The Missing Keyword: Reading Olender's RenanAuthor(s): Jonathan BoyarinReviewed work(s):Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1994), pp. 43-56Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20686001 .Accessed: 25/06/2012 10:48

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The Missing Keyword: Reading Olender's Renan

Jonathan Boyarin

Flattered into hazardous terrain by a generous invitation from col

leagues, I agreed to speak on the subject of "Semitism" at the 1992 convention of the American Academy of Religion/Society for Biblical Literature in San Francisco.1 The terrain was doubly hazardous: I had never been to a convention of this particular learned society before; and moreover I am not a Semitic philologist nor yet a historian/genealogist of that field, but an ethnographer and a critic of anthropological dis course on Jews. Therefore I began, as I will in this printed version, by insisting that the purview of this paper remains on one side of a distinc tion-how solid I dare not say-between, on the one hand, Semitism

(or rather the more common anti-Semitism which we hear behind it), and on the other hand Semitics. Clearly the historical-ideological phe nomenon of discourse about a presumed Semitic race, which was quite popular in the nineteenth century and had a disastrous political career in the first half of the twentieth, is linked to the existence of a scholarly discipline called Semitics. A serious study of Semitism might have an effect similar to that of Edward Said's study of Orientalism,2 throwing into question the work of Semiticists, or at least provoking acrimo nious controversy. Whether it is possible to analyze the "Semites" as a

particular fantasy of the nineteenth-century or whether it answers today an actual conviction that there remains such a legitimate field of study, is an open question. On that score I will (uncharacteristically) maintain the scholarly restraint of a non-specialist.

Instead I approach the by-now curious rubric of "Semitism" as an extension of my dual interest in the links between Christian superces sionism and the modern ethnographic distancing of the Other,3 and in the links between the Jew as Europe's internal Other and the colonized

Qui Pale Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring/Summer, 1994

44 Jonathan Boyarin

(the African or Native American or Asian) as Europe's external other.4 The discourse of Semitism, insofar as it ever posited fundamental con

tinuities between ancient genetic or philological stocks and modern cul tural formations and inasmuch as its debates revolved around the prob lematic contribution of "Semites" to the constitution of the Christian

West, offers rich material for discussing both of these sets of relations. As Maurice Olender details in his book The Languages of

Paradise,5 the European scholarly world in the nineteenth century main

tained a central narrative of a world-historical dialectic between Aryans and Semites. Prior to structuralism, and indeed informing structuralism in complex and ambivalent ways (LP, 5 and 101), binarism was central to the rhetorical habits of philological research and popularization. Today, however, "Semitism" seems to be a missing keyword. In the

popular consciousness of modern history, and to a considerable degree in the discourse of social and intellectual historians as well, the

"Aryanist" ideology is now associated primarily or exclusively with the Nazi movement, while the notion of "Semites" is almost inseparable from the anti-Jewish ideology of anti-Semitism. What then is Semitism? The opposite of anti-Semitism? No, that's called philo Semitism. A regional variant of Orientalism? I will claim, in fact, that Said's pioneering analysis is a key tool here, but also that the rubric of Orientalism is an inadequate description for the work of some of these

nineteenth-century figures. Is Semitism a competitor of Aryanism? A

complement to Aryanism, rather: we can recover a sense in which

"Semitism," as a positive genealogical explanatory narration, is analo

gous to "Aryanism," not diametrically opposed to it. I focus here on key writings of one of the scholars Olender studies,

the nineteenth-century French historian, philologist and liberal national ist ideologue Ernest Renan. In his time, Renan was a phenomenally popular writer, professor (at the College de France) and speaker on

subjects ranging from the origins of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to

the nature of French nationalism and its place within Europe. While Olender concentrates on the former area, Renan's work on nationalism

finds a prominent place and a weighty analysis in Nation and Narration, a recent collection representing advanced theory on cultures of national ism.6 The juxtaposition of nineteenth-century European nationalism

and ancient Semitic philology raises a number of broad questions: Why, in the twentieth century, were the "Semites" in anti-Semitism for prac tical purposes exclusively Jews? What was at stake, long before

The Missing Keyword 45

Fascism, in the account of philology and religion as a struggle between two racial essences? What are the implications, for ideologies of gender and race, of the way the pairing of Aryans and Semites echoes and at times overtly borrows images from the unequal coupling of the mascu

line and the feminine? How was anti-Semitism, this "scientific" racism within Europe at the height of its imperial power related to colonialist racism beyond Europe's boundaries? Along with a brief discussion of the third of these questions, it is the last that is my main concern here.

