Back to AtD Anti-Semitism

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

On 14.04.2012 14:54, Mark Kohut wrote:

> pp. 807-808....reread and feel how Pynchon captured Anti-Semitism so 
> straightforwardly (in Vienna)
> 'it was the air people breathed".....had reached a level of 
> abstraction removed from
> blood.........so now it was "a source of energy, a tremendous dark 
> energy".....that
> could be used in many ways......[check out how those energies are 
> still there feeding
> racial and other hatreds in the US and other countries I'm sure]
> ................................and the way this ends......
> (just in case you've wondered about your own anti-semitism or 
> prejudice) we get
> that Pynchon touch wherein after Cyprian makes a joke about Shanghia 
> Jews,even
> Yashmeen starts to articulate that belief................

You do Yashmeen ("Well, actually ..." she began.", p. 808) wrong here, I 
think.

"Shanghai <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai>'s first wave of Jews 
came in the second half of the 19th century, many being Mizrahi Jews 
from Iraq. The first Jew who arrived there was Elias David Sassoon 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_David_Sassoon>, who, about the year 
1850, opened a branch in connection with his father's Bombay house. 
Since that period Jews gradually migrated from India to Shanghai, most 
of them being engaged from Bombay as clerks by the firm of David Sassoon 
& Co 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Sassoon_%26_Co&action=edit&redlink=1>. 
The community was composed mainly of "Asian," (Sephardi) German, and 
Russian Jews, though there were a few of Austrian, French, and Italian 
origin among them. Jews took a considerable part in developing trade in 
China, and several served on the municipal councils, among them being 
Silas Aaron Hardoon <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Aaron_Hardoon>, 
partner in the firm of E. D. Sassoon & Co 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=E._D._Sassoon_%26_Co&action=edit&redlink=1>., 
who served on the French and English councils at the same time. During 
the early days of Jewish settlement in Shanghai the trade in opium and 
Bombay cotton yarn was mainly in Jewish hands." (from Wikipedia)

Of course this didn't make Shanghai "a Jewish city", since the community 
had about a thousand souls at the time. But in that last line of the 
paragraph (s.a.) Yashmeen does not call it so. What she says two lines 
earlier is that "[h]ere they call it [meant is still Trieste.kfl] a 
Jewish city." Whereupon Cyprian says:
"Oh in Vienna (...) they think /Shanghai/ is a Jewish city." By 
emphasizing Shanghai, Pynchon makes it, imo, clear that for Cyprian this 
Chinese city is just a place far far away where he would never go and 
about which he doesn't know anything. Yashmeen does, and so she starts 
to explain the facts behind the evil rumor. Not at all the same "belief" 
(your word) that is articulated as an insult one page earlier.

What's correct is that the actually eliminatoric form of antisemitism 
was essentially bred in late 19th century Vienna. True also that modern 
antisemitism reaches a level of abstraction that cannot be found in 
other types of racism which simply try to reduce the Other to the status 
of quasi-beasts. When racists say "[Jewish] Wall Street bankers financed 
the Russian October revolution to bring war over the planet" they always 
find an ear; with a similar statement regarding people of color they 
would just make themselves ridiculous. This additional level of 
abstraction makes antisemitism attractive to those unable to bear 
modernity's hypercomplexity. When Adorno wrote "antisemitism is the 
rumor about the Jews" in the 1940s, he was aiming exactly at what 
Pynchon means when he writes "[h]atred of Jews was sometimes almost 
beside the point" (AtD, p. 807) and what in nowadays' research is called 
"secondary antisemitism".


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