Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated April 8, 2005
The Parallels of Islam and Judaism in Diaspora
By SANDER L. GILMAN
Two moments in modern history: A religious community
is banned from wearing distinctive clothing in
public schools as doing so is seen as a violation of
the rules of secular society, while another
religious community is forbidden from ritually
slaughtering animals as such slaughter is seen as a
cruel and unnatural act. These prohibitions take place
more than 100 years apart, the former
recently in France, the latter more than a century ago
in Switzerland.
What are the religious communities in question? In
France the order banning ostentatious religious
clothing and ornaments in schools and other public
institutions affects the evident target group,
Muslim women, as well as religious Jewish men and
women who cover their heads. In Switzerland the
prohibition against kosher Jewish slaughter (which
still stands today) also covers the slaughter of
animals by Muslims who follow the ritual to make halal
meat. These different prohibitions have
affected Jews and Muslims in oddly similar ways, yet
each group has responded in different ways to
its confrontation with the secular modern world. Those
responses can tell us much about the
flexibility and intransigence of both religious
communities and the worlds in which they live.
Scratch secular Europe today, and you will find
long-held Christian presuppositions and attitudes
toward Jews and Muslims present in subliminal or overt
forms. Recently German, Italian, Polish, and
Slovakian delegates demanded that the "Christian
heritage" of the new Europe be writ large in the
European constitution. It was only the post-September
11 anxiety of most states that enabled Valéry
Giscard d'Estaing, as president of the convention
writing the constitution, to persuade the group
that such a reference would be "inappropriate." The
demand was transformed into a reference in the
preamble to the "cultural, religious, and humanist
inheritance of Europe." No one missed what was
meant.
What continues to trouble Europeans about Judaism and
Islam is their all-too-close relationship to
Christianity. It is the seeming similarity of the
three "Abrahamic" (the new buzzword including
Islam in the Judeo-Christian fold) religions that
draws attention to the real or imagined
differences among them -- what Sigmund Freud called
the "narcissism of minor differences." Those
differences are heightened in a secular society that
is rooted in the mind-set (and often the
attitudes, beliefs, social mores, and civic practices)
of the majority religious community -- that
is to say, Christianity.
Minority religions in a secular society that still has
religious overtones are promised a wide range
of civil rights -- including those of freedom of
religion -- if only its members adhere to the
standards of civilized behavior as defined by the
secular society (and rooted in the desire to make
sure that society, with its masked religious
assumptions, redefines the minority's religious
practice). Thus Muslims and Jews have the same rights
to public schooling as Christians, if only
they don't insist on wearing head scarves or
coverings. Any differences between majority and
minority religions seem threatening because the
majority religion has already ceded so much ground
to overt secularization. Over and over, the
integration of Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries was
decried as a force of "modernization," rather than as
the result of modernization. Today Islam is
accused of being a threat to the modernization Europe
wants, but it also highlights the loss of
religious identity that Europeans know comes with
modernization.
The West needs to understand these dynamics of change.
If we assume that transformation occurs (or
does not occur) only within communities that are seen
as different, we miss the dynamic change that
occurs in society as a whole. Religious experience is
an aspect of all societies -- even those that
label themselves as anti-religion. In tracking how
religious ritual and practice shift and rebound,
how they are transmuted and become a place for
resistance, we can say as much about the culture in
which religion is found as about religions themselves.
A new project I am beginning will look at the
experiences among Jews from the late-18th century
(which marked the beginning of civil emancipation) to
the beginning of the 20th century -- and will
ask how those experiences parallel the experiences now
confronting diaspora Islam in secular Western
Europe. The similarities are striking: A religious
minority enters a self-described secular (or
secularizing) society that is Christian in its
rhetoric and presuppositions and that perceives a
"special relationship" with that minority. (That
special relationship is marked for Jews by the
Christian appropriation of the Old Testament and the
Messianic prophecy; for Muslims, by the
appropriation of the Old Testament and the New as part
of Muslims' claims of a final prophetic
revelation.) The minority speaks a different secular
language (for Jews, it was Western and Eastern
Yiddish as well as Ladino; for Muslims, it is Turkish,
Bengali, and colloquial Arabic as well as
others) but also has a different religious language
(Hebrew and classical Arabic). Religious schools
that teach in the languages associated with a
religious group are seen as sources of corruption and
illness. Indeed some authorities in Germany and the
Netherlands have recently advocated that only
native languages be spoken in mosques to make the
message of the sermon transparent to the greater
society. That is not far from the desire that was
expressed in the 18th century that Jews learn
German in order to become members of civil society.
