel nostalgic for liberalism. However, we need to evaluate whether the roots of this discourse are not already contained in the colonial manipulation of racialized populations. Liberal altruism may well be the problem and not the solution. The Jewish-Muslim case is one of many that invite us to unveil what has been hidden, contest what has been naturalized, and move beyond modern\/colonial liberal narratives. More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SANTIAGO SLABODSKY: It is not a coincidence that even with the gradual erasure of Arab Jewish history, Jews at large were still being accused by Western luminaries of having an \u201cOriental Spirit,\u201d portrayed as a \u201cPalestinian Race\u201d or looking like \u201cAsiatic Refugees.\u201d Edward Said points out the connection between anti-Semitism and Orientalism, and Ella Shohat … Continue reading Eternal Enmities: A Jewish Decolonial Re-Evaluation of Western Altruism | Contending Modernities<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12635,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12634\/revisions\/12635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}