Of course even such a brief return to the nineteenth-century ideas of race and character evokes the great catastrophe that lies between then and now. Thus the foreword to Olender's book by the renowned classical scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant concludes:

In these two linked but asymmetrical mirror-images [that is, of Aryans and Semites], these projections in

which nineteenth-century scholars attempted to dis cern their own image, we cannot today fail to see

looming in the background the dark silhouette of the death camps and the rising smoke of the ovens.

(LP,xi)

Is this image, which seems to cast smoke from the ovens like a pall over the entire nineteenth century, an appropriate stopping place? I want to argue against Vernant's decent melodramatism. By succumbing ("we cannot fail") to the temptation to clothe our reading of Renan in melan

choly regret, we may end up projecting the nineteenth century through that very "background" of genocide, and hence discern there only our own image. The point is not to absolve the prehistory of Nazi geno cide; if nothing else, that prehistory was the history proper of colonial ism. Indeed, to the extent that we look backward toward the nineteenth

century, the Nazi genocide is a screen in the foreground which we can never quite remove. What we must try to do is sustain the tension be tween that screen and the pressing need to read history non-teleologi cally.7 It is necessary at least to attempt the attitude that Daniel Boyarin calls "generous critique"8 toward the past, even toward a past which

shortly preceded genocide. In the case of Renan, we actually have a powerful warrant for gen

erosity. I quote:

46 Jonathan Boyarin

Ernest Renan. . .is one of the authors most fre

quently invoked in contemporary French nationalism.

This is only possible if his texts are falsified and the

spirit which inspired them is misrepresented.9

I take this quote from a pamphlet entitled "The Original Identity and

Gradual Separation of Judaism and Christianity," first delivered to the

Society for Jewish Studies in Paris in 1883, and reprinted in New York

in 1943 by the Rand School of Social Science, as part of a series of

pamphlets aiming to reclaim notable French writers for the camp of

liberal tolerance. But were the wartime editors of this late Renan text

justified in claiming him as an anti-chauvinist? The very same Renan

had proclaimed, in the inaugural lecture referred to earlier:

As regards the future, gentlemen, I see in it more and

more the triumph of the Indo-European genius. Since

the sixteenth century an immense event, until then

undecided, has been coming out with striking vigor. It is the definitive victory of Europe....

10

Ominous indeed. How may these sharply contrasting impressions of

Renan be accounted for, if not necessarily resolved? The first step is to

grant to the very notion of "race," along with the ceuvre of a thinker of race like Renan, a dynamic history rather than a fixed identity.

In another lecture from 1883-also published in New York in

1943, and originally delivered before the Cercle Saint Simon-the defi

nition of race is not quite the strictly biodeterminist one we are used to.

Renan here uses the terms "race" and "ethnographic fact" interchange

ably, both to mean a group which remains endogamous over a number

of generations.11 Renan not only acknowledges, but emphasizes the

prevalence of intermarriage and hence absorption of "non-Jews" in vari

ous critical periods of Jewish history, especially after the return to

Jerusalem from exile and during the competition of religions around the time of Jesus. How far race was from being identical to "blood" even

for the younger Renan is clear from his statement that "language,

religion, laws, and customs, came to constitute the race far more than

blood."'2

Nevertheless, a closer look at other contexts where Renan argues for the transcendance of race should serve as a caution to us. One of

The Missing Keyword 47

these contexts is French nationalism. Thus Renan argues in the inaugu ral address that it is only France "which has set up in the world the

principle of a purely ideal civilization, discarding all notion of difference

in races" (ERHC, 154)-while claiming in the same paragraph that

"[t]he Mussulman (the Semitic mind is especially represented in our

days by Islam) and the European are face to face like two beings of a

different species... ." The contradiction should be sufficiently clear.

The other site of transcendance is Christianity, which Renan points out, is "accessible to every race" (ERHC, 161). But more on that later.