Religious rites are practiced by minority religions
that seem an abomination to the majority
culture. Unlike the secular majority, the minority
religions practice the mutilation of children's
bodies (infant male circumcision, and, for some
Muslims, infant female genital cutting); the
suppression of women's rights (lack of women's
traditional education, a secondary role in religious
practice, arranged marriages); barbaric torture of
animals (the cutting of the throats of unstunned
animals, allowing them to bleed to death); and
ostentatious clothing that signals religious
affiliation and has ritual significance, among a
number of other practices. Centrally relating all
of those practices for both groups is a belief in the
divine "chosenness" of the group in contrast
to all others.
The demonization of certain aspects of religious
practice has its roots in what civil society will
tolerate and what it will not. Why it will not
tolerate something is, of course, central to the
story. Thus Alan Dundes argued decades ago that the
anxiety about the implications of cannibalism
associated with the consumption of the body and blood
of Christ in the Christian Mass shaped the
fantasy that Jews were slaughtering Christian children
for their blood. It was the often
unacknowledged discomfort with its own practices that
influenced how Christian society responded to
the Jews. Such anxiety is also present in the anger
secular Europe directed at other Jewish rituals
associated with bloodletting, such as the ritual
slaughter of animals. The way that a minority
religion's practices, which differ from those of the
majority religion, highlight the very things
that seem confusing or uncomfortable about that
majority religion in a secular society is part of
the story. Thus Muslim women who wear head scarves
evoke not just the repression of Muslim women in
Western society but also Western insecurities about
the role of all women in the public sphere.
One of the most striking similarities of the process
of Jewish and Muslim integration into Western
secular society is the gradual elision of the national
differences among various groups, both in
terms of how they are perceived and how they see
themselves. Muslims in Western Europe represent
multiple national traditions (South Asian in Britain,
North African in France and Spain, Turkish in
Germany). But so did the Jews in Western Europe who
came out of ghettos in France and the Rhineland
or the rural reaches of Bavaria and Hungary, or who
moved from those parts of Eastern Europe --
Poland, the eastern marches of the Austro-Hungarian
empire -- that became part of the West. To those
one can add the Sephardi Jews from the Iberian
Peninsula who settled in areas from Britain
(introducing fish and chips) to the fringes of the
Austrian empire. The standard image of the Jews
in 18th-century British caricature was the Maltese Jew
in his oriental turban. By the 19th century
it was that of Lord Rothschild in formal wear at his
daughter's wedding, receiving the Prince of
Wales in a London synagogue. In the intervening years
the religious identity of Jews in European
eyes had become more important than national identity
-- few (except the anti-Semites) remembered
that the Rothschilds were a Frankfurt family that had
escaped the Yiddish-speaking ghetto. The Jews
are everywhere and all alike; Muslims today seem to be
everywhere and are becoming "all alike." How
does such a shift in identity affect religious
practice and belief? Is there a decrease in conflicts
felt among religious groups, or is there a
substitution of national identity for such conflicts?
I am also going to be looking at how Jews and Muslims
adapted to Western society, and what the
comparison of the two groups might tell us. For Jews
the stories of integration took different forms
across Western Europe because there were different
forms of Christianity, different levels of
tolerance, and different expectations as to the
meaning of citizenship. Different notions of
secularization all present variations on the theme,
What do you have to give up to become a true
citizen? Do you merely have to give up your secular
language? Do you have to abandon the most
evident and egregious practices?
I hope to understand what Jews thought possible to
change in their religious practice in the 18th
and 19th century, what they accomplished within
various national states, and what they did not
accomplish. That is, what was gained and what was
lost, both in terms of the ability of living
religions to transform themselves, and in the
understanding that all such transformations call forth
other forms of religious practice in response. The
history of the Jews in the European diaspora
during the late-18th century called forth three great
reformers who took different approaches to
those issues: Moses Mendelssohn and the followers of
the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany who,
together with their predecessors in Holland, argued
for accommodation with civil society in a
secularizing world; Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon of
Vilnius, known as the Vilna Gaon, who desired to
reform traditional Orthodox Judaism to make it able to
function in a Jewish world that kept itself
separate from secular society; and the first modern
Jewish mystics, the Hasidim, typified by Rabbi
Yisrael Baal Shem Tov in imperial Russia, who fought,
like their contemporaries in Berlin and
Vilnius, against what they saw as the stultifying
practices and worldview of contemporary Judaism.
