Léon Poliakov, Philosophy, and the Secularization of Anti-Judaism in the Development of Racism, by Jonathan Judaken
By focusing on the two major works of Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism and The Aryan Myth, Jonathan Judaken reconstructs Poliakov’s argument that philosophy served a mediating function in the development of modern racist thinking. Working in tandem with modern science on developing a new account of the origins, nature, and ends of human beings, philosophy replaced a “Christian anthropology” with a secular, “scientific anthropology” that re-articulated in biological terms the old distinctions about Jews and Judaism developed under Christendom. The assault on Judaism within Christian theology, which marked Jews as a separate caste, was continued in the secularized version of anti-Judaism that castigated Jews as a distinct race. By elaborating racial categories and playing the active role in the secularization of anti-Judaism, modern philosophy offered a “bio-scientific” justification to racist notions, therewith making way for anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. The specific sets of categories central to modern racist thought are shown to be repurposed from earlier Christian categories.
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Jonathan Judaken holds the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (University of Nebraska Press, 2006) and has edited several collected volumes, including Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge, 2009), and Race After Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (SUNY Press, 2008). He is co-editor (with Robert Bernasconi) of Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context (Columbia University Press, 2012). Among his recent articles are “Homo anti- semiticus: Lessons and Legacies,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2009); and “So What’s New? Rethinking the ‘New Anitisemitism’ in a Global Age,” Patterns of Prejudice (2008).
Jonathan Judaken, “Léon Poliakov, Philosophy, and the Secularization of Anti-Judaism in the Development of Racism,” in “Philosophy and Race,” ed. Alexis Dianda and Robin M. Muller, special issue, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35:1–2 (2014), pp. 181–205.