By the early 1880s, Renan argues sharply against a racial or ethnic

basis for nation-state identity. In his address titled "What Is a Nation?"

he warns against what he calls "ethnographic politics" in language that

is germane in the 1990s:

Be on your guard, for this ethnographic politics is in no way a stable thing and, if today you use it against others, tomorrow you may see it turned against your selves. (WN, 15-16)

Yet even if Renan did not endorse race as a basis for politics,13 he never

really shed his interest in so-called Semites, and especially Jews. The

quote above from his inaugural address makes it clear that he, like many

colleagues, maintained a deep prejudice against Arabs. Renan's descrip tion of the Jews as eternal-he states in the inaugural address that "Israel has vanquished time" (ERHC, 148)-was also a stereotype shared with that of Muslim Arabs. Edward Said also has insisted

rightly I think-that students of anti-Jewish prejudice must attend to the stereotypes deployed against Muslims and Arabs.14 Both Jews and

Muslim Arabs figure in the political and imaginary constitution of

"Europe" as disrupters of ideological and geographical boundaries, and the overlapping and varying ways they are cast in the invention of

Europe has much to do with their different specific weights along the continuum between internal-European and colonial chrontopes of differ ence. Hence neither the collapse of anti-Arab and anti-Jewish prejudice nor their separation15 are appropriate.

Although the explicitly anti-Semitic political movement that got

underway when Renan was already an old man clearly focused on Jews, for Renan the Jews seem to be politically irrelevant in the present. As Olender makes abundantly clear, Renan viewed the revelation to Israel

48 Jonathan Boyarin

as an absolutely indispensable moment in the history of civilization, af ter which the only world-historical role of the Jews was to prefigure Jesus.16 He viewed the Talmud as a product of reaction (JRR, 22). Yet

how can such a view of modern Judaism as essentially a fossil from which "the spirit of life is henceforth gone" (ERHC, 147) square with Renan's generous attitude in his 1883 address to the members of the

Society for Jewish Studies, whom he congratulates on their wondrous

heritage and thanks for including gentiles such as himself in their delib erations? Quite likely a mellowing of his own racialism as he grew older is in evidence here;'7 but more to the point I think, these were men who could be counted on to share his belief that the Hebrew Bible was a wonderful old book which had been incorporated and transcended in European imperial liberal civilization.

Yet, in addition to the rich set of writings on the Semitic races

which make Renan a source, if not a prophet, of political anti

Semitism, there is something in his very fascination with the problem of the Jewish origins of European Christianity that is potently malig nant. One reason for the eventual "anti-Semitic" focus on Jews was that

modern, imperial Europe was at least as obsessed with its own origins as with discourse on the colonized Other. In this light I am unconvinced

by Said's remark in Orientalism that "for Renan, however, being a

philologist meant the severance of any and all connections with the old Christian god.

. . ." (Orientalism, 138). Renan's departure from the

Catholic seminary at St. Sulpice and his decision to study Christianity from a secular philological standpoint are famous moments in his biog

raphy, but his view of the relation between Judaism as an incomplete but necessary antecedent to the Christian revelation is entirely consis tent with the ideology of progress elaborated by the Church Fathers

(Renan, JRR, 11; cf. J. Boyarin, Storm, ch. 4). Renan's inaugural ad

dress mentions the lack of complete secularization in his time: as he

puts it,

The free mind knows no limits; but the human race at

large is far from having reached that stage of serene

contemplation in which it has no need of beholding God in this or that particular order of facts, for the

very reason that it sees Him in everything. (ERHC, 149)

The Missing Keyword 49

Olender, and the historian Ledon Poliakov before him,18 have elaborated the link between racial theories and secularization of Providence

which, without elaborating, I would underscore as one of the issues which remains subterranean but alive today. In short, even in the work of scholars who claimed the mantle of secularism for themselves, the discourse on the Semites was often intricately linked to the defense of

Christianity-something that has been obscured in the almost exclusive

association of "anti-Semitism" with theories of scientific racism in our

century.

In addition to exploiting the rhetoric of religious and racial duali

ties, the pairing of Aryans and Semites also echoed the pairing of male

and female. This echo is made explicit in the French title of Olender's

book, Les Langues du paradis: Aryans et Simites, un couple providen tiel-that is, The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match

Made in Heaven. While Renan had already outlined an account of

Semitic static passivity versus Indo-European aggressive mobility, it was his German contemporary Friedrich Wilhelm Grau who argued that the Semites were responsive like women, the Indo-Germans dominating like men (LP, 110-11). But this image of Semites as feminine was not

itself inevitable or eternal. Decades later another French scholar, Claude

L6vi-Strauss, was to claim that Islam-which Renan regarded as the true continuation of Christianity (LP, 70)-"has developed according to a masculine orientation."19 L6vi-Strauss-who recalls in the same book his childhood as the grandson of the coldly formal government rabbi of Versailles-also experienced Judaism as a coldly masculinist religion.