All lived roughly simultaneously. In their wake came
radical changes in what it meant to be a Jew in
belief and practice.
Today we stand at the beginning of a mass integration
of Muslims into Western European culture. That
culture prizes its secular nature, but the very forms
of the secular state range from Britain (where
the queen remains head of the church) to Germany,
which is still divided between Protestant and
Catholic versions of secularism (and along the
dividing lines of the cold war). There were islands
of Muslim integration in Europe, such as in Bosnia,
that have been transformed over the past decade
because of persecution and external pressure. There
are also Muslim communities, such as in the
large urban areas of France, that seem to be devolving
into a permanent underclass. But how the
local pressure for rights, on one hand, and
integration, on the other, will play out in the future
is unknown. The very forms of religious practice and
belief are at stake. Perhaps some variants have
already been tried with or without success among
European Jews?
Now I know that there are also vast differences
between Jews in the 18th and 19th centuries and
Muslims today. There are simply many more Muslims
today in Western Europe than there were Jews in
the earlier period. The Jews historically never formed
more than 1 percent of the population of any
Western European nation; Muslim populations form a
considerable minority today. While there is no
Western European city with a Muslim majority, many
recent news stories predict that Marseilles or
Rotterdam will be the first European city to have one.
In France today there are 600,000 Jews, while
there are between 5 million and 6 million Muslims, who
make up about 10 percent of the population.
In Germany, with a tiny Jewish population of under
100,000, almost 4 percent of the population is
Muslim (totaling more than 3 million people). In
Britain about 2.5 percent of the total population
(1.48 million people) is Muslim.
Demographics (and birthrates) aside, there are salient
differences in the experiences of the Jews in
the past and Muslims today. The Jews had no national
"homeland" -- indeed were defined as nomads or
a pariah people. They lived only in the diaspora and
seemed inherently different from any other
people in Western Europe. Most Muslims in the West
come out of a national tradition in which their
homelands had long histories disturbed but not
destroyed by colonial rule. And last but not least,
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the past
century, as well as the Holocaust, which set the
Jews apart from all other religious groups as
essential victims, seem to place the two groups -- at
least in the consciousness of the West -- in two
antagonistic camps.
Still there are key similarities. Notably religion for
the Jews of pre-Enlightenment Europe, and for
much of contemporary Islam, was and is a "heritage" to
be maintained in the secular world of
diaspora. What can or must such memory of ritual and
practice abandon? What must it preserve to
maintain its coherence for the group? One of the
continuing questions in regard to religious
practices has to do with ritual slaughter of animals,
a practice that still links Jews and Muslims
in contemporary thought. For Muslims an alternative to
the tradition of sacrificing a ram on Eid
al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) has been created on a
Web site where one can sacrifice virtual
rams. That is a direct response to charges of
"inhumanness" lodged against Islamic religious
practices both within and without the Muslim
community. Can that be a further sign of alternative
practices developing within Islam?
I want to examine what the solutions were to similar
problems raised by modern Western secular
society in regard to Jewish religious practice; how
the Jews responded; how these responses were
accepted or rejected based on local contexts; and how
the Jews became or did not become citizens in
the eyes of their non-Jewish contemporaries. Such
questions are echoed in the debates within Islamic
groups today concerning everything from the meaning of
jihad to the ritual preparation of food. Can
common experiences provide a natural alliance between
Jews and Muslims?
The central cultural problem of Europe today is not
how different national cultures will be
integrated into a European Union, but how secular
society will interact with European Muslims.
Anyone interested in contemporary Europe before
September 11, 2001, knew that the 800-pound gorilla
confronting France, Germany, and Britain, and to a
lesser extent Spain and Italy, was the huge
presence of an "unassimilatable" minority. Much
attention has been given recently to the American
political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, and his
pronouncements about the dangers of Hispanic
immigrants rejecting American values. Such fears are
already being voiced in Europe about Muslims.
But exactly the same things were said about the Jews
for 200 years. What does that tell us? I am
only beginning to seek answers to that question, but I
hope they will help us understand the debates
that Western Europe is increasingly facing and that
eventually the United States may face, too.
Sander L. Gilman will become a professor of liberal
arts and sciences at Emory University in the
fall. He is the editor, with Zhou Xun, of Smoke: A
Global History of Smoking, published last year by
Reaktion Books.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 31, Page B15
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