To a considerable extent, then, the temptation to characterize differ ent "religious" traditions in sweeping gender terms was more general than the particular gender assigned to any such tradition. It might al

most be said that massive imaginary signifiers such as "Semites" dis

play stability, while fundamental binaries to which we remain attached, such as male/female, and display considerable mutability in their associ ations. The point, as Olender stresses, is the rhetorical contrast.20 Renan was aware of the power of such a dualistic rhetoric: "There [that is, in the encounter between Aryans and Semites] is the great current of

history, a current formed by the mingling of two rivers, compared with which all other confluents are but rivulets" (ERHC, 153). To this dual ism was linked a philosophical idealism, according to which Renan in sisted on "a sort of polarization in virtue of which every idea has on earth its exclusive representatives" (ERHC, 154). Another recent com

50 Jonathan Boyarin

mentator on Renan, intent on celebrating Renan's success as a writer,

inadvertently signals the effectiveness of linking representations of gen der and race in a dualistic account of the genesis of European grandeur:

"Geneticism" provided Renan with superb technical

advantages. Few historians have had his success in ar

ranging comparable masses of material in such a

well-unified whole.... .1

A further insight, suggested by analogy to Said's recent work on the

imperial groundings of the European novel, is that Renan's masterly writing style was linked to a masterful attitude vis-a-vis the non-Indo

European world; as the inaugural address states, the very search after "the harmony of opposite things" is "the duty of the Indo-European na

tions" (ERHC, 156). It is Renan and France and Europe who are in a

position to organize everything, contrasted with the Semites, "whose

organization has always been of a disheartening and fatal simplicity" (ERHC, 156).

The very casting of this dialectic between Aryans and Jews as the main mystery of "our" origins and the key to Providence betrays, not

just a general Eurocentrism (Renan "knew" that the Aryans had come

from outside Europe as well), but a Greco-Christian understanding of

European identity and values. After all, it is the wisdom of the Semites which the Aryans acquire; the Semites, for their part, are incapable of such development. Thus the identity, which I have already noted, be tween ancient Israelite and contemporary Arab. In his Histoire ginirale et systeme compare des langues simitiques, Renan complements the

pictorial analogy between this couple with a further claim about their essential linguistic identity:

Compared to the Indo-European languages, so essen

tially growing and living, the Semitic languages are

nothing but what one could call inorganic languages. They have not grown, they have not lived; they have lasted. Arabic conjugates the verbs today in exactly the same way as Hebrew did in the most ancient times; the essential roots have not changed by a sin

gle letter until the present, and we may affirm that,

concerning the most important things, an Israelite of

The Missing Keyword 51

Samuel's time and a nineteenth-century Bedouin would be able to understand each other. (HGSC, 434)22

Not only are Jews and Muslims alike in their essential characteristics; it is a mistake to apply to the entire Orient these characteristics of stabil

ity and passivity "which only apply to the Semitic peoples" (HGSC, 434). Here indeed, then, is an ideology properly called Semitism and not Orientalism. In the inaugural address, further, Renan's confidence in the crumbling of the Islamic world is immediately followed by his statement that the Indo-European polities are becoming "less and less

Jewish" (ERHC, 164-5). Linked to Renan's assertion of the static character of the Semites is

his refusal to grant "to the Semitic languages the faculty of self

regeneration" (HGSC, 439). In the joint combat against anti-Semitism,

perhaps Arab intellectuals will want to congratulate themselves on the

Israeli reinvention of Hebrew. A tart irony, I know; but such are the

ironies of allegiances forged by shared stereotypes, and the idea is not

inconsistent with the Israeli Palestinian Hebrew writer Anton Shammas' argument for what he calls "the two-language" solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.23

The imperial tributaries and destinations of Renan's scholarly claims are not restricted to claims about the limitations of the Semites. In "What Is a Nation?" the denunciation of national chauvinism is tar

geted at rivalries between the French and the Germans; essentially Renan is interested here in promoting solidarity among the "advanced"

European peoples (i.e., the Germans and the French) against the back ward races and nations. Indeed, Renan foresaw that, far from the nations

being eternal, "a European confederation will very probably replace them" (WN, 20)-though of course he did not foresee the cataclysms which were to proceed the possible realization of such a vision.24

Also characteristic of colonialist thinking is Renan's geographical determinism. A prime example of this is his stress on the contrast be tween the green, open and tolerant Galilee which nurtured Jesus, and the

dry, harsh landscape of Judea which was the home of primitive Judaism

(LP, 71 ff.). When, in 1883, he congratulates the audience of the

Society for Jewish Studies on the vastly different climates in which the Bible is standard reading, this is only the obverse, tolerant version of such geographic rhetoric.

52 Jonathan Boyarin

And yet this is not yet quite the full-blown argument for the proper coincidence of race and geography that appears, for instance, a few decades later in the work of the German "social geographer" Ratzel.25 The Aryan myth is not a myth of autochthony, but of colonization. For

Renan, French national identity is an amalgam rather than an expres sion of "roots," and the restless energy of a series of aggressive migra tions constitutes the patrimony. Indeed, for Renan colonialism is insep arable from progress, in the modern world as well as in the ancient. In the speech to the Cercle Saint Simon he states that

the destruction of the Temple by the Romans.. .was a stroke of great fortune, for it is questionable whether Christianity would have succeeded in com

pletely detaching itself from the Temple if the

Temple had persisted. (JRR, 11)

No doubt Renan was judicious in failing to make these statements be fore the Society for Jewish Studies26-which brings me back, by way of conclusion, to the puzzle of the two "Renans" with which I began. Although the more overtly racial texts are earlier, and the later dis courses much more tolerant, it is not a simple issue of a man growing older and wiser, but rather a cautionary tale about the danger of modern

myths even in a benign guise. For there is a link between his earlier notion of racial essences and his later obsession with the liberal state and individualism through his view of Christianity as the civilization of the Indo-European and the fulfillment in time of the revelation to the Semites. As he puts it in his history of the Semitic languages:

...the great teaching of the unity of the human

species. . .properly belongs to the Semites and is the

necessary consequence of their monotheism. The

Indo-European race, tending to see everywhere diver sity rather than unity, had but a confused notion of human brotherhood before being initiated into Jewish and Christian dogmas. On the other hand the Hamitic race, in its gross materialism, had no cosmogony and believed that it had issued forth from the alluvial de

posits of the Nile.

The Missing Keyword 53

"This faith in human unity," Renan continues, "seems more and more

to become the base for human relations all over the world's surface"

(JRR, 473-4). Here are brought together Renan's Semitism, philosophical ideal

ism, Christian successionism, and the identity of Christian Europe, in which are so happily mixed the acquisitive curiosity of the Aryans and

the eternal wisdom of the one, revealed universal Deity. Here we see

that, while the preface to the 1943 New York reprints of Renan's lec tures on the Jews wasn't entirely wrong in disputing the racial-chauvin ist claim to Renan's mantle, it was sufficiently wrong to preclude an

adequate understanding of the broad, powerful and continuing appeal of the dualist racial theory of Aryans and Semites in the midst of the Nazi effort to achieve imperial dominion within Europe as well as without.

1 In the session on "Isms in the Study of Religion," organized by Jay Geller and Tomoku Masuzawa, whom, along with Gil Anidjar, I would like to thank for pushing me to think further about Renan.

2 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 3 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology

Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 4 See Jonathan Boyar?n, Storm From Paradise: The Politics of

Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1992), Ch. 5. (Storm) 5 Maurice ?lender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and

Philology in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Arthur Goldhammer

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). (LP) 6 See especially Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation" (WN) and Martin

Thorn, "Tribes within Nations: The Ancient Germans and the

History of Modern France" (TWN) in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

7 As critics ranging from Walter Benjamin (Illuminations. [New York: Schocken Books, 1969]) to Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture [LC] [New York & London: Routledge, 1993]) insist. What needs to be underscored here, however, is that also the history of the conqueror needs to be read contingently (see Myra Jehlen,

54 Jonathan Bo arin

"History Before the Fact: Or, Captain John Smith's Unfinished

Symphony," Critical Inquiry 19:4 (1993), 677-692). 8 Daniel Boyar?n, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 9 Ernest Renan, Identit? originelle et s?paration graduelle du juda?sme

et du christianisme (New York: Rand School of Social Science,

1943). 10 Ernest Renan, Essays in Religious History and Criticism (New

York: Carleton, 1864), 164. (ERHQ 11 Ernest Renan, Les Juifs comme race et religion (New York: Rand

School of Social Science, 1943), 6. (JRR) 12 Ernest Renan, Histoire g?n?rale et syst?me compar? des langues

s?mitiques (Paris: Michel L?vy Fr?res, 1863), 3. (HGSQ 13 Martin Thom cautions that "Renan was less committed to the

'voluntaristic' argument than his lecture suggests" (TWN, 23) and David Theo Goldberg points out that although Renan "flatly denies that contemporary nations in any way map isomorphically onto

races," still "he accepted?indeed, insisted on?the ontological real

ity of both nations and races" (David T. Goldberg, Racist Culture:

Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning [Cambridge, Mass.:

Blackwell, 1993], 248). See as well Homi Bhabha's argument that the connection between racism and nationalism is integral rather than accidental or vestigial (LC, Ch. 12).

14 Edward Said, "Orientalism Reconsidered," Cultural Critique 1

(1985), 99. 15 As, to their credit, the representative French Jewish organizations

implicitly recognized in recently supporting the right of two girls from North African Muslim families to cover their heads while at

tending secular school. 16 One value of discussing Renan at a meeting of the American

Academy of Religion was that his example serves as a caution

against the casual use of the very category of "religion." For Renan's argument that the Semites contributed "religion" only and

nothing else is dependent on the presumption that there is some

thing separable out called "religion," as he made clear in his inau

gural address when assuming the Chair in Hebrew at the Coll?ge de France: "We owe to the Semitic race neither political life, art, po etry, philosophy, nor science. What then do we owe to them? We

The Missing Keyword 55

owe to them religion" (ERHC, 159). The jarring quality of this

quote today patently reveals the rhetorical abuses attendant on our

propensity to view societies through the lens of such highly con

tingent concepts as "politics" and "religion" (see Talal Asad, "The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category" in

Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in

Christianity and Islam [Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993]).

17 Compare Anthony Appiah's account of the changing rhetorics of race and culture in the course of W.E.B. DuBois's scholarly and

polemic career (Anthony Kwame Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race" in "Race,

" Writing

and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates [Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1986], 21-37). 18 L?on Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 19 Claude L?vi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum,

1974), 407. 20 See Fran?ois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation

of the Other in the Writing of History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 258.

21 Richard M. Chadbourne, Ernest Renan (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968), 83.

22 In this, the Zionist ideology of the pre-state yishuv and the early decades of the state concurred: "And the Arabs who dwell in this

landscape are part of it?'objects, not subject. Arab villages and customs are a backdrop, part of the scenery.. .a living testimony to the life of our forefathers'." (Robert Paine, "Masada: A History of a Memory," History and Anthropology 6:4 (1994), 403, fn. 38

citing Meron Benvenisti, Conflicts and Contradictions [New York: Villard Books, 1986], 24).

23 Anton Shammas, "The Two-Language Solution." Paper presented at the Modern Language Association, Washington, D.C., 1989.

24 The connection in Renan's discourse between colonialist assump tions about European progress and the desirability of such a confed eration is echoed today in the risk that a successfully unified

Western Europe will grow even more powerfully and "universally" xenophobic, not only ideologically but practically.

56 Jonathan Boyarin

25 Friedrich Ratzel, The History of Mankind, vol. 3 (New York and London: Macmillan, 1898).

26 The very possibility of referring to the destruction of the Temple as a fortunate act freeing Christianity from the fetters of the historical, ethnic and particular raises, by analogy, the interpretation of Nazi anti-Semitism as an effort to eradicate the scandal of the particular. Indeed, one way to gloss Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard's insistence that the

judgment of history for the crime of Nazism is that we are perpetu ally condemned not to forget the Forgotten (J.-F. Lyotard, Heideggerand "the jews" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1990), is to suggest that me must all learn somehow to mourn the destruction of the Temple. In Lyotard's strenuous at

tempt to think responsibly toward the history of Nazism everyone, whether Jew or not, he eventually becomes or at least identifies with the forgotten "jews" (see Susan Shapiro, "?criture juda?que: Where Are the Jews in Western Discourse?" in Displacement and Cultural Identity, ed. Angelika Bammer [Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, forthcoming]). This tangent is rather different from that of Renan, who presents the curious contradiction of bid

ding good riddance to the Temple and welcoming the continued

presence of the Society for Jewish Studies.